80G Reef fish plan!!

i wouldn't recommend a sweetlips in a 125 a spotted can get 2 feet. I try to give advice for the long-term, meaning keeping the fish for its natural life span. occasionily i will say that fish must go back when it grows.

also you can't control peoples stocking before they come to the site. most people wont change what they already have. they say its worked tell now why change.

it is easy to keep a tank for a couple years, but to make it last with out becoming a septic tank that you must tear down and redo is hard. most people on the site give good advice. most advice tends to err in favor of safety. trust me you don't want to take the more risky side, many of us have lost huge amounts of money to that(that is personal expierence with that).

just think on a construction site some people take there hard hats off. and nothing ever happens. but ask yourself do you really want to chance being the one guy that gets a hammer dropped on your head.

edit: perhaps i should add me and my friends have lost alot of tangs attempting to combine them in the same tank. my self in my 90 i lost 3 sailfins, kole, a valmingi(not all at once, spread out trying different ways to get them to live together)
one of my friend lost 8 yellow tangs(3 spread out, and 5 at once attempting to add to a 125 with a hippo)

 

I didn't see some of the threads you are talking about so I can't say much about it. All I know is that if someone already has fish in their tank that aren't suitable for it, it's a lot harder to convince them that they should remedy the situation. Often times it will be wasted energy.

In YOUR case, where you're still in the planning stages, it's a lot easier to offer advice in an attempt to prevent you from making decisions you may regret later on. My opinions are based both on what I have read and what I have experienced. Do I get a little passionate about it? Sure, I do. And I wonder if your comment about a member saying newbs who don't listen are stupid was something you think you saw me say. If not then that's cool, but I've never said a newb was "stupid" for not taking advice. I HAVE said that it's irresponsible, especially when many people agree on an opinion but it's shrugged off anyways. But I've never called someone stupid. But again my last few sentences could be for nothing because maybe I wasn't the member you had in mind. *Shrug*

At any rate, yes there is often conflicting information and opinions. It's your job to filter out the ones that you want to hear versus the ones that are probably the better approach. You could even go so far as to take a tally of how many people say one thing versus the other, weigh the majority, and make a decision from there.

I still contend that 2 tangs in a tank that size will be too many, but if you absolutely want to then just try to get smaller ones and add them both at the same time. It's obvious you very much want to have them and frankly there are worse things you could do than give something like 2 tangs in a tank like that a shot.