bookmarking that imgur link, thank you~ as for the image thing, tbh i just want a reasonable attempt at proper crediting. i know there's the potential for misattribution or improper use, but i dunno. i'd at least like an attempt. it's not too difficult for the regular user to do a reverse google search before they use something off a background website, i think? o; though there's no way to require or regulate that, i know.

as the person grumpy about her nominated pet, i just want to say i love and appreciate the people who nominated my pet! i pulled her out of the nomination queue once to change some things and she was nominated really quickly again after that, and knowing two people liked her enough to click that link is honestly more than i could've ever asked for.

what i'm not happy about is that she's been in the queue since roughly last august, and i see other people winning monthly, or saying they've had x pet go from nominated to winning in under a month and so on. seeing that is a real blow to my enthusiasm about this, you know? i'm sorry if i came across as ungrateful, because i'm really not.

I just want to provide support for the "remove spotlight win" if a pet is abandoned/transferred.

I think it would also add motivation for people to adopt previously winning pets. I don't want any pets that have previously won the spotlight on a different account.. I didn't deserve it and the existing profile (often reset) is not the one that one.

Actually maybe user's can voluntarily remove a spotlight trophy? or maybe resubmit their pet if they had changed the profile enough? Like a 1-2 year cooldown and you can win a different colour profile. The way to prove it would be that the user has to submit the previous version of the profile.

There is a lot of talk behind the scenes about removing trophies. It does open up a lot of problems that would need to be addressed definitely. And we are talking about the other things too but I know that I have heard a lot about that one in particular.

I do want to say for now, if you adopt a pet that won, you can always hide the trophy for now until something is figured out!

With the image crediting, I know at the very least there is going to be updates in the rules. And I am asking that rule (when it is tweaked) be added to the page where you check your pets to be nominated.

I agree on doing something about pets being in the queue for so long while others seem to enter and win right away. That's one reason why I gave up on the spotlight. If I knew I wouldn't have to wait 4+ years until my pet won I may actually have the desire to work on my pets.

I had my pet Paper Witch in the queue almost since it started. They had been through a few staff clearings of the queue. The last straw was when they got kicked out without any info as to why. Then the profile broke during the great breaking of all pet profiles. I had the same thing with Princess Butterball until she finally won in 2016. It was at least three years of waiting.

Bollocks, started typing and seem to have lost the page. Trying again. Disclaimer: New to this specific site and have read first post here only; am familiar with the pet spotlight from reading other threads, and from other petsites with a similar concept. EDIT: Have now read entire thread. A lot of these ideas aren't new and I'm not surprised.

To express my thoughts on how to generally improve the spotlight experience for everyone:

Allow players to self-nominate. Not only can users already covertly request nominations, and certain popular users are just more likely to get nominations anyway; I really can't conceive of a single good reason to prevent users from nominating their own pets.         1) Do away with the nomination system altogether. If someone wants their pet to win the spotlight, they nominate it. If they don't, they don't.

Award the trophy as soon as pets win and give the owner a notification. (Already a thing!)          Put the pet into a queue for a news feature as normal          Have the name of the pet's owner permanently attached to this trophy; archive the trophy if the pet moves accounts, rendering it visible but "inactive"; allow the pet to win the spotlight again under the new owner, provided they meet the credit and contribution rules mentioned further down.

