I've been keeping an eye on the queue, it HAS gone up since we switched to 3 days a week instead of every other day, so it's possible that we could up the amount of winners per week. (It's nice to have a pool of entries again to look through )

We've been working on the Pet Spotlight when we can, and we've taken feedback from the brainstorming board that mentioned above me. This project is one where we've found the opinions of what users want to be quite differing across the board, so we're trying to make something that is going to make the best use of the resources we have whilst also trying to make it more fun to enter and less restrictive.

As to having pets in the queue for months - are they definitely not just being re-nominated? I've found that I've had to kick some pets out of the queue several times, I believe it's a week before they can be nominated again though. I'll see about finding some time to do a "deep clean" of the queue, sometimes some pets are really on the fence for the judges aesthetically and don't get put through or thrown out for a while, which was one of the reasons we wanted some more peer reviews going on with that brainstorming thread - to get some more opinions on aesthetics before we judged them.

- I'll add it to the list of suggestions for things we want to include with this adjusted version.

- thank you for this information! And yes, I'd love for everyone to work on their pets for their own satisfaction, but it would be nice to have this pet spotlight incentive and actually have it work really well for everyone involved - users and staff alike!

From what I can see, the queue tends to be gone through in batches. So somebody will go through the queue and basically clear it (to the point that the win queue is nice and full and just waiting to appear in the news, and the judging queue is empty) and then we'll wait until the win queue is nearing being empty again until we go through and do another round of judging. I think this way helps ensure that the first group of people added to the win queue all get their wins/trophies before we start adding new people/people that have only just been nominated. Does that make sense? We're at a point right now where the queue needs to be cleared again, for sure, and we'll go through it again and pull all those limbo-pets out of limbo.

Because of the move to the 3-per-week wins, the queue has built up quite a lot since the last clear out! So yes, it's possible that the win-schedule will have to be adjusted again. When we were putting out 7 wins per week, both the win queue and the judging queue had almost completely emptied, so every day was definitely too much.

Definitely here and listening to all suggestions in order to come up with something that will work better for the majority.

- I understand what you're saying! I'll see if that can be coded, but if not - I think the compromise of increasing the number of pet wins per week and doing the batch judging a bit more often might help this particular problem :) I've added your idea to my suggestions list!

- that was my immediate thought, although would people be annoyed that the Friday winner gets the whole weekend? Unless we made Saturday and Sunday give a past winners highlight...except a lot of those have been cleared from their pages now! Maybe if Saturday and Sunday just linked to the entry page to encourage new participants? I wonder if that would get old fast. I'll have a think on it!

Thanks, :) It helps to know the info!

Just as an update, actually, I'm currently in limbo with the spotlight until I can get together with a programmer to make changes - which should be soonish, but there are obviously lots of other really pressing things being worked on so it's hard finding a time when we're both available. I have an idea of it being able to happen soon, though :)