Say Hi to “Guppy” our breakthrough Guppies.com ChatBot Go ahead, chat with him and you can try feeding him soon! He is getting smarter every day and he has a great sense of humor.
Thank you to the guys at Dragonfly Computing: Matt (Kingston, ON), Adam (Vancouver, BC) and Steve (Kingston, ON) and to Dr Richard Wallace (California) the head of the world famous ALICE A. I. Foundation for their excellent work.

This project started last year and over the summer we put up a tank of guppies next to Steve’s computer, loaded the computer with the latest and greatest 3D animation software and the best artificial intelligence chat software Matt could find and started coding! “Guppy” is the result of some incredible inspiration and hard work on the part of all of us but especially Steve who had to deal with my endless suggestions.

I think we can all agree he did a great job of capturing the movements of a male guppy realistically!

We think the action offered by Guppy is a breakthrough. We believe this is the first time an animal chatbot has been created with this much animated interaction on an educational website! If you know of another better example please let me know – until we find out otherwise we can all be proud of this first-on-the-web for Guppies.com. This is “computer game quality” coding.

By the way, if you ask Guppy a question you think he should know the answer to and are disappointed in his response please let me know. I am depending on all of you to help Guppy get smarter. Send the question and the answer you were expecting (a brief answer) to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it . If you send me congrats on the appearance of Guppy on the site I will pass them along to everyone involved.

Photo Gallery

Thanks to Adam for helping activate the new Gallery section. Please post some photos. The most clicked on photos make it on to the Home Page in case you are wondering who selects the pictures for display on the Home Page – you do!

What’s coming next?

1. Mike Davis, our 2006 Member of the Year and Guppies.com Forum Director is working with Christian (Toronto) and the Dragonfly guys to update the look of the Forum. He will keep all the posts but move some around in a new navigation system that reflects the fact that the Forum is rapidly reaching 100,000 entries and the increasing activity requires better navigation options to keep the Forum easy to use.

   Wondering how really active we are getting? In December, 2006 we had 21,751 site visits and 151,633 Pageviews! We rank high in all the search engines and are close to ascending to being among the top 250,000 most active sites on the internet world wide according to independent rankings. Not bad at all for an education oriented site.

   If you are reading this you are part of the success! Tell your friends to check us out. Our new server is run by Scott (Toronto) and you should be finding that we load faster than ever for a great user experience.

2. Richard Konik (St Catharines, ON – near Niagara Falls) is going to re-activate the Guppies.com Classifieds. Check the link out later this month. With the increasing cost of listing fish and equipment on eBay and other commercial sites this free service of Guppies.com will make more and more sense as a place to find fish from local home breeders and professional breeders around the world.

   We have had the Guppies.com logo put on T shirts, hats and some other items. Richard will soon have these posted in the Guppy Gear Store. I know over the years many people have asked for this – finally we will offer you a way to support the site and get some cool gear for wearing at the same time. Check out the store from time-to-time to see what we have added.

Congratulations to the first three members to suggest page content on the main site since we re-launched the new look! Guppies.com is delivering better content every week. It is a direct result of many guppy enthusiasts who contribute incredibly valuable information in the Forum and now, with our new Page Author opportunity, I would like to congratulate Stefan Orsini from Malta (look for his content contribution under breeding submenu fry), 'izzy bean' (I think from the UK?) for providing six great new tiffs and Jarem Atkinson (US?) for suggesting new contributions to the breeding page. These will all be worked into the main pages of the site soon. If you contribute let me know where you are from – everyone is interested. Guppies.com has members from all over the world. In December 65% of us were from the US, 12% from Canada, 7% from the UK, 4% from Australia, 2% from Singapore and about 1% each from Malaysia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, India and Turkey. The rest of the members (7% of the total) are from nearly 80 other countries including big countries like China and small countries like Iceland!

What can you do to help Guppies.com? Send your suggested content ideas to Gardner McBride (Publisher) at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

You are invited to become a Page Editor!

If you come to a page in Guppies.com that is not yet finished and wish to become the Page Editor please apply. Each unfinished page now shows the following announcement:

This is a new guppy information-related article needing expansion. You can help Guppies.com by expanding it.

If you are an author, reporter, editor, photographer, animator, cartoonist, film maker or student who is looking for experience or a new project you are invited to help us add to Guppies.com contents.

Send Gardner McBride an email at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it and tell him about your interest and a little about yourself as well as the content you wish to provide.