If there is a button under the pet's picture to up-vote you wouldn't be making a mistake because that is the pet you just clicked. Unless you are looking to only vote for a friend's pet and then yeah, it is to stop you 100%. It would just make it harder to only seek out friend's pets was my point. Not that it would be fool-proof, just that it could make it harder.

I like this. I've been on sites that have a 30 day cool down period for re-friending and un-friending. If you un-friend and re-friend again you can't un-friend for another 30 days. I think that would be a really awesome way to do it. It would also be a good idea to make it so you can't up-vote your own pets or advertise/ask/beg/bribe for votes or nominations.

You could also limit to say 5 (or any random number) votes per user a month or 2 week period.

Okay, this is something cool I just thought of and it's veering off topic slightly, but I think a "note from the user" type thing would be cool. For instance: "in 200 words or less, describe why you would like your pet to win." I know some of us put a lot of ourselves into our pets, and if the spotlight does have some kind of peer review incorporated, it would be cool for people to be able to see why we're proud of our work. It would be cool to have this on the news post too, like, you know, an acceptance speech only not as cheesy; the sentiments, I imagine, would be pretty genuine, and I find it interesting why people create the pets they create.

I don't do much with my pets, but I know that popularity-related things are very different from things with official judges. I personally dislike the former. It relies too much on how well you network, and who you know.

, I'm assuming their order in the voting area is going to be shuffled around so you click on say a arid montre and are directed to their profile to review it. You then go back to actually vote for that pet and click on another arid montre by mistake. So Either their names should show or when you click on the pet it takes you into a "review mode" where you can see their profile and have a movable hovering checklist or something. Much easier to just show the pet's name, which you'd have to see anyway along with its owner when you review its profile. At least that's how I see it.

I think you are meaning directly up voting/down voting right under the pet with out review which would mean we'd only be voting for its image? Custom pets would have a huge advantage.

Or you can hit ctrl + click and it will open it in a whole new tab? I know a lot of people do that (when buying things, sending flowers, things like that) and I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to make the pet's profile open in a new tab when clicked if staff were to program it that way too, to prevent such things. If they wanted to keep names off there are MANY ways they could do it and not have you click on the wrong pet.

And no. No review would be stupid and not at all what I am suggesting. I mean having it under the image and clicking the image take you to the profile. Pets could also be numbered in the queue (by the order they were nominated) so you could double check the pet number before upvoting. (Yet another way to get the right pet without using a name!)

Also it could have "_____ the female spectrum feli Owner _____" and hide owner AND pet name from showing.

Oh ick, ick ick ICK!! I'd rather my pet of mine mysteriously lose in the current system then have my pet win a glorified popularity contest D: Please keep the check box for the reason, ditch the rest. God knows it must be overwhelming dealing with the spotlight judgement, but this... no. Please no.

, ok that makes more sense. I still find it kinda pointless though cause you can see the owner/pet name on their profile. Unless staff hide those but there are ways around that too. Just seems a wasted effort. I use the right click method all the time, but it doesn't mean everyone does so I support staff coding pet profiles open in a new tab/window.

What I support:

• Checkbox reasons if staff have to kick you from the win queue

A BIG FAT HELL NO:

• Users cast upvotes (Yep, this is ready!) or downvotes not-upvotes (Nope, not quite ready!) on each pet
• When a pet has a certain amount of votes (determined by robots) it will get put into the win queue

I don't know how many times we have to go through the whole idea of voting on Subeta to learn that it just doesn't work. Examples: Epicon, Epicon again, Winter Costume Contest, and the last summer event.

Voting among the users does not work out correctly. Even when you cannot see names, there is always some bias. That is just going to happen when users vote. And pets can be SUPER PERSONAL to people, and other users should not have a say in that process outside of nomination.

I kinda get that you want us to help weed out pets that aren't spotlight ready, but if you all get the final say, which you are suggesting you do (- Staff will double check the pets in the win queue to make sure there are no sneaky rulebreakers), then why should the users waste their time voting in the first place? A pet can get 200 votes and still break rules.

