Pet Peeve - Do you or don't you?
 

Anytime I get a new coral or frag, I cut it off the base and mount it directly to the rock. It drives me to see people puttying frag plugs, or worse, chunks of maricultured bases to their rock work. Even after the coral encrusts, I can see the outline of the plug/base.
Who does it which way and why?

Well for myself I dont have a frag tank and I want my new SPS to grow. I dont like the look either but I wanna make sure I have them in a good spot and that they are happy.

After a few months I may just put them on the rock..

just my thoughts

I'm just like you Brad. I take that a step further and buy only frags as I think the mini colonies for sale that come on the mound-like bottom also look a little unnatural. There are a ton of tanks way nicer than mine that do have corals on plugs that are visible... of course I'm just referring to this specific aspect of scaping =)

frag plugs and discs drive me bananas ! However, I do use rubble to mount my frags and then mount the rubbled with frag to my rockwork. I like doing this because it is slightly less ugly and allows me to easily move the frag around which I do frequently.

I also have a few smaller frags, but I keep them in little magnets on the side. And I guess it's not so much placing the frag somewhere good, it's about permanently gluing the plug or base in place :)

I've done this to every frag almost. I consider it the same as mounting to the rock. My rubble bits are tiny (that is what she said - sorry I need one of those every now and then) and I put them on the rock so they blend in really well. You def can't tell they're there although currently that's because my algae is hugging a lot of my frags.

See this I remember that someone here i dont know who bought a crap load of colonies and just like Brad stated glued them all on the rocks. Then in about 5 months put out there Look at my tank!! Look at how much its grown and doing well. then you see the plugs.

+1

I see this as coral gardening. See, for me, I hate the look of frag shelves in a display tank. If all I have are little frags though then glueing those in place without the plugs, for me, has not been as successful in frag retention than has been glueing the plugs down. Snails, clumsy fish, urchins .. it is a conspiracy of pretty much anything that moves in my tank (including the water now that I think of it) to find loosely attached corals and remove them from their mounting points. So I epoxy the frack out of the plug while minimizing contact with the coral itself. Yeah, it means that I have plugs on the rock, but, 1) they get covered in coraline in time and it's less conspicuous, 2) in some cases the corals have grown over the mounts and you can't tell (no really, you can't tell. Maybe not that many qualify in this category but it's nonzero), and 3) in the very beginning of this thoughtstream I said something about coral gardening, the thing is, this is coral gardening and part of gardening is pruning and replanting and the like, if the coral does well over time then it's likely that it will get removed and the plug, if still conspicuously sticking out by then, can simply be removed and the coral and/or whatever frags can be remounted using other means (it's been years since I was at this point but I fantasize one day I'll have a tank like my 75g where I couldn't even give SPS frags away for free because the growth was that fast).

I used to put them in as I received them ( plugs or culture bases) but have introduced too many pests that way, all new purchases go into quarantine till happy and then they are removed from the base they came on when they go into the display, any residual coral that remains on the base stays in the quarantine and is given away or chucked.