You’re here because you are wondering what happened to tropicalfishnews.net. Here is the story:
I started tropicalfishnews.net as a toy. I am an avid fish keeper and active on a number of aquarium forums. I am also an old IT guy with my own web server at a colo. I had an idea for consolidating the posts from many different aquarium forums on the Internet, and uniformly categorizing them. So, I set up WordPress with the FeedWordPress plugin and spent a lot of time mapping RSS links from those forums into categories on tropicalfishnews.net. I also configured the posts to very clearly link back to the source forum. Since RSS only gives the original post, a visitor would have to follow a link to back to the source site. It worked really, really well.
At the end, the site was bringing about 200 visitors per day. There were about 80,000 “posts” in the wordpress database.
So, what happened?
In short, it was more trouble than it was worth. I’ve gotten very busy at work, and picked up a new hobby (photography) and don’t have as much time to spend on it as I have in the past. One of the few problems was that FeedWordPress would capture a lot of spam posts – spam that is deleted by mods of the forums, but since RSS is a one way bridge, the spam would remain in the TFN database, requirement me to sort through and delete them, lest the spammers get the advantage of links from TFN. The large number of posts was also beginning to put a substantial load on the server.
So, I decided to discontinue it and redirect it to this site. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Note: there have been some spirited debates over the months I have had the site up, but I can say that I have not gotten rich off that site (<$10 total over the year that it was up).