Sorry to say, but this is one of those features you created and then realized you don't have the staff for. But there are too many users committed to this, so you kinda just have to deal with it. Get another staff member. This idea causes too much drama on our end. People are already kind of wary about the pet spotlight as it is, due to comments in the news and offsite about pets. Users are not good at judging other users in any way. We've proven that time and time again.

Adding voting only adds an element of competition to this which isn't needed. As it is now, we don't really compete... it comes down to luck once you are in the winner's queue. The voting adds competition which just should not be part of this- well meaning or not, I don't see it working.

BTW, can we get an update on the numbers in the queue right now? Are we still seeing few pets in queue and few nominations? I have 5 pets who have been nominated for months, and want to know what the queue looks like (not the actual other pets in the queue, I like the surprise of seeing them in the news... just numbers). Is this revamp still limiting winners to 3 days a week? Or would we be back to 7?

Not sure if it's been mentioned before, but this sentence made me think of an idea that could prevent a couple of issues.

What if when you went to the pet spotlight page, it was random? Kind of like the adoption center where you can click to refresh, but it's only one pet at a time (like on shuffle), and you can only vote on a specific number per day? That way people can't just go look up one specific pet that people have asked for votes for.

I'm sure some people would just sit and refresh for ever to find a specific pet, but it might discourage a lot of the "popularity contest" or "bribing for votes" aspect of it.

Is this a place to ask about another question/potential clarification and/or tightening up on the pet spotlight? Cuz I have one that I've been wondering since I signed up for the site.

A lot of the spotlights I've seen since joining aren't really about pets at all, but human OCs or creatures/characters from completely different settings, canons and franchises. While I get the creative freedom that implements and how a lot of folks seem to either base their pets on their RP characters or developed them FROM those pets, or just generally use this site as an RP platform, it kind of isn't a PET spotlight anymore? I dunno, it's one thing that's kept me from really paying attention to it. The stories and characters are well and good, but I'd rather be reading about the character ideas of the critters based on the actual setting we're all playing in.

This could and probably is just me and simply indicates that the spotlight isn't something I should be involved in. And I don't want it to sound like I'm trying to stifle creative freedom or shut down RP venues! It just makes me a little wistful that there's groundwork for a setting here within the site's lore and it seems to rarely get used for the showcase pets we often see.

Again, sorry if this is a complete derail of the actual topic at hand, but since we're discussing shaking up the spotlights, I just figured I'd ask!

I'm not reading through this whole thing because I don't have time, but I'm not understanding.

Staff has had ample time in the past to view pets, but now that a checks system is being put into place, you suddenly don't have the time? LOL sounds to me like someone is trying to shift the blame on the reason your pets aren't winning. : /

I'm with . This seems very poorly thought out and the best course of action is not to shove it into the user's hands with a "VOTE IT OUT!" resolution-- our userbase isn't mature enough to handle this. It will be a popularity contest. This is a PET SITE... though its at a point where it looks like simply a lovechild of Gaia and Neopets. (Avatars being first and foremost, pets trudging along behind that.)

There should be more staff assigned to handling spotlight. Minimods could do this easily enough. Especially if they're one of those that have 10+ pets who have won.

Though, I'm personally sick of the "so and so wins so often because no one is trying to win anymore" argument. I'm pretty sure there are more than 100 pets in there.

Uhh, TCs are not at all hard to hide in a tab??

[edit] "not enough pets in queue, we're reducing this to 3 times a week" "we're putting all this on users now because this is too much for us to handle"

Uhm... lol...

I only support the check boxes. Please don't attach a sp prize to winning, just attach some achievements. Like a super cool prize would be after 15 wins you get a free pet slot. Having any sort of public voting system even the pet page "likes" is a popularity contest. You will have on-site and off-site begging for votes, likes, as well as advertisements of their pets. It would be seriously beneficial if there was a sort of mini rotating pet-spotlight council. Let them see the cue and then solely vote if they think the pet is ready or not. Then it goes to staff. Don't give the power to everyone, let it be from the user base that has won with their pets, but make it shift. Like terms of a few months, before it goes to another set of ACTIVE (make sure they are on at least once a week) users and of course these people can accept or reject the temporary position. In the time they act as council their pets are not considered in the cue. These council people will get no special icon, and will not be allowed to tell others they are part of the council. Like give them access to a page where they can write comments or say it is not ready then after a pet goes through all the council people and gets approved by the majority, let it go to staff for final say.

