• 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

    =====================
    Posted 08/15/2025
    =====================


    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....

Redtailboa.net back and improved

N

natas

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I just want to start out and say that this is not a advertisement. I am posting this to give a brief history of what happened and what has changed on redtailboa.net

As alot of you know the past year has been terrible for redtailboa.net. First we got hacked (yes someone hacked my register.com account) and held my domain name for ransom. Basically I had 2 choices, I could pay the guy the amount her wanted, or sue wait up to 6 months for the cybersquatting incident to go to court and pay up to $2000. Well it sux but I opted to pay the a$$hole in Asia for the domain.

Well when we lost the domain we decided to get reptilehaven.net. Things started off well and everything seemed normal. Heck we even eventually got redtailboa.net back...but we kind of stuck with reptilehaven.net since most people where used to the change.

Well just when things were getting good they all of the sudden turned sour. Everyday I was getting calls at work from Lori complaining about so and so admins etc. I told lori that we would have a admin get together the next week to resolve the issues. Well the next day my email box was flooded with admins sending in the resognations (sorry if I spelled that wrong). I was so confused that I didnt know what to think. Everyone of my admins except for Lori decided to quit....a few left some reasons explaining that Lori decided to have a admin chat with them, some how pissed them all off. Keep in mind I am reading this at work during mu lunch break and I am freaking out. I shot everyone of them a email back saying I refuse there resognations because whatever happened was BS...and assured all of them I will handle what happened.

Now all the admins knew that I pretty much put Morti and Lori as a Super Admin status basically to handle issues while I was away. I had been traveling alot for work so my time on the website was null. Morti was involved in real-life issues and he was gone alot also...so pretty much Lori was a sort of head admin.

Hearing that Lori pissed them all off I decided that having one Head Honcho admin other than myself was just not a good idea. So I sent out a email to all admins saying that when issues come up we are all to use a democratic system. Basically we all vote if needed on things. Everyone was totally cool about this except for Lori. I got 1 email from her saying that she quit with a long explanation that basically went nowhere and made no sense.

I pleaded with Lori about quiting because she was a great addition to the site. Yeah she had issues here and there but she was dedicated. I never got any responces back.

Well things started to get normal again. Lori was gone, but it didnt really matter because we all saw how she really was. Then we got another turn of events. As some of you guys know fauna magazine made a deal with redtailboa.net that basically stated they would host us if we advertised for them and I maintained there web servers. I could start a whole thread just about fauna magazine and the BS the owner put me through....but anyway they no longer would host us.

Well I bought a hosting machine and set it up. I went to godaddy.com to change the dns records to point to the old ip. Much to my surprise my password did not work. Lori apparently went in there and changed the password the next day after quiting the site and locked me out. Me, her and one other admin had that password. I called godaddy.com and they refused to give me the password since it was now under her name. Yes she changed that info once she changed the password. So I can't do anything about it :( I sent out over 20 emails to her on a weekly basis and still to this day have not got one reply.

Lori screwed me over multiple times and I lost it. I neglected the site for a good while and the site was just going under. I was real busy with work and just so mad about what happened. Well I got a email from Morti one day saying that he needed me to bring the site back up so he could post pics from his wedding. I felt so bad.

I noticed that even tho the site wasn't as busy as it was the community was still strong. I then decided that I owe everyone. The site needed a redesign and upgrade. Well after a month of hard work and endless nights going through sql and php code I got the site updated. I also got the site a facelift in the graphics area.

I want to end this and welcome people back to the site. Yes we had problems, but those are all behind us. Forget the reptilehaven name we are sticking with Redtailboa.net and. We are already climbing on the topsites list again, we run our own topsite listing now at http://redtailboa.net/topsites , we also have a online calendar to post herp events (reptile shows, society meets and other random things), new improved forum, and our very own classified section. Pleas hop on over and say hi if you get a chance.

I also hope someone will redo a post here on the forum about our site and how things have changed. Its been a rough year...but things are looking bright and I think we are back on track to be once again the best online reptile community site!!!

PS: Its 4:00am here in dallas and I dont feel like proof reading...so if it seems a little off forgive me. I just went through a very bad session of cluster headaches (www.clusterheadaches.com) and am a little crazed right now from Maxalt shots ;)
 
Hey Shane

Sounds like you had a rough road to hoe... so to speak.As you well know there was a loud rucus about the site and mods from some people . You also know how tight the reptile community is as a whole , im sure in time your change will be duely noticed and your hard work will again payoff and the word will spread of the change.sit back and let it happen as they say "you build it ... they will come " take care and best of luck on the reincarnation
 
Thanks for the reply Alan.

Yes it was a long hard road. Maybe it was just bad luck.

And your right. I built it (well made it better) and they are defiently coming!
 
