Pet Profiles Announcement!

Over the years you may have noticed us gradually making layout changes to the site, and that these changes sometimes affect your pet profiles. We've known for a while that it's not really sustainable the way we've been doing it - any change, no matter how small or subtle, has the potential to seriously affect pet profiles. That's frustrating for you folks, and frustrating for us too - we see your creativity as one of the reasons to keep going with Subeta.

We appreciate that many of you have spent a lot of time and money on your pet profiles, and any disruption is unwelcome - which is why we want to stop making 'little' changes continuously and move the whole pet profile system to a layout separate from the main site layout. We're at a point where we have the resources to make this one big change that will enable us to really progress the site in the long run. It's a 'for the greater good' situation, and while we wish we could simply move profiles over without touching them, we have this one opportunity to build something really useful and we will, of course, do whatever we can to ease the transition.

We'll be improving the default pet profiles, making it easier to customise for those of you without advanced coding knowledge. They won't be affected by our work on the main site layout - similar to how our user profiles currently work.

Importantly, we are not planning to make any more site layout changes until this is fully rolled out. Working on the new pet profile system will take priority.

Once the new system is ready, we'll have a grace period where it will exist as an opt-in alternative to the current system. You'll have time to work on/commission new profiles or adjust your old ones to fit the new system while keeping your legacy profiles in the meantime and will be able to opt-in when you are ready. To make the transition as smooth as possible, the new profile system will have a permanent "legacy mode" that will have same sections as the current profile, the same CSS identifiers, and some extra code to reset some CSS to mimic current profiles. With this option, you should be able to paste over your current code and it will work with no (or minimal) modifications. This is new for us too!

There will be a date where everyone gets switched over, but it will be announced well in advance. We currently don't have more details or ETA to share ...so stay tuned!

TL;DR

• We're going to work on a new pet profile system that separates it from the site layout, for everybody's future benefit.
• We are not planning to make more layout changes until this is fully rolled out.
• Once it's done it will be an opt-in situation for a couple of months so you will be able to keep your legacy profiles while we transition.

Yup! Actually, we are going to allow you to do both with the same pet. So basically, your pet will get a profile 2.0 to experiment with, but you can choose when to make that be the one that shows up publicly. Until then, the legacy one will remain. We're putting a lot of thought into making it as painless as possible, which is also why we will have a separate, permanent legacy mode build into the new system.

- it will not mess with your user profiles, no. As to your pet profiles, it's explained in the original post! (But to reiterate, we are aiming to make it so that you can copy-paste your coding onto the new profiles, keeping any 'messing' to a minimum)

- The idea is that they aren't lost, and you'll be able to paste them over to the new system, which will then no longer be affected by us working on the site layout of the rest of the site.

When the new system comes out, there will be a grace period where you'll have access to both the new and current system, while making the transition. This grace period is temporary, and eventually the current system will have to go.

However, the new system will include a special mode we've called "legacy mode" that is fully integrated with the new system, but basically makes it mimic the old profile's structure so that you should be able to copy-paste your existing code and have it work. That's what this quote is referring to:

- I absolutely understand you, I cannot get my head around coding at all - but our is so very helpful and good and will be on hand to offer as much help as possible to get this working for everyone.

The recode is an ongoing thing! It's happening all the time, the site has been updated so much over the past few years, but until we actually get the big visual thing it's hard to think of it as one big thing!

1. We don't have more details to share yet, but yes, we are planning to provide customization options that do not require manually coding anything.

2. Probably not, as pet profiles are currently not a significant source of lag.

3. User profiles are currently separate from the site layout, so they don't pose the same problems. While we may eventually decide to upgrade them as well, it's not a focus right now and they certainly won't be worked on alongside the planned pet profile changes.