Thanks for this thread! There's one thing I want to say real quick before the discussion gets rolling:

If this change has you happy and excited about your pets, great! If you're feeling lukewarm or outright upset about this change - that's also valid, and you're allowed to express that. You don't need to apologize for how you feel.

I'd really like if we can respect those who are upset by this change by refraining from the urge to keep debating it, and also refraining from telling those people how they should or should not feel. Both sides of this debate have put forth very valid points: there are merits to names being unique, such as the way it could inspire creativity, and how it could be a source of pride. The decision made today doesn't invalidate those points, nor does it mean that you are "in the wrong" if you feel upset about the decision made. Ultimately, we did what we truly feel is best for the future of Subeta, and we regret that no decision could've been ideal for everyone.

Yes, only pets created prior to this change will have legacy names, and this will not be changed. This is because the purpose of a legacy name is to honor the potential time, effort, and resources spent in obtaining those names when they were still unique and thus could be quite difficult to get.

To clarify what happened to news comments: they were not deleted! They still exist, and will be back as soon as we can manage it. They are just no longer being displayed right now, because doing so was causing site lag, an issue we own is entirely on us. We made the call to hide comments on that page before the site lag got unbearable.

There was no other reason for disabling or hiding the comments, and we are currently working on getting them up on new.subeta.net with newer, more efficient code that will allow you to view and comment again without this problem. (I can vouch that has already began work on this, though we can't estimate when this will be done.)

Yes, pet friends will be updated.

the news post is back!

Rah was completely involved in the decision making process, once I said that we just had to do it. She was particularly concerned that this would be an issue -- but I want to be really clear that I made the decision to just push forward with a plan, instead of involving more time of going back and forth.

Having a poll and more input could have only made the process longer, and worse. If we'd made a poll and the results were 52% keep unique names, what do you think we should have done? Knowing that this change sets us up for new users (who couldn't participate in the poll, obviously) and bringing back users who've left over the years. A poll would have been useful input as a single piece of information, but if the results were public and we did something that wasn't the majority, there'd be even more upset users. I'm all for (and you'll be seeing more things like the CW council in the future, to get critical user feedback) getting input from users, but at the end of the day the decision is mine and I have to make it. I've honestly been really bad at this over and years and waffle on things, and I'm trying to get better ;)

We had to just do it, and we came up with a plan that (I think) serves everyone involved, and sets us up for a great future. I'm not sure what more user input or a poll would have helped if this was the likely outcome.

80 pets!!

We're adding a way to remove the legacy feature entirely from your pets, if that's what you'd like. Otherwise, the custom CSS is the best option :(

We're going to be doing a LOT of work on pet profiles soon (don't panic -- we'll have a way to keep your current ones :)) and will keep in mind being able to keep text blocks like that as something that you can toggle on/off.

y/y/y!!

We're wrapping up the bug fixes for the wardrobe (HAIR. WHY.) and making sure it has all of the features people expect (and some new ones!) and then we'll send out a newsletter with all of those updates :D

I had addressed this previously but I can see how my post wasn't clear enough! So let me clarify some things:

1. That notice is for the pet's name, not their legacy name.
2. If the name is "disallowed" due to something like invalid characters, periods, etc - you can file a ticket to get a free name change. Again, this is a change for the pet's name, not their legacy name. As an aside, this was never meant to punish users and you don't get a warning or anything if this happens. The reason this was done is because certain site features do not function correctly with certain pet names. There is also no penalty if you never make a ticket, and choose to keep the grandfathered name - you will have to accept however that certain site features may not work properly with your pet and that those bugs will not be fixed. (For example, in the case of periods, it breaks the pet profile URL that contains the pet name, because files beginning with a period are hidden files in Linux and are web server forbids public access to them. Pet names beginning with a period trigger this rule.)
3. Staff will only clear legacy names in the case of it breaking site rules regarding bad words, extreme vulgarity, etc things like that. This is an actual violation of site rules and I hope you understand why we need to remove names like this from the site when they are caught.

I hope that addresses your concerns. Thanks for reaching out about this.

I'm not sure if you actually want an answer, or if you just wanted to vent (which is totally fine too!) but either way, I want to answer your concerns, in case it helps you feel better, and for anyone else who might have the same concerns:

1. This feature was tested before release, and the release went very smoothly. There were a few issues with displays and broken links immediately following release, but they were quickly fixed, and there were no glitches that modified pet data in unexpected ways.

2. So far, people have been renaming pets to other pets with the same name, and it's been working smoothly in all cases. There have already been hundreds of name changes with no issues. There's just no reason to believe that it is broken in any way.

3. In the worst case scenario that something like this does happen, we would immediately take the site down and restore data from our database backups. After the wardrobe items incident, we promised to keep more regular and reliable backups, and we have kept that promise. I just double-checked with five minutes ago that the backups we set up are still running, and they are.

4. The way non-unique names work just means that two pets can have the same name. At no point in the code does this involve any kind of delete operation. With the wardrobe, the feature we were working on was deleting items from a specific user's wardrobe, so there was an intentional delete operation that we just... messed up badly. But with the pets, we don't delete pets anywhere. This feature only modifies the pet's name, so if we did mess them one up badly too, the worst that might happen is that it changes your pet's name to something wrong. Again, in such a case where, say, every pet's name gets set to a blank name or something, we would take the site down and restore the data from backups.

Again, I understand if the trust in us has been broken and can't be restored for you. It's your right to decide that. But I hope the above points might help to reassure you. If you have other questions or concerns about any of this, feel free to ask and we'll do our best to address them. :)

No worries! I'm glad you reached out so I could clarify. My original wording was a little confusing honestly, because I just said the word "name", and pets kinda have two different types of names now, and then like "disallowed" was a little ambiguous too.

We're working on help pages to explain the feature, but it is still once per pet, per account for the gold account perk.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, I was very happy when the forum posts were originally linked! Not everyone uses the forums, and might not know to look here for info. Thanks for the feedback - I edited the link to the FAQ back into the news post.

Aww, yay <3 I can't say too much about this topic at this point of time, but yes... Pet profiles v2 is on the map!

Is this what you are looking for?

Could you link me to the bug report, because I can't seem to find it? We had an older bug report on this but the issue was resolved. It seems like the issue wasn't actually resolved though, maybe can find that topic and reopen it? (TY DESTINY)

[edit] Testing...

[edit] For those just seeing this now - It's been fixed!

Hey so actually - this issue is now resolved. It wasn't a problem with a code, it was something... weird? The sCode processor was stuck on an older version, but we've just resolved this now.

As usual - older forum posts, comments etc may take up to a few hours to update on their own due to caching, but you can speed it up by clicking edit and save (no changes need to be made) this will force it to process the text again and update.