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A new article has been added to the Betta Articles page featuring some ideas for beautiful betta homes. If you wish to have one of your tanks added to the article, please feel free to submit a photo and a few details about the tank via PM to either Bettalinz or Bettanne.

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[Bettalinz]

As you already know, My Betta is dedicated to improving the care and welfare of bettas in the UK, but we have other long term plans. Ideally we would eventually like to be able to provide the right sort of information, encouragement and advice to breeders in order to improve the quality of bettas available in the UK. Too many betta keepers in the UK have to rely on imported stock to get hold of some of the more unusual tail-types, which is very often a source of frustration, particularly for breeders. It would be nice to see more of an interest in the breeding process used to develop these tail-types in the first place. It would be incredible to have reliable UK sources for homegrown quality bettas, rather than having to rely on imports, which aren't always reliable due to the stress caused by the long shipping process. The International Betta Congress (IBC) has always taken an interest in improving betta stocks through careful breeding, and has set standards for breeders to aspire to.

For those of you who haven't come across it before the IBC is a major international organisation with huge focus on educating people about improving bettas and conserving wild species. I have been a member for several years, and the lovely Bettanne has also recently joined up, and there is a wealth of information and resources made available to members. The organisation has a number of "local chapters" all over the world and My Betta have been discussing the possibility of registering as UK Chapter of the IBC - an active UK community with an interest in the welfare and conservation of bettas, and a useful resource for breeders. But its not all about breeding better bettas... its about having somewhere to talk bettas! The requirements for us to register as a chapter are that we provide a club environment where betta lovers can discuss and learn about bettas, share experiences and knowledge and offer advice to help breeders, both new and experienced. We believe that we already provide that, and would like to take it to the next step, however we need to have 5 IBC members in order to register as a chapter. As such, we would be interested to know if there are any My Betta members who are already registered with the IBC as members. We in no way want to move away from promoting the care and welfare of the pet betta, but feel there is also a place for encouraging breeders within our club.

Obviously we would love to hear more from our members on this subject, so we have started a forum thread on the subject and would love it if you'd share your thoughts. Click here to view the thread and contribute.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be looking to take on 1 or maybe 2 moderators to help manage the day to day running of the forum. I have a new baby on the way in about 7 weeks and obviously this will impact on how much time I have to spend online (at least initially) so my role will be mostly focussing on the site itself, meaning that Anne and I will need some support managing the forum.

So we are looking for volunteers to take on the post of Moderator, which will ideally be someone who can be online at least once or twice a day to check over new posts and threads to ensure that they all fall within our guidelines (not a common problem for us, but still one to watch out for), and to maintain a visible presence online - promoting new threads and competitions, welcoming new members, promoting our ethical stance etc... We would also like our Moderator to have a good knowledge of both bettas and fishkeeping in general as they will obviously be called upon to answer questions, and help out members old and new.

Anyone who wishes to volunteer for this post, please PM either myself or Bettanne as soon as possible. We will then look through the list of interested parties and decide on who will be best suited to the task. Please don't post your interest on this thread - just via PM. Also if you have any questions, feel free to ask and we will add the answers to this thread where necessary to ensure everyone benefits from the answer.

The votes are all in and counted and we have two new winners for our Betta Of The Month Hall of Fame! Congratulations to gonz686 and majerah1 for their winning entries. Along with immortality in the Hall of Fame these bettas have also won the chance to be included in our BOTM 2009 calendar due out later in the year. For your chance to win, don't forget to place your entry on the board for BOTM July 2008!

NB: there has been a change in the rules for this month and all future Betta Of The Month competitions. Due to issues with the size of some of the entries recently, we have been forced to impose a minimum size restriction on entries for the competition. We now require a bare minimum size of 800x600px, but highly recommend that your entries be at least 1024x768 for best quality reproduction should your entry win a place in our 2009 calendar. Please be aware however, that even though these sizes are required for the competition and subsequent usage should you win, the forum will not display the image any larger than 640x480px - don't worry though, this is merely a display alteration performed by the forum itself and in no way affects the size or quality of your actual image.

As part of routine forum maintenance, inactive members have been contacted on several occasions over the last few months and invited to log back into the site. To reduce unnecessarily wasted storage space and to improve performance for those who do use the forum, any member who has not responded following this contact is automatically being purged. This in no way effects their ability to rejoin the forum whenever they choose, and doesn't remove any of their posts, it simply allows us to manage active members and forum performance more effectively and provide a better service to those who do use the forum. This move also allows easy removal of accounts setup in order to use the forum for SPAM, as the registration system prevents most of these accounts activating for the safety of our members. We hope this purge on inactive members doesn't have a negative effect on any of our users (please inform us immediately if this is the case).

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