Hey Shane I do like the changes.
It really really looks good.

Basically we all vote if needed on things. Everyone was totally cool about this except for Lori. I got 1 email from her saying that she quit with a long explanation that basically went nowhere and made no sense.
Click to expand...
This is good to know.
This is basically the same story all the admins and mods and myself were saying. But Lori and her one or two disciples say that she quit a long long time before all this stuff happened. (which we know was a lie Lori fed to her disciples)
But it is really good to hear the truth from the owner who was also fair and impartial.

Anyway away from the negative. (Hopefully forever)
Back to the positive. Did I mention the site looks really really really good?

Did I mention that your admin base is a very good group of people?
Did I mention that your moderator base is also a good group of people?
All of them except for that Ritchie guy.

Good Job on the site man!!!!
 
Yay! It is very good to be back ant to have some excitment in the hallowed halls of Redtailboa.net again. I am a happy camper.

:D

-Your Sick Uncle Morti
 
cool the new site looks great!! I signed up for the topsites to get a little more traffic flowing... :)
 
Jeff,

You bring up an interesting point that has been running through my mind lately.

There are a number of topsites websites popping up now, and I think this is an overall good thing. I think if we ALL participate in them all, it will create a rather unique "web within a web" effect. This would be an excellent method to get around "you know who" who has banned the mention of competing sites on his own site.

How about a topsites site listing only topsites? Sort of a topsites web ring. I would be willing to set something like this up. It would be a central location listing ALL of the participating topsites and be the central hub for this sub-web we can create.

Anyone having any ideas on a decent domain name for this, please email me privately. ;)

One thing webmasters need to be aware of setting up a topsites listing however, is that it can be quite a strain on your server. FaunaTopSites used 6 gigabytes of bandwidth last month and this means a LOT of hits to the server and responses back to the linked sites. Keep that in mind so you don't bite off more than you can chew. As Jurgen discovered with his ReptileTopSites, people are just not willing to pay for this service, so this has to be a freebie or it will die on the vine.
 
Sounds like a excellent idea webslave.

I am willing to host that site for ya if you want for free

And your right it does eat bandwidth for the topsites list :)

No idea on a domain name tho..Im bad at that lol
 
Heck, it's no sweat on the hosting. I have two dedicated leased servers right now, and one of them is mostly idle.

Every domain name that has come to mind to me so far has sounded REALLY goofy or way too long.

Maybe one of the domains I already have registered will work?:

HerpCentral
HerpConnection
HerpLine
HerpLinks
HerpNet
HerpWeb
FaunaCentral

Heck, I'm open to ideas here.
 
Hey I was also wondering if you guys would mind if I made a Canadian Top Site listing as a majority of the vendors etc on my site are canadian and there is no strictly canadian top site program... I have the top site program, would you guys feel violated in any way if I made something like this for the canadian herpers??? I dont like to step on other peoples toes or anything but I think it would be great for the Canadian hobby.
 
Canadian version sounds fine, but my opinion is to keep it non country related. The reason why I bring this up is because I have people from all over the world that go to my site and I really can't put it in a category other than English Speaking website :)
 
Well unfortunatly unless you have lived in or dealt with the Canadian industry you wouldnt beleive the draw backs that we have from being Canadian... It is a whole differant ball game up here and a very differant industry alltogether... To be honest we really didnt have anything that we could call our own untill sSNAKESs.com came into the picture... Well there was Queensnake.ca but other then that there was no choice at all. I have strived to provide canadians with everything that we didnt have and thus far have achieved everything that we had set out to do and more!! :)
 
Yeah, the topsites listings don't seem to be geographically limited. When I was doing an audit of the sites on FaunaTopSites, I found they were all over the world.

I think the next step in the topsites programs will be to limit the members to within smaller interest subgroups. I thought about setting up a Corn Snakes TopSites page, along this line of thinking.

Of course, there can be TOO many topsites links on your pages eventually, and you can find problems from that. Some of the earlier topsites were plagued with server problems, and some users found that the topsites server being down was hosing up their pages when people would try to view their site. Some browsers were like this in that they wanted to load the entire page before displaying anything, so they would just hose up waiting for that graphic from the topsites server.

Bear in mind that each topsites graphic on your page will send a query to the topsites server and expect a response from that server each time a user views a page. Also the size of the graphic being issued from the topsites server can have a bearing on how quickly your page will load up and be displayed for your own viewers. This can be dramatic for someone viewing a heavily populated page and using a dialup connection.

About a year ago I had about a half dozen various animal related topsites links on FaunaClassifieds. But after several instances of problems stemming from those links, I finally had to remove them to get the throughput back on track.
 
on topic post ;)

Natas,
Thanks for sticking with us through the dark days and giving us all a chance to bring it all back together again!
 
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