I also like the idea of the pet owner having to contribute something to the profile. Even if it is just the TC. I'm not sure I support a TC being required. I like the idea Andrea had, the 3 out of 4 qualifying factors thing.

I wouldn't mind up voting, but I really dislike the idea of down voting. It does seem like it would just become a popularity contest. Though like others have said, maybe do a one month trial period? I don't think that the reward for voting should be sp - maybe a random chance at a forum point or something else?

I really like that there will be checkbox reasons for being kicked from the queue.

I don't like this whole the players decide who gets spotlight. This reminds me too much of Neopets and their Beauty Contest. Big time popularity contest and major spamming everywhere.

I do like that we will now know why our entry gets rejected and what needs to be fixed, otherwise, yeah, not a fan of this whole thing at all.

I kinda like this idea! You could also make that Users get special points for a "Spotlight Shop", where you can buy old retired Items, like old Event Shop Items or whatever. (Or even new, Spotlight themed things...) Probably a bad idea, but just a thought... :o

I'm sure the pitchforks will come out but....

Easy way to get around the popularity contest.

1. Make it so friends can't vote for their friends pets. The long version: make it so that if a person enters their pet to the queue, none of the people on their friends list can vote for that pet (Oh no! You can't vote for your friends silly!) It would also have to be made so they couldn't just unfriend and friend them again. Put a limit on how many times you can friend and un-friend in a single month.

2. If a pet wins the spotlight, maybe have a list of all the people who voted for that pet to win could be displayed under the pet. ie.not on the news page under the pet or on their pets profile, but have a page that you can click on to see who voted for the pet to win.

I don't really care about the pet spotlight, I've never been interested, so I could potentially have a 1000 people screaming at me at how absurd the idea is but I thought I'd put it out there.

Edit: I spelt queue right without even looking it up (I did look after to make sure) and I'm feeling quite proud of myself for doing so, I just thought I'd let you all know about what I consider an amazing accomplishment.

I think this idea can work and be great as long as:

1. A time limit is in place on how often a user can win (like what is in place now)

2. The user name is not shown next to the pet, only the pets name (of course you'll still easily be able to see who owns the pet by visiting its page)

3. Before your allowed to up or down vote you'd have to have actually visited that pets page.

Like what others have suggested have a list users can check off what’s on the profile before voting. This way the pet has to have been reviewed. Maybe have it so you’d have options to check off about each section and a certain portion of the options checked have to meet or exceed a set requirement. This way if user A like everything but the story they can “down vote” the story and “up vote” the rest. But user B loves the story hates the profile so they’ll of course vote very differently. The average can be taken and that can be used to determine who goes to the que.

So something like this but for each section (story, art, profile, treasure etc.):

Pet Story: GREEN: Story is completed and I like it. YELLOW: Story needs some work/or is finished but I don’t care for it RED: There is no Story

Maybe give the option for the user voting to mail/comment the pets owner if they wish to be more helpful (like pointing out typos) Also have the option to flag a pet if something is really inappropriate.

My thoughts on the popularity contest A person can only have so many pets therefore they can only win a certain amount of time before someone else does. Also their pets can only win if they actually but work into them so they'd be deserving of the win anyways.

I think something I could more so get behind would be staff ultimately being the deciding factor-- maybe a pet subform for the spotlight, but absolutely no form of downvoting. For the record, this could be exactly what staff had in mind and I'm just utterly not understanding what the whole point of this was :'D?

Something like:

• User A nominates a pet.
• Pet goes into round one spotlight queue.
• All users can see pets currently in spotlight queue.
• If you see a glaring problem with a pet (misalignment, species/name different from graphics, a theme that isn't one that subeta will officially allow to win, grammar errors, broken images, etc) you can add a "critique" that will be cleared once it's corrected by the user or disputed (ie: if you leave a crit that says your ideas suck, the user can dispute it and have it removed).
• Once a pet has 5 upvotes/0 outstanding critiques, it will be elevated to round two spotlight queue.
• Round two is when staff once over and give it a yay or nay-- if they nay, they give a formal reason and the pet is bumped back to round one.
• Business as usual?

Also, absolutely no rewards. If staff want more users to get involved, then simply make it where only one of your pets can successful get nominated into the pool until you upvote/critique 5 other pets-- kinda like do onto others as you wish them to do onto you? Unless of course there's not enough pets in the round one queue to warrant 5 upvotes, but if there is.. there you go? There should be a limit in place of how many times user a can vote for user b's pets-- I think this might already be the case (kinda)? So if I upvoted one of my friend's pets I couldn't upvote another one for idk... a week? Give or take, depending on queue and how many people are voting verses not voting.

If there's not enough users voting, offering rewards to people for doing so isn't going to help anything. You'll just end up with people upvoting every pet because free things-- if someone doesn't care about the spotlight, then they don't care. If they vote for a reward, they're voting FOR the reward, not the profile. If people who like the spotlight want to vote, they will because they enjoy it. If they enjoy participating they'll vote on others so they can keep it alive + can keep participating.

Friends not being able to vote would be nice, I think I like the suggestion.

Also your "amazing accomplishment" made me laugh. (I finally can write queue without looking it up as well, you're not alone. XD)

I kind of dislike your idea of not being able to vote for a friend. It could prevent favoritism a bit but it could also be a big problem if a user has a lot of friends and can't get any votes because of that. If that was implemented you should also not be able to vote for a pet you contributed to. Because a profile maker, artist, story writer could just vote for a pet because they did a part of the pet.

I really like that we'll get feedback when our pets get rejected but I'm not looking forward to the voting at all.

Yay for checkbox rejections!