Double Post. >.<

In terms of people anti-wins for people who pay for stuff. I have 3 pet wins and the overlays and graphics were made by others. Does a story really have to be credited? I think I only credited myself on Plushified because I had someone else edit it and gave credit to them back when I was new to "creative" writing. Inches won on a very short "story" which was really more just a way for me inform people about these cool caterpillars.

I feel that the reason why upvoting/downvoting isn't a good idea is simply because anytime this is done to win something it... just becomes difficult to make it so that it's not a popularity contest. It's fine for sites like Reddit because you're not winning something.

That being said, I have a suggestion. What about instead of voting, users comment on a pet. Once it reaches X amount of comments, it then is put into a queue that the staff then reviews. If the general consensus is that the pet is well done/meets the criterion/is creative etc, then it gets put into the win queue. If general consensus is that it needs to be worked on, then the checklist is issued and the pet is removed from the system. This also allows for the staff to notice that yeah, some of the comments are going to be crap like "I don't like snakes." Which really don't have any impact on what queue the pet will go in, but would count as a negative vote if the voting system was implemented.

I know this is going to put a little more on the staff than what they're aiming for here, but it sounds like if you keep getting downvotes, you're going to stay in the system with those downvotes even if you improve on your pet via what people say in the forum. There needs to be some way for the pet to exit the system until the pet is improved on, otherwise you're going to be stuck there.

Hope this made sense.

I love that everyone's workarounds are to code SO MUCH SHIT. Like, are we playing the same site? You really think coding for "friends can't see your pets" is going to work?

The only way this is ever going to work is to give the users the same (or more basic) check boxes that the admins have. I flitted through some of this and really liked whoever suggested the red/yellow/green check boxes for each area.

it could be a simple YES/ NO tick box for criteria. If you tick no on something, you should be required to fill out a short form at the end for why it's not working for you. It should automatically get kicked out, and the report should be sent to the user. Once it's fixed (Or like a 10 day cool down) it can be re-entered for another round of submissions. Once it gets to all yeses, it should move on to staff. Then if there is something else that we missed, staff can kick it back WITH SPECIFIC NOTES.

Here's the thing though, after a staff kick out, there should be a flag sort of system in place where it doesn't have to go back through round one. It should go DIRECTLY to staff to be checked on, the placed in the queue if the problem was fixed.

I know, coding, but really, this will only work if it's SPECIFIC shit. All this half ass voting isn't going to do anything I guarantee it.

If this is really the way the spotlight is going I'm just going to yank the nominate link off of my handful of pets. I'm tired of all of this. I hate giving users this much power, so to speak. We've already seen the shit storms over the HA contests.

And exactly why has my pet been in the queue for at least 2 months now? I too thought we didn't have that many pets being nominated. I have no idea when she was nominated so my estimate is being generous. I was surprised to see her nominated and then nothing. If she gets kicked out then I'm completely out of the whole pet spotlight. I didn't want to be in the first place and thought I disabled it but when I saw her nominated I decided to give it a go. Specially since the whole 'not enough pets in the queue' talk.

.... 's idea is also excellent.

Not sure if it's been mentioned before, but this sentence made me think of an idea that could prevent a couple of issues.

What if when you went to the pet spotlight page, it was random? Kind of like the adoption center where you can click to refresh, but it's only one pet at a time (like on shuffle), and you can only vote on a specific number per day? That way people can't just go look up one specific pet that people have asked for votes for.

I'm sure some people would just sit and refresh for ever to find a specific pet, but it might discourage a lot of the "popularity contest" or "bribing for votes" aspect of it.

Lol have it like the pound was exactly what I was thinking when I wrote that :) I like the idea of limiting it more though to just one or a few pets. I'd still like to see the que total though.