I go off coralline mainly, once I see lr with coralline we stamp that as cycled since its not possible to have coralline in place without nitrifying bacteria
(I know some people in challenge say what about medication, yes, that would do it but it never applies. nobody on this site ever bought sterile live rock, it was live, and where goes real coralline goes other benthic verifiers to back up the coralline etc)
we're all about visually cycling tanks and not using testers there. And when we do test, its ammonia only, not ever nitrate nor nitrite because those don't factor in marine cycles, even with dry materials, for reasons listed.
we cover in our thread that adding ammonia to live rock doesn't ruin it, it can digest it. We stamp it as a sign of not understanding how cycling works though, and by extension how tank cleaning and invasion works.
we figure if people can't start off knowing when to add ammonia and when not to, then they're about 98% likely to lose the tank to an overall invasion at one point (its rare for people to tie in cycling habits to invasion receptivity, but that becomes apparent if we create and run both cycling and invasion threads where people's tanks will die from bad calls)