Make the news feature queue linear: a FIFO system just makes the most sense here. Then split it up:          1) A daily news feature identical to the current system          2) Saturday Catch-up: a cumulative news feature which lists all pets who have been in the queue for some arbitrary period of time, maybe two to four weeks, and published on the same day each week (including an "empty" catch-up if there are no qualifying pets, just so everyone knows there's no need for the catch-up rather than thinking the feature is broken). The best part about catch-up is it can be a completely automated process. Staff don't ever need to touch it unless they want to tweak the timing.          3) Introduce themed features curated by queue mods to the tone of "Theme Spotlight: Tribute pets" and "Theme Spotlight: Mechanical pets". Announce planned themes ahead of time (not with a date, just "here are some themes we want to fill")          4) List the total number of pets sitting in the queue waiting for a news feature on the pet spotlight homepage and maybe even offer a counter on a winning pet's page indicating its position in the queue.          5) Introduce a community spotlight: Make the news feature queue publicly visible, and allow players to vote for their favourite. Feature the most-voted pet each day alongside the next pet numerically in the queue (one of these must trump the other; if a single pet qualifies for both spots, push it out of that spot in favour of the next most valid candidate. I suggest allowing votes to beat date.)          5A) Alternatively, split it into three or four categories and have one pet featured for each category each day, including a "general" or "all-around" category for pets with excellent everything.

2, 3, and 5 don't need to co-exist, especially if a themed spotlight is published on a schedule (even once a month would be great). In particular, 5 could replace nomination votes if that feature is removed.

Actually display the reason the pet won: It took me three days to learn "pet spotlight" wasn't just a really weird "random pet" feature, because the news post is just the pet's name and image. On the third day, a pet with custom art won and I actually clicked through, only to see a lot of other great stuff on their profile. Now I actually click through to see why a pet won, but I shouldn't have to. It's the pet spotlight, so spotlight the good stuff. Quote the story! Use the fake-custom art rather than the default Subeta art! Show a screenshot of the really great layout! Just! Something so it doesn't look like another completely generic official-site-art pet with nothing special about it!         Ideally, do this via archive. An external archive service could work, but I'm thinking about archiving the actual page somewhere on subeta where it can always be viewed in the exact state it was in when it won.

Thoughts on pet spotlight rules:

Stricter rules on credit visibility On some pets, I have to hunt for credit, or it's hidden under a button. One one occasion it was in an invisible div that was only visible on hover so I found it by pure chance as I moved my cursor to click on something else. Credit should have to always be visible without the viewer doing any work to get to it. I read the spotlight rules which clearly state credit for all aspects should be listed, but I don't think I've seen that on any of the spotlight winners now or past (I've into the spotlight backlog); or if they were, they were again so well-hidden as to functionally not exist.           Introduce a standard credit feature that automatically links back to the relevent users (see toyhouse)

Require that at least x% of the page have been created by the owner where x is some number I lack the experience to determine, probably somewhere between 30 and 60. Without this rule, "pet spotlight" is just "which pet did someone else work really hard to make nice".           Alternatively (or in addition), Award all contributing players a trophy for having contributed to a spotlight pet. Make these trophies independent, linking back to the pet in question and/or the news post hosting the archive. Works perfectly with the standardised credit feature.           Alternatively alternatively, create an "original work" spotlight exclusively for pets whose owners have personally contributed a significant quantity of the profile content.

This is already a feature. You go to the Spotlight Page (you can navigate there from your main pets page) and select which pets you want to have the nomination button visible on.

To be fair though - I think we should just be able to nominate our own pets too at this point. My one winning pet was in the queue for so so so so long (they were approved but since the whole system is random, it took forever to actually 'win').

Great, I'll remove that from my post.

I'm definitely in favor of making this whole thing more streamlined and effective and love some of those suggestions you've made (and also bless you for making it very clear and categorized for easier reading) :)

I'm glad you think so! The organisation is better for everyone, including me as I'm writing it.

I've noticed the "require owners to have contributed x%" is particularly unpopular, and I think clarifications on exactly what the pet spotlight is and isn't supposed to be will help everyone form an opinion there (that is, is it just "this is a great pet" or "this player worked really hard on their pet") but I also think if they go the categorisation route, adding an "original" category for players who have contributed x% might be a good idea.

I should add that to my post for completion's sake actually. Only just thought of it as I re-read a few posts.

That clears up a lot, thanks! However, on this:

I am surprised. Reading this and other threads, it seemed the pet spotlight is too full of valid pets and with an ever-increasing backlog, the site needed a way to feature more than just seven pets per week.

