Dog Channel / Dog Channel Central / Announcements

SmallAnimalChannel.com has Launched!

dc-moderator — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:14:46 GMT

The editors of Critters USA and Ferrets magazine are proud to announce the launch of SmallAnimalChannel.com and FerretsMagazine.com. The websites offer "critter" enthusiasts attractive and captivating sources for expert ferret and small animal information.

The SmallAnimalChannel and FerretsMagazine.com Grand Opening celebration runs from April 15 to 21, 2008, and offers thousands of dollars in prizes for users to win.

The Grand Opening celebration is really exciting and packed full of great prizes for your small pets. Users will have a chance to win a 48" Pet Hutch from Doctors Foster and Smith, and critter specific prize packs from other SmallAnimalChannel Grand Opening sponsors Kaytee and SuperPet, 8 in 1, FerretDepot.com, ZuPreem, SlippyPad and SlippyMat, Ferretonin, Green Pets and Mazuri. There are many more prizes to be won.

Come back every day for another chance to win!

To join in and win prizes during our Grand Opening Celebration, click here.

Problems With the Forums

dc-moderator — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:43:31 GMT

Hi everyone,

We've been experiencing a few technical difficulties that resulted in the boards being down for a bit yesterday afternoon.

They're back up now, but you may notice that some of your posts from the last few days are missing. We are aware of the problem and are investigating to see if we can recover the lost data.

We'll let you know if there's an update

Thanks!

Official DogChannel Rules and Guidelines

Admin — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:44:32 GMT

Welcome to Our Community!

If you’re looking for the best spot on the internet to talk about pets, you’ve come to the right place! The Animal Network offers a fun, safe and supportive environment where pet-lovers can connect, make friends, share stories and exchange advice.

A core value of the Animal Network community is that everyone is welcome. We encourage you to further this goal by jumping in to help others get involved through conversation and encouragement.

Another core value of the Animal Network community is to make the world a better place for animals, one member at a time. How can we do that? By realizing it is courageous to ask for help. With every question asked and every member who responds with a spirit of kindness and compassion, there is one more pet in the world that will benefit from the advice shared.

When participating in our community, there are a few simple rules we ask each member to follow:

1. Communicate in a friendly and respectful manner.
It’s ok to share your opinions and to disagree, we simply ask that you do so without attacking another member in the process.

If you feel you have been personally attacked in our community, don’t respond with an attack of your own. Instead, email the Flock Moderator to alert her to the problem.

2. Keep it clean.
Profanity and obscenities will not be tolerated. This includes masked profanity where letters are substituted with special characters.

3. Don’t instigate arguments.
Content intended to inflame or disrupt the community is not allowed. This includes harassment of fellow members, links to inappropriate content, racial, ethnic, religious, or other slurs as well as any name-calling.

4. No solicitations.
No unsolicited or unauthorized advertising. This includes promotion of items for personal financial gain, as well as promotion of an item or issue for the purpose of mass communication. Further, mass posting or ‘spamming’ the message boards is not allowed.

5. Don’t share personally identifiable information.
To protect your privacy and to ensure your online safety, we ask that you do not post personally identifiable information. This includes phone numbers, address, instant messaging screen names (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, etc) or web address leading to such information. Further, we ask that you do not share someone else’s personally identifiable information.

6. Don’t post copyrighted material.
We ask that you do not post any copyrighted or trademarked material unless you have the express written consent of the owner to do so. The Animal Network is not responsible for any posts that infringe on copyright laws. If a copyright has been broken, you may be held legally responsible.

7. Respect our Community Team
The Animal Network community team includes employees and volunteers who do their best to maintain the integrity and standards of our community areas. Should a problem arise on a message board, we ask that you assist the community team by paying attention to their posts and following any directions they may provide.

8. Signatures
Your signature is not to exceed 450pixels by 90pixels.

9. External Links
Linking to other sites is allowed so long as the site is not an offensive, illegal, or inappropriate site. Linking to auctions, sales pages or online shops is forbidden.

These rules are here for your protection. They ensure we maintain a fun, safe and supportive environment where members can talk about the animals they adore. Members who continually break these rules are subject to account suspension and are no longer eligible for participation in our community.

Now that you know the rules, we invite you to join in our community and look forward to your participation. Welcome!

PMs Are Back

Suprafa — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:04:19 GMT

Just letting everyone know, the PM system has been re-enabled. Please do not harass other members thru the PM system or send people negative messages. If these problems happen again the PM may be disabled indefinitely.

We just would like to keep the DogChannel community positive and a fun place for everyone. The negative comments do nothing but discourage the other members and fuel even more hostility. That's not what we're about on this message board.

Thanks to everyone that has participated and helped to keep the positive attitude here. All you have done is greatly appreciated.

