Personally I would send in a ticket and have staff review the pet. After all, they are the ones that have final say on the spotlight queue.

I know you are one of many that work so hard on pets for spotlight, but I think some more clarification on rules and what's allowed should be front and center.

Something I want to see is that when the pet is approved, the profile is frozen. Taking a snapshot of the pet at the moment its sent into the queue, rather than showcasing the pet now.

About two months ago, we had a delightful winner who sadly broke the rules of the pet spotlight, because the pet species/color no longer matched the story. Had this been in motion, it would probably have been better.

I think that's mentioned in the OP, under things that will not be implemented.

I'm Jared 19 and I do not know how to read. Thanks :D

One thing I've never quite liked is how a pet gets into the spotlight queue in the first place. I think that this is something that should be reworked, maybe even completely.

With this "nomination" thing, a user has very little control over whether their own pet gets into the queue or not. It seems like you have to campaign for nominations, or ask your friends to do it, both of which to me goes against the spirit of the "spotlight". It also leaves you open to being nominated when you're not ready. Yes, pets are usually defaulted to not being ready for nomination, but users may switch that on and off as they work on the profile coding and getting everything ready.

If the spotlight is not a competition - which it doesn't seem like it is - then nominations should not be a thing. Users should have full control over when their pet is submitted. If nominations were intended to be used as a sort of "pre-screening" and to help with the minimal staff issue, then it's pretty clear that's not effective.

The counterargument to this that I can see is that letting users decide when to submit a pet may lead to the queue being gummed up with pets that don't even have profiles at all. But maybe something can be written into the coding of 2.0 that prevents this from happening, like an auto-check/rejection system that looks for coding, writing, TC, etc. If your pet is missing X things, then they cannot be submitted.

That will probably also be easier to figure out when the pet profiles are revamped.

Until last night, I agreed with this; I was fully behind self-nominations, - but it's true that user nominations are a first layer of filtering. While the most recent winner proved that it wasn't foolproof, I'm not as keen to get rid of nominations as I was earlier in the thread.

You can adjust a setting so that your pet can't be nominated. https://subeta.net/spotlight.php?view=pets

It also makes it clear that (a) things can be nominated that shouldn't, and (b) staff may be using nominations as a sort of filtering device more than they should.

I addressed that in my post.

The problem wasn't that the pet wasn't ready for spotlight. There are pets who won with less than this in the past. This isn't the most incomplete pet ever, and indeed had all minimum components to win. It has a profile that wasn't the default one, a treasure chest, a fitting minion, and enough text to be considered a story;

The problem was that the pet was racist as hell (AND BROKE ACTUAL SITE RULES), and staff has pointed out that they did indeed drop the ball on that. Nominations means that there is two layers of filtering, rather than just one.

Double filtering is better than single filtering.

D'oh, I glanced right over that ._. my bad!

Saying that the system should remain the same because "look at what sort of stuff gets through as it is" doesn't make any sense.

If things are getting through that shouldn't get through, that is a clear indication that something needs to change. The nomination system is not working. It is not a filter, and it should not be used as such.

The problem wasn't that the pet was nominated, the problem was that it was in the winner's queue.

Nominations are making it that less pets are there for staff to check, and thus, errors like this are less likely to happen. What happened cannot be blamed on the nomination system.

Hell, at this point, I'd want more nominations, so that we're sure than more than one person on staff looks at the pet. I'd rather lose the "please don't ask for nominations" rule and make sure that more than one pair of eyes look at the pet before it makes it to staff - this would avoid staff dropping the ball like they did last night. Staff made a mistake and admitted it - I think that the next step is to correct it so that pets that break official site rules do not make to the winner's queue again

The more people validate a nomination, the better. Nominations should 100% stay.

It's very clear that we don't see eye to eye on this.

You have your reasons for wanting it to remain, and I have mine for wanting it to be changed, and that is fine.

