Big update - 19th Feb 2024 - The Big decision

Ok, some good news.

After 3 weeks of disruption from Trolls it looks like that has now been reduced by 98% due to Suffolk Police now being involved in dealing with these people. There are more details on it at the bottom of this blog, but, some people may find it upsetting so please don’t feel that you need to read that part if you don’t wish to.

After several weeks of this harassment (the word harassment downplays the seriousness somewhat tbh), I had quite frankly had enough and just wanted rid of the trolls, rid of the shop, and not even want to do this as a hobby anymore. Considering the circumstances I think most people would have thought the same tbh. However, now that’s finally subsided to negligible I have reconsidered that, and am pleased to say that I’m going to put all that behind me, and move forward to hopefully a much longer future for Salty Revolution. The main reason was due to the amount of you that sent messages of support, which was much more than I expected tbh, both in the sheer number of people that did so, and how much it means to many of you. I can’t put into words how much it meant to me reading many of those messages and comments etc.

As well as all the support from Simon and Giedruis, and the others that help me week in and week out I’d also like to give a special mention to these people that were particularly influential on my decision to continue due to either the amount of time and effort they put into getting me to reconsider, or, in some cases struck a chord with just a single sentence.

So extra special thanks for: Peter Fox, Marcus Gray, Neil Kirk, both the Hendry brothers, Rabbit, and last, but, certainly not least Mark Murphy who has lifted my spirits countless times now (say hi to the boys too Mark).

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Salty Revolution group

Yay, it’s finally here! We finally have a Salty Revolution Facebook group, where it's easier for me to do quick updates. We can live in a wonderful (relatively) Troll free world, and best of all, it brings all our fans together so you can all talk to each other etc :)

Peter will mostly be looking after this for me, with me just occasionally popping and meddling lol. This has been a great help because I would struggle to find the time to run it, and Peter is very good at being in charge of Facebook groups, whereas I’m not really even good at being in charge of my own meals or bedtimes.*

*Like a giant toddler basically lol.

PS If you do see anyone trolling on there (or on any other groups) please click their comment and report them to Facebook for harrasment. Often it only takes 3-4 people doing so and they get a 7-28 day ban from groups, and persistent offenders can get banned from Facebook entirely. No one likes Trolls regardless of their target, let’s all work together to get them out of all the marine groups as it’s better for everyone.

So make sure you join the group!

So, where do we go from here . . .

Ok so things can now finally start getting back to normal. This week I’m going to mostly be trying to catch up on the vast numbers of emails etc, working out where we are with orders and stock, and catching up on all the other things I’m behind on. It’s unlikely many deliveries will go out this week realistically. Just going through all the emails and messages may take several days on it’s own, and then there’s 400 odd orders to look through, over 1,700 lines of stock allocations etc.

I’ll start cracking through the orders again the following week, and because actually we’re not far behind (for once) hopefully I should be able to catch up on the vast majority of them fairly quickly. As always when I allocate the delivery slots out, I normally email each person as I allocate the spot, so please don’t clog up my inbox asking if I know when your delivery will be, because until I allocate a slot I won’t know, and as soon as I do allocate a slot, you’ll know with minutes of me knowing. The more emails I have to wade through before I can start organising delivery slots, the longer it is before deliveries can start going out.

I know we’re behind, and I’ll catch up as fast as I can. Anyone that doesn’t want to wait for me to allocate a delivery slot to them, just let me know and I can cancel and refund it for you instead. As usual if people spam me with chase requests I’ll cancel and refund their order, typically less than 2% of people do this, but, I’m not having 2% of people delay everyone else’s deliveries. It’s not fair on everyone else.

Later this week I’ll put out a more detailed plan, but, I can’t do that until I’ve gone through all the emails, and then done all the stock allocations.

Sorry for the delays everyone, as you know when it’s busy like this I do work all hours (usually 120-140 hours a week) to get it back to somewhere near sensible as soon as I can.

Clearing up any very old orders:

Dry goods

These will be given priority over all other orders. We’ve had delays on them, all the stuff is here now. I’m going to get all these orders done as highest priority.

Old orders

To clear very old orders off the system for any of the following items I recommend taking a refund or credit. For any of the following items you can either have a refund of what you paid, or, take shop credit for double what you paid.

