• Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

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    Posted 08/15/2025
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    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

How can I do this? general search

I know it was and I wouldnt have blamed you had you of. I am glad that you didnt simply because it has saved me tons of money and the fundraising made me see the people on here in a different light... Maybe "the changing of the guard" is what really changed me on becoming a contributing member really. All I know is that I am grateful for Fauna as it is the best forum site with classifieds on the net.
 
WebSlave said:
I understand. However this site's name IS FaunaClassifieds, after all... :D
Click to expand...

Sure but a larger community discussing reptiles also = more buyers for the sale ads. if you can't find the discussion easily I think you'll lose some great people. We can't buy something new everyday :(

It's just a thought and I know I'm a noob on the board. For whatever reason, the reptile community seems very fragmented when it comes to message boards and I'd like to see one great board where you can get info and also shop with a lot of feedback on vendors.

What makes this board hard to read is that it's divided into so many sections that it's difficult to participate other than using the 'new posts' feature. Unfortunately, while using that feature, you are so inundated with ads that it's hard to find the content. Arachnoboards, for instance, has a ton of sale ads, but it's dwarfed by the discussion areas which are very easy to access. Therefore you can read about a super cool spider, then go check out the classifieds for a bug :D

Just my thoughts on what might be restricting your discussion area growth. It would be really awesome if there was a way to search new posts while excluding sale ads and then another search to look at the ads.
 
BlindOne said:
Sure but a larger community discussing reptiles also = more buyers for the sale ads. if you can't find the discussion easily I think you'll lose some great people. We can't buy something new everyday :(

It's just a thought and I know I'm a noob on the board. For whatever reason, the reptile community seems very fragmented when it comes to message boards and I'd like to see one great board where you can get info and also shop with a lot of feedback on vendors.

What makes this board hard to read is that it's divided into so many sections that it's difficult to participate other than using the 'new posts' feature. Unfortunately, while using that feature, you are so inundated with ads that it's hard to find the content. Arachnoboards, for instance, has a ton of sale ads, but it's dwarfed by the discussion areas which are very easy to access. Therefore you can read about a super cool spider, then go check out the classifieds for a bug :D

Just my thoughts on what might be restricting your discussion area growth. It would be really awesome if there was a way to search new posts while excluding sale ads and then another search to look at the ads.
Click to expand...

Perhaps we are talking about apples and oranges here. That board has a much more limited scope then this site does, so naturally there are going to be a whole lot more sections and forums here. With that in mind, how would you envision the structure here to be any different then it already is to make it better?

Quite honestly, I NEVER use the NEW POSTS function and never have. I merely look at the forums main page and then look for new posts in areas I may be interested in. If the icon indicates a new post, I look in that forum and then see what new threads are there or pre-existing threads have new posts added to them. This is easy to do, and I have always viewed EVERY forum I ever visit in exactly the same manner.

Certainly if the ads were excluded from the NEW POSTS function, even as an option, then those people placing those ads might likely find issue with it. So if I have to choose between the discussion forums or the classifieds, then I'm afraid the classifieds will win out.
 
Making the for sale/trade/wanted tags mandatory would make skimming a lot easier.

I use the new posts feature almost exclusively. I love the way the forums are here, no doubt, but the main board is huge.

Not saying there's a better way to set it up because all the options rock. That's just why I subscribed to the separate areas I frequent most, I kept getting lost :eek:
 
WebSlave said:
Perhaps we are talking about apples and oranges here. That board has a much more limited scope then this site does, so naturally there are going to be a whole lot more sections and forums here. With that in mind, how would you envision the structure here to be any different then it already is to make it better?
Click to expand...

I looked at the board index here and I think I counted 84 forums? Just taking a look at only the snake section, I think you could have a Boa, Ball Python, Other Pythons, and maybe only one 'colubrid' board for the milk/king/bull/pine, plus a venomous. You could go from 11 forums to maybe 5? Combined, the colubrid board thread count would barely exceed the boa board by itself. (2402-2053)

Again, I'm not trying to be critical, only to critique. Thanks for responding.
 
