You may remember our first announcement on this. If you haven't, or need a refresher, read it here: The Future of Pet Profiles We know it's been a while since that announcement, so we wanted to give a quick update on the status of this project, as well as a chance to address your questions and concerns.

So far, the initial groundwork has been completed. This means the basic "skeleton" of the system is in place. The new framework allows for some exciting new features:

• Profiles will be modular, which means you'll be able to reorder and even remove various profile sections. For instance, you could rearrange the sections to have the Minion come after the pet's basic information. Or, you could easily remove the stats section if you don't want it to be visible, without needing to resort to CSS.
• This modularity will allow us to introduce new types of profile sections in addition to the ones that currently exist.
• Profile CSS will be entered separately into its own section. This will make things not just easier to edit, but also increase the character limit for profile CSS.
• Since each section will have its own, separate, character limit, the amount of custom content you can fit onto a single profile will increase significantly.

We've finished the code for representing and displaying profiles, as well as adding and removing profile sections.

We've also completed the code that will transition existing profiles into the new system in "legacy mode". What this means is that the profile will be preserved as-is but cannot be edited - so it's perfect for completed pets and spotlight winners where you want to preserve the profile as-is and have no desire to edit it further. The conversion is a one-click process to make it as easy as possible. UPDATE: After discussing some good points brought up in this topic, we've decided to allow editing Legacy Mode profiles. We are still discussing the details of how this will work, but we agree there are good enough reasons to avoid locking you into Legacy Mode like that.

For unfinished profiles that you still want to edit, you won't need to start from scratch in the new system. We will have a guide on how to convert them to the new system with as little work as possible. The process will go something like:

1. Separate the CSS from the rest of the code.
2. Paste CSS into one text box.
3. Paste rest of the code in another text box.
4. Hopefully our system will be able to automagically do the rest and you are done.

We will be providing staff assistance with any help you need making tweaks during the transition period.

Please feel free to post any questions, comments or concerns you may have in this thread! Staff will be watching and we'll do our best to address whatever we can.

The OP didn't say much about this because we don't have much work done on it yet. (We've been focusing on making the infrastructure robust) However, we do have a solid plan in place for the edit screen. There will be an entirely new edit page that's a lot more sophisticated than the current one.

Our current (old) system just gives you a single text box, and the preview option was added only recently.

The new system will be more similar to how user profiles are set up: A live preview where you can add and remove sections, as well as drag-n-drop to reorder them. In addition, you'll have the ability to toggle CSS in the preview (since we realize this causes problems with the user profile preview)

This is about as much as I feel comfortable saying for now. When we have more progress on this, I'll be sure to post an update and maybe include some screenshots to visually show what we mean :)

No ETA yet, I'm afraid. We understand the desire for ETAs and we wish we could give them, but it's very hard to predict a timeline for such a large and complex project, and we'd rather not promise a deadline we can't keep.

You will be able to start over whenever you wish. You'll also be able to follow our guide to convert them to a profile in the new system while still preserving whatever is possible to preserve without breaking compatibility. The only thing that won't be allowed is going back to Legacy Mode after a profile has been converted to the new system.

Well... Surprisingly, I think profiles being "basic" versus "complicated" won't matter much for how well they convert to the new system.

I've tested Legacy Mode on some of my own pets that also have some "complicated and unconventional code", and it's worked without issue so far :) As long as your code is well-formed, transitioning straight to Legacy Mode should have no issues.

Transitioning to the new system is necessarily more involved, but I see no reason for complicated code to break it more than simpler code. As long as the CSS is valid, it should work the same.

The main issue I can think of is if it relies on parts of the page HTML that the new system will not have. For example, the new system won't have the same header, navigation bar, sidebar and footer. So if you had CSS that relies on styling the postcards in the header, that won't work anymore and you'll need to find another way to do it. The good news is that the new system is meant to eliminate the need for such workarounds.

(Personally, whenever I applied CSS to header elements in my profiles, it was because I wanted something at the top of the page but I couldn't put it there. In the new system, you'll be allowed to just add a profile section and drag it to the top of the page. So I think, overall, it will eliminate the need for a lot of hack-y workarounds since you'll have more control over the page HTML itself, if that makes sense.)

This is a good point that we hadn't thought of, and we'll discuss if there is something we can do about that. Thanks for bringing it up! :)

(Pinging as well since you expressed similar sentiments.)

Quick Update! After discussing some good points brought up in this topic, we've decided to allow editing Legacy Mode profiles. We are still discussing the details of how this will work, but we agree there are good enough reasons to avoid locking you into Legacy Mode like that.

The OP has been edited to reflect this new info.

Legacy Mode is meant to preserve them as-is, so no, it won't make changes to your profiles at all.

It's okay to be nervous! Big changes are ahead and we are nervous about it too. But definitely keep telling us your needs and concerns because we really do want to make it as painless as possible. <3

It is so early in the process that we haven't gotten that far yet. But rest assured that Bug and I will be working closely with other staff to work out what will happen in regards to spotlight. In the past, we have always tried to assist users with big transitions like this. This change will be no different. For now we are allowing user discussion regarding the pet spotlight and some possible changes that everyone would like to see. Once we get closer to changing the system, we will know more about how this will affect the queue and the pets in there. Below is the board for anyone wanting to take a look and/or post!

Pet Spotlight Suggestions

As has mentioned in the past, this is due to Cloudflare's security system getting triggered. The CAPTCHA happens before your input even reaches our servers at all. Thus, it's unclear whether the new system will also have this problem. However, since it seems to correlate with submitting long profiles, it's likely the new system will mitigate this by allowing you to split up your profile content into multiple, smaller sections.

You'll be allowed multiple description sections. Just having one extra section will double the amount of space available, so space should hopefully no longer be an issue! Realistically there needs to be a limit, but what the limit should be will become clearer after initial testing and usage statistics.

Yes! I do want to clarify that while this system is also modular, it's not going to be a user profiles clone. We learned a lot from user profiles, and here, we want to expand on the best parts of user profiles while learning from its mistakes.

I also wanted to offer reassurance that we'll beta test it before it's released to everyone. We want this to go smoothly as much as you do, and we're putting a lot of thought and effort into ensuring it goes as smoothly as possible. :)

We won't be allowing custom JavaScript, because it poses a huge security risk.

It is likely that Bootstrap's JS/CSS will be included on the page by default, to power the responsive parts of the default layout. So, in theory, I think you could get some JS things to work by building divs with Bootstrap's classes. However, I advise profile coders to be wary of relying on this dependency. If a new Bootstrap version comes out with changes that break compatibility, and we update the page to include the newer version, then your code will break if it's still relying on the older version of Bootstrap.

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One thing we've done in the past is create sCode tags powered by scripts; for example, the [tt]spoiler[/tt] tag uses JavaScript to open and close the spoiler. That's a relatively safe way to give users the ability to format things in a way that requires scripts. I'd be open to adding things like toggleable tabs to sCode in the future, but not as an open-ended thing. I love this option because, in addition to being secure, it also puts the burden of maintenance on us rather than you. That is: say you are using sCode that outputs toggleable tabs based on Bootstrap, and we want to update the version of Bootstrap we use. We can make sure to update the sCode's output at the same time, so you never need to worry about updating anything on your end.

You'll be able to toggle the CSS when editing.

(I just wanted to clarify we may not use Bootstrap. I don't want anyone to think we are promising that! And whatever we do use to power the layout, I will strongly discourage relying too heavily on it, for the reasons I explained in my last post - that is, because these are dependencies you will have no control over. We will make this clear in the editor.)