Fish

There are only about a dozen people with Fish on order. I’d recommend taking credit or refund on all fish orders, apart from Giedruis’s tang, Simon’s angel, and Mark Murphy’s fish. For everyone else I’d recommend refund or double shop credit.

Invert orders over 60 days old.

For any invert orders over 60 days old, again I recommend either a refund on what you paid, or, you can have shop credit for double what you paid.

Any items over 90 days old.

There aren’t many things over 90 days old that aren’t already covered above, but, if there are you can either continue to wait for them, have a refund of what you paid, or shop credit for double what you paid.

Finally.

They’ll be a more detailed delivery update out later this week, along with some other updates on other things, and there should be a whole load of new WYSIWYG corals online too.

Guppy Revolution!

Yep, you probably weren’t expecting this, but, it’s been something that has been in planning for probably around 3 years now on and off, and having taken time out this week to assess a lot of stuff, this finally got the go ahead.

Now this might surprise you somewhat as to why someone previously only really known for marines, suddenly wants to do what many see as the most basic starter species of tropical fish there is, but, actually it’s a bit more logical than it may seem at first.

Ok, so although most people think of Guppies as tropical fish, and most hobbyists keep them in pure freshwater, the species in the wild is actually originally a marine species. Not even a brackish species, they actually live in full strength marine saltwater. They’ve always been able to cope with brackish water, and nowadays can be kept quite well in hard freshwater, but, technically they are actually a marine fish, which is probably a surprise to most people.

Secondly we already do very well with stuff that people collect. We have a vast collection of Discoma mushrooms, and Star polyps, and a large part of our trade is people that collect either of those, as we have a far bigger selection than anyone else in the UK.

Well, this is exactly what we intend to do with Guppies which is a very similar market. We’ll be mostly sticking to the rarer ones at mostly £20 a pair upwards, and plan to start with a basic 20 or so types, and then expand that up to over 100 types of Guppies in stock, plus another 100 or so listed online that you won’t be able to order, but, is a useful ID guide for collectors.

Just like we do with the Mushrooms and Star polyps, the Guppies will be mostly farmed in house, they will be available in a choice of sizes. You’ll be able to get Lucky Dip! baby Guppies in the same way we do the Lucky Dip! baby mushrooms. They’ll be available in packs like we do we the corals. So you can get say a pack of all different kinds of red Guppies, or all the different colours of Cobra Guppies, etc. Then just like we do with the corals they’ll also be some WYSIWYG ones for especially nice specimens, some bought in show standard ones from dedicated breeders of that type. So actually the high end guppy market is almost identical from a farming and marketing approach as the high end Mushrooms market surprisingly!

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Before you get excited by the idea of filling your reef tank with Guppies just bear in mind, that many other marine fish would eat or attack them, they won’t do well in a high flow reef tank, and while you can certainly acclimate them back to full marine even things like most marine rockwork will damage their fins etc. So they are best kept in a traditional Guppy collectors setup of small bare glass tanks with aeration and some floating plants, rather than a traditional reef tank.

But, the most important reason for doing it, is I like Guppies, I always have, and it’d be nice to broaden out a little into doing something new.*

*Broadening out has always been my speciality, mainly achieved with the help of many Domino’s pizzas over the years!

Guppy Revolution FAQ added 6pm 19th Feb.

As you may have seen already, Guppy Revolution will be coming in Spring this year. I've had a few questions about it, so here's some replies to a few of the things people have asked.