Forum Maintenance Tonight

dc-moderator — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:29:46 GMT

Hi everyone,

I wanted to let you know that tonight (Monday, April 23, 2007) we will be doing some maintenance work on the message boards. The scheduled start time is around 9pm PST/Midnight EST. The message boards should be back up and running on Tuesday morning.

The scheduled maintenance is an effort make the message boards run faster. We expect the maintenance to affect all other channel forums as well (CatChannel, HorseChannel, BirdChannel).

Thanks for your patience!

Disabling Private Messages

dc-moderator — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:55:30 GMT

We've recently received many reports of members abusing private messaging.

Because of so many reports, we've decided to suspend private messaging until things begin to cool off. During this time, members will only be able to receive PMs from the moderators and admin.

Also, during the suspension we will be cleaning out old PMs from your inbox. If you have PMs that you would like to keep, be sure to save them to your computer so that you won't lose them.

We want everyone to have a positive experience with other dog lovers on this forum and hope that the abuse of private messaging will cease.

We will inform you when private messaging will once again be available.

Thanks for your support!

New Moderating team and forum clean up

Suprafa — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:16:28 GMT

Just letting everyone know that we have a new team of mods looking after the message board. So they'll be assisting me in keeping the boards under control from bad posts and other problems that may arise on the boards.

I'm also doing some cleanup on the boards by deleting old posts, closing old posts and moving some posts around to the appropiate forums they belong in. So if your post got moved, that' most likely why.

Also, the Announcement forum is now going to allow only mods and staff to post new topics. Everyone can still reply to topics and vote in polls but you won't be able to create new topics and polls in this forum.

This is just for the mods and staff to have a specialized area to place announcements about new stuff on the boards and the website. Thanks guys!

The New Signature Rule

Suprafa — Wed, 24 May 2006 12:54:44 GMT

Signatures are now being moderated. Your signature must now comply with these rules:
1. Your signature is not to exceed 500pixels by 200pixels. If you don't know what the heck that means...

If all the contents of your signature do not fit into that red box space, your sig is too big. The lone exception is TEXT. Text may go further right than the edge of the box because it wraps naturally. However, ALL IMAGES MUST FIT IN THIS AREA. You may have as many images in this area, but they can't exceed the boundaries, and no one image can exceed any boundary.

2. Your total signature images must be less than 100K in size. If you have no clue what that means, try reading this. You can always right click your image and choose "Properties" to see what your file size is. This means you may have to start gettin rid of animated images, as they are big in file size.

3. Posting personal information in your signature is not allowed. This is your age, IM name, e-mail, full name, your location/address and your phone number. Posting anyone else's personal information in your signature is also not allowed.

4. Linking to other sites is allowed so long as the site is not an offensive, illegal, or inappropriate site. Linking to auctions, sales pages or online shops is forbidden.

Failure to comply with these rules will result in the editing of your signature by the staff. These rules will begin being enforced MAY 1st, 2006. Starting then, we will edit sigs violating the rules.

Thank you for your cooperation.

dogchannel map

2BrownDogs — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 16:49:08 GMT

Hi guys- I have created a member map for dogchannel members. Copy the link below, paste the url into your browser, delete the space after www., and add yourself to the community map.

www. frappr.com/?a=showmap2&mapid=2701416

Suprafa- could you sticky this post? And also activate the link?

New way to contact Mod/Admin

Suprafa — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:41:15 GMT

This is a re-post of what I wrote in another thread in case you didn't read it.

--------

Hey guys,

Just writing to let everyone know how sorry I am about all the stuff that happened over the past week. It's been very difficult and its true that moderating message boards take a lot of time and dedication.

I really appreciate that many of you have remained and helped to get this problem under control. Since the new implementation of the website, I continue to get many emails from a lot of people in regards to various issues on DogChannel.com. Some of it is forum stuff and others are about the website itself or maybe even about the magazines.

I have another email setup and a new AIM screen name set up to specifically help me to deal with these problems promptly. Sometime's it's better to email me directly since I check email all the time and I'm on AIM and other IM software a lot of the time.

I can't give out this information in this post. Spammers can get a hold of it and mess up my system of communication to you all. If you'd like this info from me, send me a private message and I'll get you this info right away.

Thanks again for everyone's help and I sincerely apologize for all the inappropiate posts that have gotten on here.

Abusing Privating Messaging

Suprafa — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 23:23:04 GMT

We've receive a few reports of several people using the private messaging system to recruit members to another forum. This is strictly prohibited and those caught doing this will be BANNED.

Because of private privacy laws, messages sent through the private messaging system cannot be tracked. To help crack down on those abusing the message board, we're asking that if you receive a private message that solicits another message board or website, please report this to us.

You can contact tech support through sitesupport@bowtieinc.com. You can also use the report button located on each post to alert the moderators. We want everyone to have an enjoyable experience here and those abusing the forum only hinder on your positive experience.

Thanks for your support!