- that's actually a great idea about cleaning out the queue completely at the end of every month or even something more like 3 months, to filter out the inactive users.

- I try to check the activity of any user with a blue icon. Currently, in the first 10 pets currently in the win queue, the longest 'away' time a user has is 3 weeks and 5 days. Re-entering would be a pain, you're right. Checking a users last seen time is also a bit of a pain. Streamlining the process remains an ongoing project.

What would be better, of course, is coding to remove JUST the inactive users each month. Which is something I'd asked for tonight just prior to seeing this topic. A little tricky due to the way the spotlight is set up, but our grelca is a magician so I'm hopeful.

Also - you may be right about the way the win queue is set up, because I've been keeping an eye on it recently and it seems to favour the more recent adds. There are definitely some names in there that have been in there for a while.

But yes, I don't usually reply to these boards as I don't often have something new to say regarding the spotlight, but you posted it on a night we're actually tinkering with it. We apologise for any frustration caused!

I have a pet that's been in there for ages, it's kind of slowed me down from working on my pets as well. I completely understand this and it's been frustrating for us, too. It's really gotten a bit out of hand, and it's something I'm going to try to take under my wing and be a bit better with. We don't have a staffer dedicated to this anymore, and it's clearly gotten a bit backed up and needs some more attention. Quite a few of us have knocked down the queue significantly in the last few weeks, and we're working on getting it completely cleared out.

I'm also talking with programmers about getting a few of the tweaks mentioned here, specifically the pets showing up in order (oldest first) instead of the random way now. I never liked it this way, but it wasn't an issue when we were staffed and able to keep the queue better under control. I'm also going to see about getting approve/deny notifications with a few tags for the common things (missing credits, broken coding, etc.).

Please don't let that stop you from fixing weird coding! They would rather you fix that cause if it is left, then they'd have to reject it anyway.

Adding to treasure does not mess with anything. I forgot to tell you that earlier :D

(and anyone else interested) I have spoken with staff and they said this (and this will be added to the rules): "If a pet is edited after being accepted, it will go into a separate ‘re-review’ queue, it will not go through the main review process again." So please if you have things you need to edit, do so! You won't be kicked out of the queue. Just moved so they can check it again!

- your pet was not in the win queue. If it had been in the win queue, it would have gone into the re-review queue when you edited it. We have people working on the review queue right now, which was severely backlogged. Looking at your pet's profile, I will say it was likely denied because of the text on the right that's separate from any of the rest of the profile. It looks out of place.

- The re-review queue typically has 1-5 profiles in there at any one time. I check that queue regularly, the profiles have already been judged and I'm just checking to make sure the text is all still there or the profile hasn't been wiped. No pet stays in this queue for long.

- users can give all of the great suggestions in the world, but if we don't have the resources to implement them, or they don't work with our current system or coding, then they cannot be used. The re-review queue isn't new, it's been there since the early days of spotlight.

We will not be letting users know which queue they are in.

We're going to stop denying pets for the time being as our tagging system is being worked on and we will be able to deny with actual reasons, as well as give a notification if your pet is denied.

- Since we switched to 5 days per week the queue is moving faster. There are currently around 25 weeks worth of pets in the winners queue now, just waiting to be selected. There are around 250 pets left to go through in the judging queue. We're implementing a tagging system for the pets we deny to let people know what needs working on, or if there's a small fix to be had.

- I want to get the queue cleared out real soon and have taken a few people away from their other jobs to work on it with me this past week. These are temporary resources to clear the queue out, and these staff members will eventually need to go back to their own priority tasks, but this push should set us up nicely for the next few years. I am working with grace on the coding requirements at the moment. I don't want to sit here making promises though when we've been doing that for over a year. I'll keep this board open until this is implemented, we'll let our actions continue speaking for us.

We obviously don't enjoy our users being completely frustrated with us and this process, it doesn't make us happy!

- no, it doesn't show us oldest to newest. And after discussing this with the programmer this week, there doesn't seem to be a way to easily make them show from oldest to newest because the nomination isn't tied to a date.

Older pets haven't been looked at for a while (or, a lot of them haven't) because we haven't had the resources - with what we had, we were able to review a percentage of the pets in the queue every so often, enough to keep the queue going. It was this or close this down completely, which would back it up even more. Our programmer has been working on several large projects over the months, and was unable to work on the spotlight. I'd held off on accepting too many pets as I wanted the tag system. It got to the point recently where I just said 'guys, we need to go through this queue, it's too big' and then suddenly a small pocket of programmer time was made available, I put a stop to the denials and we are getting the programming that we require.

And these fixes are happening at the moment, they are what our programmer is currently doing. Pets will be reviewed/denied with reasons again soon, and will do so until the queue is cleared. I have put our resources onto this project to get it sorted now.

Just a note - if you edit a pet that's in the review queue, it won't be kicked out completely. I encourage the editing of pets. That will not get you kicked out of any queue completely. (The re-review queue is very easy to look at and re-add the pet.)

- what pet of yours are you having trouble with?

- he looks perfect to me, great layout, everything looks to be in place. The background is a little dithered but it's not so bad as to be overly noticeable! The text all looks fine. I don't think you need to do anything to him!

- oh I see what you're saying! Oh huh, that's happened to a few of mine too. I knew it was happening with some of the text, I didn't realise it had happened with coding too.

Ok, looking at this, it appears that three things have been changed/messed up. A '<' bracket has been changed to '&lt;' (minus the hyphens there), and the '>' bracket has been changed to "&gt;' and lastly quotation marks " have been changed to '&quot;' - if you use a text editor, you can find every instance of these and do find/replace to get them back to what they're supposed to be.

Try copying the entire profile, making the changes in an external editing program (like textedit or google docs or something) and then testing it out on another pet! Does that make sense?

- no problem! I'm actually going to go post this in the profiles forum where more people can see it, as it's more of a hidden problem.