There are various ways to help improve and add to the site, these are:

1. Donate cash
The time we spend developing Planet Catfish is not paid for. All is done because of a love of knowledge of all things "aquarium catfish". Sadly, the nice people who host Planet Catfish don't share the same view and currently charge over $75 a month for our web space. Our ISP also costs £25 ($45 approx.) a month. Then I need to buy software, hardware, hardware upgrades etc to keep it all running. From it's inception late in 1996 to today (April 2008) the web hosting alone has been several thousand US dollars. Now, I know you can get free hosting and so forth, but there are limits to bandwidth, site size, database hits - we exceed most of these limits - so to keep it fast and free I have to pay. There is a list of financial donors in the Hall of Fame page.

You can really help by donating some money. It doesn't need to be a lot; £5, $10 or 8 euros is a great start. More is better! At the end of each quarter, whatever money donated is electronically transferred to our web host company. To do this securely and internationally we have enlisted the help of paypal.com who, with millions of users, can be trusted with your credit card details. Click on the button below to give it a try - it's fast, free and secure!

2. Add to the Cat-eLog
If you've got information to share, pm a moderator and provide a Cat-eLog data submission that they can submit.

3. Send us images
OK, so we have lots of pictures - but we'd like more! We are especially looking for images of species that are not already listed. We'd be really impressive if it's of a genus not already featured. If we only have an adult picture of a fish, send us an image of a juvenile. If you have a pair, send us images of both. You get the idea? Here are some pointers:

1. Images should be emailed in .jpg format to webmaster@planetcatfish.com with your full name and, if you have one, your forum username so we can credit you for the contribution and link it to your forum posts.
2. Please send images in as large a format as you can, we're happy to resize and otherwise manipulate them and it gives us more flexibility the larger the image is.
3. If you want to put your logo or text on the image, please do but bear in mind the next point PLEASE!
4. All catfishes on Planet swim to the left, up or face the viewer. Please flip your images accordingly. Don't worry, we will do this for you if you don't.
5. If you have lots to send please do, but bear in mind we're unlikely to use lots of images that are similar but, for large (20+) sets of images we can use Dropbox - get in touch to discuss.
6. It would help if you send images for one species per email.
7. If we have, say, twelve images of a species, you'll have to come up with something better or new to what is already there to likely have the image used. That said, it might show something new and all twelve images are great and I don't want to change them and so we can add anything up to about 60 images per species. This is unusual though.
8. It's REALLY helpful if you name the image files along the lines of nanobagrus_nebulosus.jpg, panaque_maccus(male).jpg and so on. Or you can just list all the filenames in the email and explain what they are.
9. If you don't know what species your fish is, try getting it identified here.
10. Try a couple out first before sending your entire collection!

4. Send us articles
Maybe you have had catfish articles published in your local society publication but would like them to be available to the whole world? Or would you just like to share your knowledge on a specific topic or species? Shane's World is the place to publish these articles and you can chose any picture from our image library to go in your article should you be hotter with a keyboard than a camera. Email your articles to webmaster@planetcatfish.com, they are best sent in word format, but we should be able to work with pretty much anything you can email.

5. Report BUGS!
If you find something wrong, a broken link, spelling mistake, soemthing piece of information that's out-of-date or wrong, please let us know by posting in the "Bugs & Suggestions" forum.

Whatever you contribute, it's a foundation of the ethos of this site that credit is given where credit is due.