This isn't a replacement to Salty Revolution, it'll be run alongside it, from the same building, and by me. As I'm a sole trader it's effectively all part of the same business.
With us running now on our more streamlined range of corals, and a more limited selection of inverts, this means there's the entire fish system sitting empty, and one of the 12x3 invert tanks that we used to use for holding large numbers of pistol shrimps. Now I was going to take the fish system offline, but, the golden rule in fishkeeping is if you've got a spare tank all set up and running, then you might as well fill it up with something, and this is a more sensible idea than my previous idea of just filling up all 5,000 litres of fish systems with lots and lots of pet groupers for me. To be fair it was a close call lol.
It'll mostly be the higher end Guppies, mostly £20 a pair plus kind of ones. Just like the corals they'll be available in different sizes, Lucky Dip! assorted baby ones, various packs and sets, WYSIWYG ones etc. I'll also be using the same grading system that we use for the corals, so they'll be 🌴El Presidente grade🌴 ones etc.
A few people wondered why instead of doing this, why don't we do marine fish again instead. Mostly it's because the Guppies take less time to look after, a lot of them we can farm in store which solves a lot of supply chain issues, they use all the same kind of sized bags and polyboxes etc that we already buy in for sending out the corals etc, and once you've kept I don't know how many thousands of Clownfish, it'd be nice to have something different to look at.
Plus one thing we can do with Guppies that I can't really do with marine fish, is that we can then start line breeding our own varieties etc, and I haven't done that before, and it sounded quite fun.
Also unlike many marine fish which like to bury in the sand or hide in tubes, Guppies tend to waddle around up against the front glass, which makes life a lot easier for filming for live videos again. Because corals aren't very exciting on a live video as they don't move around or do much and are awkward to film, whereas colourful little fish wiggling around right in front of the camera everyone pretty much likes watching even if it's not something they keep.

James :)

The biggest change of all . . .

So, the big one. This summer I’m hoping to move shops. Ideally I’d prefer not to, as it’s a lot of work, and a lot of expense, and actually I kind of like it here too. But, I’ve had 3 years of legal battles (still ongoing) with the landlady here, who goes out of her way to be as awkward as possible at every given opportunity, and one lesson I’ve learned from dealing with all the Trolls this past week is that actually I’d just rather not have the aggravation.

I intend to find a similar sized building, still in Mildenhall, and then relocate to there. In total it took roughly 1,500 man hours to build it, so it’s probably going to be 1,000 to 2,000 man hours, and cost maybe £100,000 in moving costs, and may mean we go offline or run reduced service for a couple of months, just to move all of it a couple of hundred yards, but, actually I’d rather go to all that effort and expense than listen to any more of her nonsense.

Stop here?

The rest of this blog deals with the Troll issues over the last few weeks. You can read it if you wish, but, don’t feel you have to. As much as I’ve tried to avoid it being too emotive, it will be upsetting to many of you, so feel free to stop here, and maybe go look at our corals instead, which is far nicer way for you to use your time :)

Thank you all for your support all the time everyone. It really does quite literally mean the world to me.

James

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CAUTION: Whilst I have tried to be careful how I phrased this some people may find the following part upsetting, and you may not wish to read the rest of this blog post.

The Troll attacks over the past few weeks

Ok so as most of you are probably aware, over the last few weeks I have been subject to quite a vicious hate campaign. I have quite a large internet presence, the website gets over 3,000,000 impressions a year on Google, and on the busiest months my Facebook and Instagram feeds can get over 400,000 unique visitors a month. To put that in perspective, just my Facebook posts alone get 2-3 times as many readers as the Financial Times newspaper does in total worldwide.

Anyone with a large internet presence inevitably attract Trolls. For those of you not familiar with the term Troll this is generally used to describe people that specifically set out to leave comments on posts, send emails, etc, very loudly voicing opposing opinions, often in a very hostile manner, in a deliberate attempt to start an argument, cause confrontation, or cause harm to their target.

Now obviously not everyone is going to agree with what you say or do, but, this does not make them a Troll. Whilst a normal person may have opposing views, they won’t generally oppose every single thing, there will be some things they can agree with, and most (but not all) will consider other opinions and facts, and may consider changing their opinions. This is not the case with Trolls. Trolls will always state an opposite opinion, even if it means flipping to stating the opposite of what they believe, or just said, just so that they can disagree.

Trolls are typically quite tragic individuals with often quite serious issues with frustration, or anger at the world, and unable to deal with the cause of their problems instead try to release that anger by venting it on 3rd parties. Most Trolls will pick a target almost at random, and then may spend many hours every day targeting that group, business, or, single individual with sometimes dozens of hate messages a day, often creating many fake accounts so that as one is blocked, they can then strike again from another account, over and over and over again.

They will often pretend to be customers, and some of them may be actual customers. They will often exaggerate and distort reality to try and make their claims even more attention grabbing, and some of them may even create entirely fictitious scenarios and become so obsessed by them that eventually they may even genuinely believe those to be real events that actually happened when it may be a heavily distorted version of events, or even entirely a fantasy created in their own heads.

