Advertiser News & Info

If you have a text sponsorship in the PetHobbyist community here is some good news!

This weekend, starting with kingsnake.com, we will begin upgrading the classified, forum, and photo gallery sponsorships from a simple text link to a graphic image link. The image is the same image that enhanced classified account holders upload to their account in place of posting their name in text. Enhanced classified account holders will have the bonus of being able to change their sponsorship image across the site on the fly. If you do not have an enhanced classified account you may still send us a banner but you will not be able to change it on the fly.

This upgrade will take approximately 1 week and for most of our sponsors, little will be required, but a few will need to submit banners. Please check your sponsorship later in the week and if other sponsors on your page have been upgraded but your link is still text, please contact our sales dept.

Sponsorship images must meet the following specifications 150 pixels wide x 30 pixels tall - no more than 15k file size - .jpg image format only

The new site design will require that we significantly alter our existing banner sizes and specification, locations, and in some cases availability. Some banners are going away completely, some will be in new locations, but ALL banners will need to be modified to the new specs when released. The new banner ad specifications will conform to the IAB standardized banner sizes.

Starting April 10th 2007 the following banner sizes and locations will be eliminated:

Header Banner - 150 x 30
Footer Banner - 170 x 50
Panel Banner 2- 200 x 400

Starting April 10th 2007 the following banner sizes and locations will be modified:

Full Banners
Current Size: 600 pixels wide x90 pixels tall, less than 40k in file size
New Size: 728 pixels wide x90 pixels tall, less than 60k in file size

Full banners will also be moved to the very top of each page, essentially
replacing the header banner and increasing their effectiveness. The existing
banner regions (i.e. python, boa,etc.) will remain unchanged.

Panel Banner 1
Current Size: 200 pixels wide x 400 pixels tall, less than 40k in file size
New Size: 160 pixels wide x600 pixels tall, less than 60k in file size

If you are a current panel or full banner customer please have replacement banners made to these specifications and submit them to our production department at production@pethobbyist.com as soon as possible for review. After April 10th any banners that have not been replaced will be modified by our staff if possible, but if not possible your banner service may be suspended until an appropriate sized banner is supplied.

Once these changes are made the most banners that will ever appear on a page on our sites will be 2
and most pages will only have 1, the full banner.

We have begun to migrate our online payment systems away from the Paypal system and to our own secure server system this week. Currently we accept Visa/Mastercard and American Express. Next week we will be able to accept Discover.

The Open Invoice Payment system and Classified Registration/Renewal system have already been converted to the new secure servers, with the balance of our systems to be converted over the next 2 weeks. Once this has been done we will no longer be able to accept Paypal payments.

Due to policy conflict issues between Paypals security department and our Account Review department regarding our ability to investigate and prosecute fraudulent transactions processed through Paypal's system, and issues relating to continuing problems from relying solely on Paypal to process our online payments, we will have no choice but to discontinue accepting Paypal payments in the very near future. This is unfortunate as we had hoped that with Paypal's experience with their parent company (EBay), eventually they would offer some neat tools that we could integrate on site for our thousands of vendors that use Paypal to process their payments.

We are currently reviewing other payment solutions such as Google's new Checkout payment service, as well as more traditional credit card processors. It is likely that we will begin transitioning to the new payment system at some time in September once a decision has been made and the secure processing systems implemented. For the time being we will continue to process payments using Paypal until the new system has been thouroughly tested and the switchover has occured.

This of course will have no impact on your businesses ability to accept payment via Paypal for your own goods and services, it just means you won't be able to use it to pay for services here with our business in the near future and we will be unlikely to be implementing any Paypal specific features in our communities.

We apologize in advance to our users, clients, and vendors for any inconvenience this may cause.

Jeff Barringer
President/CEO
OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.
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Thank you for your business!

Upcoming changes to enhance our pet community sites by upgrading our interface will give our communities the opprtunity to change our banner ad formats to the standardized sizing recommended by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)