Update June 2024. Forum is no longer active, and therefore login and registration has been disabled. We have kept the forum as it is, because it still contains a lot of useful information and all you have to do is search the forum, you mind something which can help you with your questions.

There are many forums in today´s inter­net, includ­ing many aquari­ium forums. Most of them are region­ally lim­ited, full of use­less chat and there­fore not inter­est­ing for seri­ous licorice gourami enthu­si­asts. But some are use­ful, e.g. the very com­pre­hen­sive licorice gourami forum of the IGL, which is reg­u­larly vis­ited by good people:

http://​www​.igl​-home​.de/​f​o​r​u​m

Unfor­tu­nately it is mainly German-​spoken and its hori­zon sel­dom extends beyond Cen­tral Europe.

If you con­sider that licorice gourami enthu­si­asts exist not only in Europe, but of course in Amer­ica (at least in the U.S. but in Canada as well) and in Asia (not only in Japan, increas­ingly in Thai­land and par­tic­u­larly in Malaysia and Indone­sia) too, then it was clear that our task would be to cre­ate a forum which is use­ful every­where. It is meant to trans­port ques­tions and answers and pic­tures to all places, where some­one is inter­ested in these fish and their fate – to dif­fer­ent coun­tries, even con­ti­nents. It is sup­posed to be use­ful, where some­one wants to com­mu­ni­cate in their neigh­bour­hood, about recent prob­lems but also is intended to assist net­work­ing and the con­ser­va­tion of the aquar­ium stock over long distances.

There­fore we have estab­lished an area “Euro­pean”, where one can dis­cuss mat­ters with North­ern, West­ern, South­ern, East­ern and Cen­tral Euro­pean rel­e­vance. Another area “Amer­i­can” is opened for the friends of the licorice gouramis mainly in U.S. and Canada. Here they can ‘tie their nets’. The area “Asian” is ded­i­cated not only to the peo­ple liv­ing in the home coun­tries of our fish, but also to other Asian coun­tries like Japan as well. Because we are all inter­ested not only in our own sur­round­ings, we will have a look at the “other” areas, too – to learn some­thing new or to estab­lish inter­na­tional and inter­con­ti­nen­tal connections.

But of course, there are many issues about licorice gouramis, which sim­ply deal with facts about the fish and which have no regional rel­e­vance. For these top­ics the area “Global” was estab­lished. Here we can dis­cuss the fish, their liv­ing con­di­tions, breed­ing, prob­lems, etc. Inter­na­tional and inter­con­ti­nen­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion will mainly take place here.

The whole thing is an attempt to organ­ise a new form of net­work­ing for the ben­e­fit of the licorice gouramis. We would be happy if many peo­ple join us!

So what about the lan­guage? We rec­om­mend using mainly Eng­lish, but of course one can also dis­cuss in Ger­man or French. And if some­one wants to use another lan­guage, every­one is free to do so. There­fore we have imple­mented “Google Trans­la­tor”. If this tool is used, the trans­la­tion might not be per­fect, but most likely it will be pos­si­ble to get at least the point of what the con­tri­bu­tion is about.

PF/​HS