The vast majority of Trolls are seeking to start an argument, so for the vast majority of them if you ignore and block them, then after a while they get bored, and move on to another target. Often this takes many weeks or months for them to give up, and sometimes they will even pursue someone for years. These kinds of Trolls are fairly common on the internet and roam around usually singly. Whilst sometimes annoying, if you ignore them they eventually go away.

Sometimes to add more credibility to their claims they will generate multiple accounts and then use those accounts to reply to each other so that sometimes what may look like 2-6 people that all have the same opinion, actually it may just be one person switching between accounts. Sometimes they do genuinely form small groups, but, usually before long they are unable to resist trolling each other, and most groups break up fairly quickly.

As you can imagine the majority of Trolls tend to have varying degrees of mental health issues. Whilst most of them are just seeking to vent their frustration at the world on others and other than being annoying are just part of life on the internet.

However, while 98% of Trolls are annoying, but, basically harmless, obviously you get those with more serious mental health problems, often with very serious anger management issues, almost always obsessive compulsive behaviour, and sometimes paranoia, or even full blown psychosis. These ones are very different. I’ve had a large internet presence for a long time so am generally fairly good at spotting the ones that are a bit more serious in their intent to do harm. Usually if you tell them you are reporting them to the police, that’s usually enough to make them think twice and slink away.

However, sometimes it is not, and it is these ones that are willing to act with no regard for the law, or, the police, that are something that should be taken very seriously. Typically only 1 in 500 Trolls fall into this category, they usually act alone, and may start off appearing to be less of a threat, over time they typically become angrier and angrier. The messages become increasingly violent and explicit, if not dealt with quickly this can soon escalate into active acts of sabotage from them, and in extreme cases can escalate into physical violence, criminal damage, and in some cases these people can very occasionally even progress to wanting to, or even attempting to murder their targets. The more extreme ones tend to target famous celebrities where their crimes may bring them greater fame.

Now most Trolls are like water off a duck’s back to me to be honest, but, sometimes I have to threaten to report one to the police to get them to go away, and for more extreme cases I report typically 6-20 a year to the police. Usually they are very easily tracked down, tend to receive a police warning or caution, and for repeat offenders they may receive a few months in prison, or, have to attend treatment for mental health issues.

Generally, these more serious threats tend to be sole individuals, but, occasionally they may form a group. This is something that should always be considered a possibly very serious threat. By their nature Trolls want all the attention on them, so when there is a group of them they will each try to outdo each other with ever more outrageous claims and acts. Now for many of them they will not have actually done what they claimed to have done, and just make up some outrageous act on their part. However, some of the others will be fooled into thinking that has happened and then feel they need to outdo that, and actually carry through with it not realising that what the others claimed to have done was pure fantasy. This can escalate quite quickly.

I’m not going to go into specifics about what the group targeting me have said or done over the last few weeks because of ongoing police investigations, and pending criminal and civil claims. However, I will say that in the more extreme examples it included repeated and explicit threats of extreme violence, arson, cyber attacks in various forms, and even things that could be considered a threat to my children, with one individual going as far as sending texts to my private phone number attempting to make it look like they were sent to me by Suffolk Police. Fortunately I know what genuine texts from the police look like and so it was immediately obvious they were fake.

As you can imagine when it comes to things like threats of arson, threats to children, and attempts at impersonating the police, this is something the police take very seriously indeed. Not only will some of those be likely to receive moderately long prison sentences, but, also some of those that were in close association with them can sometimes be charged with conspiracy to those offences.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing (although this was probably had some of the most extreme levels of behaviour). At first it seemed to just be a random group of Trolls gathering together, however, it soon became apparent that one of them was already known to me, and had previously acted in an extremely malicious nature in 2022, and had decided to try again.

Happily though there is some good news. Now that the police are involved, and due to the serious nature of some of the offences committed, this is something now being taken very seriously indeed by the police, and I have been very careful to collect quite substantial amounts of evidence, and track many of the IP addresses, and other details of those involved. I have also been assisted by quite a large number of people that infiltrated their group and helped collect quite a lot of evidence via screenshots, voice recordings, video evidence and so on. I was also careful to forward this evidence to several of my friends, including some in other countries, and upload it to secure servers offsite so that the evidence was safe from any attempts to steal or destroy it. This has also meant the group of trolls has started breaking up quite quickly, and the more serious ones have backed off hard and fast, with the problems now almost entirely gone.

James