Aw hell... I wish you hadn't told me about that Arachnoboard site.... I was just reading some threads in the BITE REPORTS section....... Sheesh..... I already get the creeps concerning spiders so I REALLY wish I hadn't read those accounts..... :ack2:
 
Actually when I first set up this site, it was geared mostly towards BUSINESS, and I wasn't all that interested in having specific discussion forums here. I only made a feeble stab at providing discussion forums about the actual animals, and I used to tell people to just go to kingsnake.com if they wanted that. Yeah... really..... It wasn't until events arose where I decided to expand the discussion forum concept that I added them in here. But the BOI was really always the main draw here, and they never really did much. Well the leopard gecko forum did well for a while, but events happened that killed that off.

I tried putting in moderators to ride herd on the forums, asked people to try to make efforts at posting interesting and informative stuff to try to spark discussions... Nothing worked. So a while back I just really gave up on them. I was busy with my own business anyway, so they could either sink or swim, I really didn't care either way any longer.

But now that I am retired from that business, I will have time to do some major housecleaning, I suppose.

So honestly I am toying with the idea of going back to my original vision. If the discussion forums aren't being used, then yes, they are just clutter here. My CornSnakes.com forum site gets a whole lot more activity with discussions so I may just drop the idea here and expand on the discussion forum concept over there where it would likely be much better received. I wish there was a way to transfer threads between vBulletin websites, but since there is not (as far as I know) then I will likely just consolidate everything into VERY broad categories. Like separate forums for Snake Discussions, Lizard Discussions, etc... Heck, maybe just a Reptiles General Discussion forum would suffice.... I guess I can give this some thought one of these days.

But yeah, I guess that will streamline the main forum page display quite a bit...
 
WebSlave said:
But now that I am retired from that business, I will have time to do some major housecleaning, I suppose.

So honestly I am toying with the idea of going back to my original vision. If the discussion forums aren't being used, then yes, they are just clutter here. My CornSnakes.com forum site gets a whole lot more activity with discussions so I may just drop the idea here and expand on the discussion forum concept over there where it would likely be much better received. I wish there was a way to transfer threads between vBulletin websites, but since there is not (as far as I know) then I will likely just consolidate everything into VERY broad categories. Like separate forums for Snake Discussions, Lizard Discussions, etc... Heck, maybe just a Reptiles General Discussion forum would suffice.... I guess I can give this some thought one of these days.

But yeah, I guess that will streamline the main forum page display quite a bit...
Click to expand...

Did you just suggest murdering the Fauna forums?
 
WebSlave said:
Aw hell... I wish you hadn't told me about that Arachnoboard site.... I was just reading some threads in the BITE REPORTS section....... Sheesh..... I already get the creeps concerning spiders so I REALLY wish I hadn't read those accounts..... :ack2:
Click to expand...

LOL! besides my 20 year old reptile addiction, I also keep about 40 T's. They are pretty neat critters too.

Some of the stuff I keep (Poecilotheria, Heteroscodra) have pretty nasty bites. Never been bitten and I'm planning on keeping it that way. I kept venomous reptiles for about 10 years and I had a perfect safety record with those guys too.

I hope you don't totally scrap the discussion boards, I think this place has great potential to be the main focal point for reptile discussion. Kingsnake.com has a -horrible- format.
 
Twizted Paths said:
Can't you just euthanize this thread and pretend the thought never crossed your mind?
Click to expand...

Actually this thought has crossed my mind many times over the years. Just never really got it very high on the priority list to actually act on those thoughts. Truth be known, sometimes I wish I had stuck with HerpWantAds.com and not decided to expand to FaunaClassifieds.com at all. But you know about that hindsight thing......

What I may do, eventually, is just set up (or use an existing one) a general forum and monitor the discussion forums. Any forum that doesn't get any posts at all in a certain timeframe would get axed and all the threads copied into the broader scoped forum. Those that are earning their keep with participation can stay, otherwise they are gone. There actually are a few discussion forums here holding their own, whereas others, well the site apparently doesn't need them here. And as has been pointed out, some people find the number of forums here to be a burden anyway, so perhaps this would be best to push up higher on the priority list anyway.
 
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