I would like to point out that my suggestion is for the broader scheme and was not about last night's winner in particular, who was not brought up by me (although they were the impetus to get me to finally address something that's bothered me for a while).

I think we can both agree that there should be an overhaul of the system.

I will not respond to further @'s about this.

Nominations are just fine as they are. They serve as a first-layer form of peer review, and without them, I don't see how pets would otherwise get spotlight-- would we expect staff to just find pets they like and pick them? That's incredibly unreasonable, for it's too much time and effort on their shoulders that they can spend doing other things, and the userbase is far larger than the staff pool.

The current user nomination-->staff review-->winner's queue system is perfectly fine. It's gotten better in recent years due to the addition of an official feedback system for any pets who are kicked out of the queue, too. (I also agree with on the notion of "make it allowed to ask for nominations"; we can peer-review each others' profiles, push each others' profiles into that first state of staff review, it's all good. It's progress.)

Current events are not a matter of the whole system requiring a revamp, but instead just closer attention being required in the review step. That's it. Everything is already streamlined just great. Closer attention in staff review, with the possibility of multiple staff members looking over the same pets for content and quality assurance, would neatly address the issue at hand here. Multiple pairs of eyes mean that more details will be noticed, and that potentially-rulebreaking pets are far less likely to get through to the winners' queue. This is, of course, up to question due to current staff capabilities and concerns, but I feel like it's the ideal answer in the long run.

Seems like Written's idea is just to forego nominations altogether and to queue whatever we feel are ready, meaning that staff would have to filter out a lot more stuff - and it scares me. We've seen the worst than can go through WITH the nomination system, I dread to see what could go through if there isn't a peer review first.

i don't have very strong feelings either way on nominations but i think the current system is kinda unfriendly towards people who would rather keep to themselves? asking for nominations outright isn't allowed so you either ask friends off-site or post your pet enough times hoping someone will nominate. and both options are kinda : / for ppl who like....... don't wanna socialise

quoting this from the first post listed suggestions bc i rly rly like this idea since i feel like it keeps the preliminary screening offered by nominations while also making it feel less like a popularity contest

i feel like i might have already posted this before and if i did i'm sorry asdfghjkl i haven't slept in like 2 days

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alternatively, just get rid of the 'no asking for nominations' rule and let people make threads asking for nominations. like let's be real that's basically what people are already doing when asking if their pets are spotlight ready lmao

Just confirming that this at least was a thing. This happened years ago before we had official rejection reasons. I think it happened in tickets or the forums or something, but I don't quite remember. I was told it was okay to have the story on-site but that staff would never allow it to win because they didn't want it on the front page.

I don't know if that's a thing that happens anymore, but I would rather stories that staff don't want to "promote" just not be allowed at all instead.

Ooh, so you didn't get a clear reason why it was rejected?

That really sucks. Glad you got clarification through the ticket system though.

I actually had to do that with a few of my pets. Submit a ticket to either confirm it was appropriate or to clarify rejection reasons.

Does this recent debacle mean that staff might have to hire some more spotlight proofreaders? Because I don't think the pandemic is going to lighten up for the forseeable future..... so the staff members who are essential workers likely won't be available for a while.

I feel as though it's difficult to hit the "not appropriate for Subeta" angle unless you're really trying to, given what the site has on it and what themes it's comfortable tackling.

A general adherence to PG13-level content has served me well, personally-- there's more tolerance for violence than sexuality, but highly detailed gore might be pushing it, etc. Some more mature themes are likely to get refused as well (for example, things like the sexualization of minors, sexual violence, and discussion thereof those things tend to never be permitted), and anything hateful/in line with hate speech (such as racist themes) is explicitly against rules. This is just observation from someone who's been here forever and has been creating pet profiles since before the Pet Spotlight existed; I'm not staff or anything.

It would be useful for everyone if what was explicitly stepping over the line, rather than having to guess based on general site tone/themes and site rules. It's relevant given recent events; better definition of sensitive topics and how they should be handled here could really help.