The Poultry Keeper

stephen · Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 4:50 pm Post subject: Welcome to the forums!

Just a quick "Hi and welcome" to The Poultry Keeper.

The Poultry Keeper is an independent website for keepers of poultry. It is not run by a big company or magazine but by a few people who jealously guard its independence and the right of everyone in the forums to recommend who they like and where they like without fear of links being removed or competitors names being blanked out.

When you register for the forums you will be asked a lot of strange questions - a lot of this is to stop spammers. You will be asked to identify pictures of chickens and cats!

If you are visually impaired or have other problems that mean you cannot do this, please contact me and I will manually register you!

We want the forums to be a friendly area, with lots of information and advice, but also the more chatty aspects of keeping poultry and chat amongst friends. As long as everything stays on the right side of the law there'll be little intervention from us.

As well as the forums, we operate The Gallery which is an area where you can upload your photos of your chickens. This space - just like the rest of the site - is free of charge. The reasons for offering the space are many fold; the obvious one is that it makes it easier for you to post pictures to share with everyone else, the less obvious is that when you post pictures and label them the search engines find them, index them, and that helps other people find the site, too! Feel free to register on the gallery for your own area for your photos. It may take a day or so for me to approve your account depending on how easy it is for me to get to a computer with internet access. The only thing we ask is that you restrict your photos to poultry related photos - hosting space costs money, and if you do want to host your holiday snaps, please use one of the many photo hosting sites.

If you do get stuck, please feel free to ask! . If you want to contact a moderator of the site then please contact either myself or one of the moderators. We're all based in Europe. If you want to try things out before posting in a "real" thread, try the test posts area.

The forums and galleries are free for everyone, and I hope it stays that way. They do, however, cost money to run. Rather than taking advertising directly from companies and risking our independence we use a few of sources of income to cover these costs:

1. Amazon Shop: We run an Amazon shop here. If you use this shop, or the links to Amazon on the website, we get a small percentage of the sale. We should get a slightly larger share from the "shop" area than the other Amazon links on the website - but any Amazon purchase helps us! And you don't pay any extra by using one of our links or shops...

2. Small adverts that appear on the website. We don't choose which adverts we get.

3. We accept small amounts from our members - in return you get the forums free of advertising altogether. It's our little "thank you" for helping us!

All these help to pay for hosting costs, running the infrastructure, paying for some software to help run the sites.

We're not demanding that you give us money, just if you do buy books or DVDs, or host a website, think of using one of our links to do it. It won't cost you any more money, but will help keep the website going.

If you don't want to, or can't, purchase items from the links and adverts but still want to help, you can still put money in the pot - any amount helps! There is a donate button on the front page of the website. These are accepted through a PayPal account, just please make sure you say what your account here is so we can say "thanks"!

We don't aim to make a profit - the money we get from the above ventures goes back directly into keeping the website going and offering more and more services and paying for the expansion of the site.

On the front page there is also a "Traffic Light" that tells you how we are doing. If it's red, it's costing more to run than the income we're getting, if it's amber it's nearly break even, if it's green we're doing ok. If we're green there is a better chance of new things happening on the site!

If you've got ideas of things you'd like to see, tell us! We're always ready to listen to your ideas.

stephen · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 7:25 am Post subject: Moderation Policy

Moderation Policy

It is not our policy to delete posts on the fora.

We hope and believe that our members can sensibly discuss issues without resorting to personal attacks.

Occasionally things may get very heated, especially when sensitive topics come up with very strong opinions and very little common ground.

When this happens the moderation team will do one or more of the following:

1. Lock the thread - no more discussion in that thread is allowed.
2. Split the thread - the more contentious parts of a thread may be split off from the rest of a thread.
3. Temporary Quarantine - Sometimes it is necessary to move a thread, or part of a thread, into a quarantine area whilst the moderators discuss what to do, and may also discuss with the posters. The posts are not deleted - they are moved into a separate area whilst this takes place. We never delete posts unless all the posters involved in a thread ask us to.

We do not believe in censorship, but occassionally the above is necessary to give chance for things to calm down.

stephen · Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 10:07 am Post subject:

A full copy of the Terms and Conditions for using the website can be found here

stephen · Last edited by stephen on Sat May 17, 2008 7:15 am; edited 1 time in total

If you wish to contribute to the forums, there are "Pay now" buttons on the front page of the website.

If you wish to pay a small amount each month, there is a subscribe button on the forums. You can choose the currency as £, US$ or €. It is handled by PayPal on our behalf, and is processed automatically. You don't need a PayPal account to subscribe.

If you do contribute or subscribe, please make sure you let us know your username so you can get the ad-free version of the site.

If you do subscribe and later decide you wish to cancel your subscription, click here

stephen · Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 1:40 pm Post subject:

stephen · Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 4:03 pm Post subject:

A minor update to the Ts & Cs has been made. The changes are as follows:

1. The hosting company(s) line reflects all of our infrastructure providers. This is to more fully protect them and us.

stephen · Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 10:45 am Post subject:

We have added a section to the Terms and Conditions regarding your privacy and our advertisers.

stephen · Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 9:25 am Post subject:

In addition to the PayPal method of contributing, there is now also a payment via "Google Checkout" button available on the main page. If you wish to contribute a different amount, let me know and I can send you an electronic invoice. Google doesn't handle subscriptions, though.

stephen · Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 11:00 am Post subject:

There has been a minor update to the terms and conditions.