We do have a good number but I think if we were to do multiple categories that are selected regularly, it would burn through TOO many. I think the seven pets a week has actually helped as it used to be weekdays only before and then every other day before that!

^ This is of course just my opinion as a judge. I personally wouldn't mind doing something similar as a special thing once in a while, but a constant drain would mean the queue would be empty.

My pets are important to me and so is the spotlight. I buy code and I pay for stories tho have written several of mine; I also have had several pets recolored and some I also worked on myself, and have bought custom overlays. A very few I have paid for the profile. However, I edit everything and as such I have spent literally thousands of hours on my pets choosing placement, backgrounds, colors, text, animations, whatever. And with the profiles breaking last year my heart broke too as I had to re-do many of my profiles. I resent anyone saying that just because I paid for parts of my profiles that I haven't done anything myself. I also resent anyone saying that if anyone paid for their profile that it matters that they didn't do it themselves. So freaking what? There are amazing talented incredible people on this site and why shouldn't anyone avail themselves of their abilities for their pets if they so choose? No one should be penalized in any way for any reason in regards to this. Its ridiculous. Esp because it is obvious that pet profiles have won all across the spectrum of complexity and of sp or csc spent or not.

I have a pet that I think is in the queue but I really have no idea. Its been there forever, if it really is. I haven't received a rejection in any case.

I think pets get kicked out of the queue if you change their coding, but I don't know if this includes adding things to the TC?

Really, the thing that would encourage me to make more of my pets spotlight ready is some idea of what's going on. Is my pet really in the queue? What happens when a pet is rejected? What happens if I change the code, even a little, like fixing a typo, does it restart the whole process? Right now the spotlight feels like a big giant black hole and its totally discouraging.

Idk if that's too hard to code because I'm basically ignorant about it but,,,

wouldn't be cool if we had "categories" or at least a "theme" that other people could apply to? So you guys can announce more than one pet a day (like 1 winner is for the main spotlight, 1 winner is for a themed, etc)

Sorry i'm bad communicating, english is not my first language so I may get confused with the words sjbsgvdss

I love LOVE this idea, I like looking at people's pets and nominating them anyway, so this would only make that hobby easier and would give me better access to see people's hard work, not just the winners, but everyone!

Also:

There's two parts to this, and I love them both! One, being able to remove a pet's trophy would solve the issue of people not wanting to adopt (or adopt out) pets that have already one, preventing the pet from getting fresh life and love (I know, it's just pixels, NOT THE POINT). And two, being able to resubmit a previous winner would be awesome.

I know there are pets of mine that won a couple years ago that I've given new profiles, new stories, or commissioned new art for, and even though it's the same pet, they feel completely evolved and new. Having a 2 year cool-down seems fair to me, and even requiring a write-up or screenshots to show how the pet has evolved and changed since its initial win seems like a good way of making sure people aren't just resummiting the same pet with minimal changes after each win.

I realize not everyone on site is as invested in the pet spotlight as others, but since the site has been going now for as long as it has, I have to wonder if allowing old winners to be revised and given the opportunity to win again might draw more older users into the spotlight who have been discouraged by things like profiles breaking and coding changes. Just food for thought!

I have always found it difficult to nominate pets that I like unless they have an active nominate button on the page. Maybe there could be a way to let everyone know how to nominate each and every pet so more would be in the pool to draw from.

One thing that is difficult about resubmitting a pet that has already won is proving the previous win. A lot of the old links go to pets with broken/no profile so even them submitting the "proof" really doesn't do much if we don't have the proof that one won. And it doesn't happen often but we have had a handful of people try and submit content that already won on another pet. It really would have to be non retro and there would have to be a way to store a copy of the old win. It would be a lovely idea though!

I do think a page where nomination ready pets could be displayed would be nice! Kinda like we have done for contest entries.

The nomination button will always show up if the pet has been marked as done on the spotlight page. You can see what pets you have marked as done here