Other than that, I don't like the voting idea, like at all. It can go wrong really quickly, and generate a lot of drama. I already see people with lots of friends, fanpets of popular characters, and pets with pretty art being the only ones voted, even if they have terrible stories/TCs/etc. It'd be more about getting and overlay of a popular artists or making a popular character to win contest, which limits a lot people's creativity. I think it's a nice idea in theory, but considering how user run winners worked in the past, there's no way this could work properly.

Why? I don't think anyone here has most of the Users here on their Buddy List, but if so then yes this would be a problem. (sry for the accidental ping XD)

gore One less pitchfork hole in me! I'm so glad I'm not alone anymore, so refreshing to know I'm not the only one. :P

Athene I'm not sure anyone has so many friends that it would prevent them from winning, but I suppose that will be found out when/if this, public voting, thing happens.

I like the idea that no one could vote if they had a hand in making the pet, though. I'm not sure how well that could be implemented, it seems like an awful amount of work to code all these people who can't vote. It would have to be different each time.

Edit: @ Gore No problem at all. Yes it does seem to be tricky.

I agree with Andrea, especially with this:

Also there's a simple workaround to having your friends vote if its baned, just unfriend them they vote and then refriend each other. So I am against that.

I can imagine that after a while only people interested in pets will vote and depending on the size of this group they could easily be friends like the pet spotlight support group. And I know there are users that have tons of friends so I don't they would vote for anyone just because they're one of that user's 100 friends. Also maybe you befriend someone because you compliment their pets. But as soon as you add them to your buddy list you can't vote for them anymore even though you liked the pets before you became friends.

And I personally think that if you can't trust users to be objective in their votes maybe they should be able to vote at all? It can still be a popularity contest even if you can't vote for your friends. No matter if it's because you've seen the user on the forums/ you've comissioned them before/ think they're cool or whatever reason.

I'm thinking the voting enthusiasm will die down after a while (especially since so many people have voiced their complaints here already) so it will get harder to get the votes you need to a point where it's much easier for people with fewer friends. Like if you needed 20 votes and there were only 25 people actively voting after some months and half of those people happened to be your friends you couldn't win anymore even if your pet was really good. I'm not saying that this would definitely happen but it could and I wouldn't like that^^"

I'm not liking the sP reward but maybe the winner can get an exclusive wear to spotlight winners? (Account locked so it can't be sold?) Or maybe CSC or a 1 week GA?

I'm 100% in favor with what said about the "flag this pet" option though. I feel like it should have a check-box form that goes with it so you can't just flag the pet of a user you don't like.

I also don't feel like the pet name or the owner should be shown (if there is a way to keep it anon) to help prevent the "popularity contest" mentality that I feel like is coming by putting this in the hands of the users.

That or a team of 2-5 users to make mini-mods (whose pets can't be entered because of bias) that volunteer and are voted on BY THE USERS NOT THE STAFF to go through and put the pets in the queues themselves. Mini-mods that can answer general (non-pet specific) questions that the users have or clarify the reasons behind the rejection. "Story" isn't very helpful but "Story - I didn't understand what was going on" or "Story - Your have some serious grammar and spelling errors that couldn't be overlooked" would be a lot more helpful.

This sounds like the start of a good idea, honestly. Just have to figure out the workaround for, yeah, popularity contests. Maybe everyone's limited to one vote per week? Not allowed to advertise your pet anywhere and just leave it to people who take it upon themselves to browse the selection? Limited/non-existent gains for participating in a vote so someone isn't enticed to spam or pick a certain profile over another based on something outside of the actual content up for judgement?

Or can we just assume the best of this userbase being honest and selecting or declining a profile based on what's present? I think so. Maybe I'm hopelessly naive and still too fresh to the site! But I think it could happen.

Ah I get it. Sure, it can be a problem for some people, especially in huge cults etc. Actually, valid points. Now thinking about some cults, this could make the "no friends can vote" part a bit tricky. :o Also your explanation about how only a few Users maybe tend to vote after a few weeks/months and most of them are the friend of someone is a problem in that case.

(Honestly, I did not think of that. Maybe "it's after midnight and I'm tired" is an excuse? No? Ah... :D)

Absolutely that could happen. Personally, I don't think users should vote but I'm willing to give it a chance to see how it turns out. People may be getting upset over nothing, maybe we should all have a little faith in each other.

As someone who doesn't have a ton of friends onsite, I would appreciate this limitation. Even if the pet spotlight did turn into some sort of popularity contest, this would keep the playing field a little more level.

As for making the submissions anonymous to limit favoritism/popularity: just removing the user's name or the pet's name from the submission isn't going to do anything if the pet's name is included in the story or on the graphics that are part of the profile. There is practically no way to make this anonymous.

But all around, I'm excited for this! It seems like there are still a few bugs to iron out, but having a checklist and getting users more involved in the process seem like huge positives to me.

It'd be pointless to hide the pets names. You'd have to review them and the second you go on their profile you'd be able to see their name as well as their owner. Not to mention what happens if there's two of the same species and color in voting and you click the wrong one by mistake.

(Haha, it's after midnight here, too, so I totally understand.) I understand your point though, too. It would really suck if users just voted for their friends but completely disabling that could be problematic, too. I think a voting limit could prevent abuse like not being able to vote for more than one pet of a user at once so you can't just vote for all pets of a friend? Or maybe limit it to a number of votes for all your friends for a period of time? Hopefully they'll find a way to solve this c:

I'm not really a fan of this idea but maybe we're all just overreacting. Considering how many people fear it might turn into a popularity contest it looks pretty good. Maybe people will really vote for honestly good pets.^^