Portkey.org (PK) was created around November 2002 to serve as an online home and sanctuary for fans of the Harry and Hermione (H/H) romantic pairing from the Harry Potter stories written by J.K. Rowling. Over time, we've opened our doors to fans of Lily / James (L/J), Draco / Ginny (D/G) and Ron / Luna (R/L, R/Lu or R/LL). In fandom parlance, most of our members ship H/H. Some don't but they come here because they ship L/J and/or D/G and/or R/LL. In fact, some of our past and present staff ship Ron/Hermione, but were nonetheless invited to become staff because they had contributed plenty in promoting our side-ships.

Here's a partial history of how our site came to be and how we chose our pairings. We've been supporting them by archiving fanfiction and fanart about them; recommending such creative endeavors; hosting competitions; and maintaining a forum to chat about our ships and the HP universe much of the time. Trust us, we've discussed everything about them with varying levels of seriousness and intelligence -- or the opposite!

We'd have been bored long ago had we talked about Harry Potter all the time. Hence to this day we often find ourselves playing the silliest games or having topical chats about our real lives (Muggle lives in Harry Potter lingo).

We've been allowing any Potter fan to join our site for as long as they remain respectful of our target audiences' shipping views. For lack of a better term, let's refer to them as "non-PK shippers", ie, people who do not support PK's pairings. This and this discussions best exemplify our stance towards non-PK shippers; while this (the box near top of the page), this and this come closest to representing PK staff's stance towards Ms. JK Rowling, viz., we'd allow people to criticize her writing but not to make personal attacks against her or anyone else.

We expect non-PK shippers to refrain from generalizing against Portkeyers. After all, forum posts do not necessarily represent the opinions of staff or many members. We're glad to see many non-PK shippers voluntarily observe the boundaries we've set, such as refraining from posting in forums marked as For PK shippers only or For H/H shippers only. While we know these are all common-sense for most people, some get the wrong impression and some bad eggs do show up from time to time, prompting us to write messages like this.

We'd also welcome non-PK shippers in our non-shippy forums and non-Potter forums. Perhaps if we get to know one another better, then we'd treat one another with more respect and refrain from forming generalizations.

Troll or no troll, everyone should nonetheless keep in mind that Portkey users come from diverse backgrounds in terms of cultures, countries, languages, age groups, gender / sexual orientation, education, occupations, faiths and other life situations. We must also be considerate of differences in our members' internet facilities and familiarity with online lingo and customs. To maintain (some) order, we require all Portkey.org users to abide by the site's policies at all times.