This is why I choose to try to achievements rather than the pet spotlight. To much of a mess:P

I am 100% for mini-mods being in charge of the queue and everything....provided none of their pets can be entered into the spotlight. I feel like that would bring too much bias and if one of them won it would cause as much a stir as the Universe wins every 2 weeks. I still feel like you would have plenty of volunteers and if someone wanted a shot at spotlight, they could easily step down for a while and let someone else have a go. :)

(Not trying to stir the shit pot. I like Universe and the winning pets. It is just an example.)

That makes me feel a lot better then. :) Otherwise I think it is a great idea, so long as we don't get the say in the end. Lol.

Personally, I'm starting to think that if staff has no time to take care of the pet spotlight, remove it from the site, yeah. As much as I love pets, I won't cry if the pet spotlight is gone.

All I can say is exactly my thought.

sarcastically well this is just great :( and it will turn into a popularity contest

as is its hard to get a spotlight now..... sigh

Not about to read all these pages, sorry if I repeat things, but here is my two cents.

I could see this turning into the opinions of a few dedicated "voters" while the rest of us loose interest. I don't remember to do half the things I should be doing on here each day already. Giving me another thing to do is fun and all, but if it is for like 1K SP I could see myself forgetting about it pretty quick.

Check boxes for why pets are denied is SUCH A GOOD IDEA. I don't even enter my pets, but I can hear the relieved sighs of all the people who do!

Down-votes? Please, no. There has to be a better way to go about it. Maybe make the buttons "Ready" and "Not Ready" takes the negativity out of it somewhat... Could still be abused, but doesn't make a "down vote" sound as terrible.

Checkboxes? Complete support. We should have had something like this from the get-go, but at least we're finally getting it.

Everything else? Not so much.

Honestly, this kind of seems to me like just a way for staff to make users do what should be their job (with "user control" being a nice-sounding excuse)... Like others have mentioned, a minimod-like job for the spotlight would be better.

I still think an alternating committee or council will work. That way it prevents bias.

If I'm not mistaken, only one person handles the current Pet Spotlight submissions AND the Custom Wearable submissions. This is a daunting task, and she DEFINITELY needs help. Thats why I'm so utterly FOR having a minimod or two come in to assist with the Spotlight, allowing her to focus more so on CWs and the overall skimming of pets that have gone through a preliminary screening to make sure that it is ready to go (at that point, it would be looking for anything her assistant may have missed and addressing that and/or approving pets to become a winner.)

I like the idea of users being able to see the queue, but I do NOT agree with the general userbase being allowed to "upvote" or "downvote" any of the pets. A general critique? Sure. We have that in the forums (though, last I was in there, it was pretty damn dead).

Ooh, interesting changes! I enjoy the idea of users being able to upvote pets. I don't actually care about the Spotlight myself (as it stands), but I do love looking through other people's pets and I spend a lot of time creepin' on everyone's characters. (If you are reading this board/care enough to post in pet-related topics, there's a very good chance I have ogled your pets, sorrynotsorry). I would enjoy going through the nominees and voting for them now and then. ___ showmeyourbabies

Downvoting... definitely sounds questionable, though. I can see people using that for dishonest reasons and I hope some kind of critique system is used instead. People can be petty and spiteful - that's just human nature, inevitable in any situation and certainly not a trait that's unique to our community. It's best not to add tinder to the fire by giving people an option to anonymously ruin someone else's day. x:

Not sure what to think about it. I like the idea of the checklist, I already had the issue of having one pet kicked out because of whatever reason and I had absolutely no idea what it could be. The user votes... I see there a big issue with it. As many already said before it has potential to turn into a popularity contest and that would be the point that would make me stop participating and just doing my pet profiles for my own. The other thing is that fan pets will be more popular, gain more votes and more attention than original characters. I can pull their parallels to dA very much regarding the attention a piece of art gets. Just an example: draw an art of your bevloed OC, pour your heart and blood in it, push yourself to a high quality and you'll get almost no attention, draw a quick scribble of something popular, let's say Naruto stuff or whatever, you'll get tons of attention. Same will be with the pets if you let it be voted by users, I am pretty sure of it. It also will drop the value of a good story. This already is neglected regarding some winners during the past few months, when some of them had just one short paragraph of "story", rather a shorthand describtion of the character, nothing I personally would consider as a story. So why then bother to write anything fancy at all anymore? Because when users will vote, they won't read through it at all anymore. I could say yay for me, because I can draw, but my heart as writer bleeds, as often I am sitting much long on a story than on the artwork. And from long-time experience I can say that this is a fact: people are too lazy to read (most of the times).

