A quick hey..

[Alabamagal]

..from south central Alabama! Happy to have found y'all and hope to learn a lot as a new goat mom to a ND 4 mo old wether and 5 mo old doeling. I'm so in love!! Hopefully, with more experience, I'll one day be sharing helpful advice with others myself.

As empty-nesters, hubby and I left the city to fulfill our homesteading dream seven years ago. Bought a home with 15 mostly wooded acres in the country, and along with our 3 cats, have since retired. We now have chickens, a garden, an endless list of projects to finish and our dear, sweet little goats! I just love our simplified and more sustainable life!

I hope I won't take up too much of y'all's time with the myriad amount of questions that are to follow..be afraid, be very afraid!

 

[soarwitheagles]

Alabamagal,

A very warm welcome to BYH. You have come to the right place to share and to learn!

 

[norseofcourse]

Welcome from Ohio, and congrats on your new goats! We love questions - and pictures

 

[CntryBoy777]

Welcome from NW Mississippi!!....
We have goats, chickens, ducks, and cats here. Glad ya found us and joined up. There is a ton of info in the existing Threads and Forums, so make yourself at home and browse around....if something "Sparks" a question, comment, or advice just feel free to post away. We all like pics and ya will see plenty in those Threads and Forums, so share as ya see fit.....Again

 

[Latestarter]

Greetings and welcome to BYH from NE Texas. I just got my goats about a month ago but have "had them in spirit" for several years. Congrats on your simpler life and retirement! Also, congrats on getting some goats They sure are fun aren't they? They are also addictive and goat math, like chicken math, is a real thing! So make yourself at home and by all means browse around in the forum. You'll get to "meet" many of our great goat folks and there's a wealth of info and knowledge shared. Glad you're here with us!

I always recommend to folks that they should put at least their general location in their profile... Though your screen name sorta does narrow it down somewhat a bit closer might help when the time comes that you seek advice or guidance. Climate and all that goes with it often has a bearing on advice to be offered.

 

[Alabamagal]

Thank you all for your warm and kind welcomes! It will be fun to spend a little more time reading, sharing and learning, and I sure have a lot more to learn!
Latestarter, it took me forever to learn where to go to update my profile further with the location and a pic, but finally got it. I can see where having the location listed can help when others offer advice.
I am wondering tho, how does one get directly to the goat forum, or do you just go to the general herds page and click on a goat topic or catagory to post to? Sorry this might not be the place to ask, but still learning the ropes! TIA

 

[Hens and Roos]

Welcome glad you joined us!!

 

[Latestarter]

OK @Alabamagal here's a quick run through... When you first sign in you should be on the main forum page that lists all the main sections and the subsections of each. The first main section is, well, the Main section. Then you have the Herds General section which contains subsections with all the stuff that pertains to all herds. The third section is the goat section. It's high on the list because it's the most popular and biggest group so it gets (typically) the most posts. It is broken into subsections like this;

You can see there are 7 subsections and their titles. You can start in any subsection you're interested in but... You'll notice the first subsection is bold which indicates that I have posts in that subsection that are new, that I haven't read. There may be more than one new post, but if you look to the right, it shows the most recent new post title and the author as well as when the most recent post was posted. If I click on that subsection to go there, this is what I find:

You'll notice that there are in fact 2 new posts but they're not at the top. The reason is because the staff has "pinned" the top two posts to always head the list (red thumbtack on the right there). The first bold post (I haven't read the latest posts) would be a great one for you to read if you eventually plan to breed your goats and have kids. If you look to the right side, you can see there have been 75 replies (@10/page, there will be 7.5 pages of replies). The next thread down is a "kidding thread" that has been going for multiple years... The owner of the thread changes the title as time passes to indicate the most recent post data. But you can see it's going to be 134.8 pages of posts But since it's a kidding thread, there will be LOTS of pictures of goat kids!

OH, real quick, if you look up top under the subsection title, you can see that there are 186 PAGES of threads in this subsection alone! If you go back to look at the very first one, it was originally posted on May 18, 2009, titled trimming hoofs. I share this info because the date of the post isn't what's important (for the most part, excepting "best practices"), it's the info the post contains and in this case, trimming hooves hasn't really changed since then so the post may contain really good info, even though the post author hasn't been back since October of 2009. If you click on that post and open it then scan to the bottom of the page, you'll see that the system has automatically listed 4 other posts that "may" contain similar information by title:

So you now have a small selection of other posts dealing with hoof trimming you can go look at. And as you go to them, they too will list other posts that may contain more information. Kinda like searching youtube where one link leads to another and before you know it hours have passed and you aren't even close to done

So that's how the forum works. Now there's also a search function all the way up top right above your profile information. So if I want specific information on say mastitis, I can go to the Diseases & Injuries - Goats subsection and then search for "mastitis" (I clicked the box to only search this section) and I get the following results:

So you can see there are 2 pages of threads that contain the term "mastitis" in the thread title. That gives lots of information to read and look through. You can see each thread listed also contains all the information about it like when posted, by whom, how many replies (10/page remember).

Hope this helps Enjoy browsing!

 

[Alabamagal]

Latestarter..sorry I'm just now replying to your very informative how-to on using the forum. It must have taken you forever to write it all and touch on all the bases..phew! Think I got all that, and if not, I'll have your post to come back to! I'm sure it will help other newcomers as well! Thank you SO much for all your time and effort explaining it all..I sure do appreciate it!!