Well there are only my thoughts of it, we'll see how it will turn, but I pretty much see a chance that I won't bother with the spotlight thing anymore if it really will turn out into a populartity contest. It was fun as long as there was chance for winning, now with every change this chance gets smaller.

I haven't gone through all pages yet but:

• users need checkboxes just like staff
• critique box needed
• anon, don't make it a damn popularity contest because after 14 years neopets i'm done with that.
• don't make the reward for users voting too high because people will abuse it.

Hopefully this way it doesn't take 4 months for pets to get judged. Because it took one of my pets 4 months to get kicked out of the queue. Since my friend and i noticed it took that long, i'm done with the "not enough pets" bullshit.

Upvotes Yay; downvotes Nay. It can get into personal vendetta. Keep it simple. Maybe in the rotation there could be a non-repeater issue, that users can't again nominate a pet that has been spotlighted (as opposed to nominated) recently. How many votes per user per time limit? Can a user go through and nominate 5 pets? ten pets? infinite nominations? a day? an hour? every 5 minutes? Can we vote on a pet over and over until spotlighted?

Queued pets being looked at by human judges is good. Impartiality is still difficult.

• Nomination is done by users. But instead of having someone click on a button/link, have the applicant open a topic in a specialised forum.

• Having it done in the forums allows Mini-Mods to assist and monitor the process

• Compile a list of requirements and detail them.

• Answers to the topic will have to include a list of all requirements and a feedback on some or each them, but all requirements will have to be "okeyed" by users before pet can be taken to the next step

• If a pet is "approved" for all requirements by at least x amount of users (?), a Mini-Mod can enter it in a queue for staff to review and put it in the winning queue

• Reward: just the usual forum points you would get for posting like in any other board

Another issue that we hope this may help is how few pets we have available for judging/winning right now.

I feel like with the way Subeta is now very few people care about pets. The site doesn't care. The users don't care. No one has any reason to. If I want to look at people's characters/art work/concept designs or display my own there's way better sites for it. IDK, I'd actually be a bit embarrassed to have 12 pets with all-singing, all-dancing, spotlight trophy profiles that I'd worked my fingers to the bone on. It's like "look at all this pointless stuff I put loads of effort into that no one cares about toot toot".

I'm an artist and a writer; I like drawing and character building and it's something I do for no satisfaction beyond my own, but the whole way you have to build pets on Subeta is so laborious, un-fun, frustrating and limited in what you can actually do and show, and the reward so disproportionally tiny (I think it's a trophy and an achievement or two? For all that work?) that I got one pet finished and in the spotlight, and after that I haven't really had the urge to finish any of the others.

That has to be my favourite part of that post :D

I'll reserve judgement on the user voted pets - I can see why it's an idea, but I can also see it could just turn into a popularity contest, where the more well-known people / those with loads of friends get the most votes, and the really good profiles from not so well-known owners just get sidelined....

I second what most people have said about either not having 'downvoting' or at least not call it that. Even on sites where it's common like Reddit it still feels discouraging seeing your posts get downvoted. Though if people (especially the owner of the pet) couldn't see how many down/upvotes they got then that might be okay. Just as long as they knew that getting kicked out of the queue was solely a sign that the pet wasn't ready.

For the voting rewards I reckon that could be abused so much. Perhaps if people were only allowed to vote a certain amount of times a day? I like Gryffindor's idea on page 2 where there would be a random selection of 10 pets for 2 days (or really however many for a short period of time) for anyone to vote on and the ones that weren't sent to the next queue/kicked out (perhaps each at a select number of up/downvotes?) get put back in the pool to be selected again in a different round. And maybe during those 2 days users could vote on X amount of pets (3-5?).

: The way I've seen it it's the complete opposite o.o People care a lot about pets here, and entering the pet spotlight, which is why they do the whole 'laborious, un-fun, frustrating and limited' work on them. If those people feel that their characters/stories/art/etc are best displayed on Subeta then I say let them go for it. And it's not pointless because it's a person putting there own mark on this community, showing their work to other people, sharing their ideas with other people. I think that's a great reason to do it! It's inspiring!

But I do agree the rewards should definitely be better because at the moment it's not proportionate to the effort needed to create a complete pet.

One of my concerns is the pets currently in the queue. One of my pets has been in for months now--I have no idea if she's in the winning queue or the review queue. Will she be booted at this new system's implement? I'm also concerned on how to get people to "vote" for my pet. I would like to believe that people will honestly choose the pets that deserve the wins--but objectivity doesn't always remain. I love that the spotlight is being looked at, I am just hoping a fair way is found to ease the strain on the staff and put our minds at east for those that want to keep going for spotlights.