Hey everyone! We're trying something new with the Pet Spotlight, and we need your help to test it.

The Problem

The spotlight queue has gotten really long, with some of you have been waiting years for your pet to be reviewed. That's not fair to anyone, and it's not sustainable. I want to fix that!

The Idea

Instead of staff being the only ones who review pets, we're opening it up to the community. You can sign up as a Spotlight Judge and help review nominated pets. Esmerelda — yes, that Esmerelda — is running the show.

How It Works

For Judges

• Visit the Pet Spotlight and click "Review Pets"
• Click "Become a Spotlight Judge" to opt in
• You'll be shown pets to review — up to 5 per day
• For each pet, you check off criteria:
  • Visual Design
  • Story / Character
  • Treasure Chest (does it fit the vibe?)
  • Minion (does it fit the theme?)
  • Name
  • Completeness
• Give an overall star rating (1-5)
• Leave optional written feedback for the owner
• Earn 50,000 sP per review
• Work toward four new Spotlight Judge achievements

For Pet Owners

• Your pet gets reviewed by multiple community members
• You'll receive detailed feedback on what's working and what could be improved — delivered personally by Esmerelda (she has opinions)
• Pets that pass community review go straight into the winner queue

The Rules

• You can't review your own pets
• You can't review your friends' pets
• Your reviews build a reputation score over time — reviewers whose scores align with the consensus gain more influence
• Pets need agreement from multiple reviewers to pass or fail (no one person decides)

This Is a Pilot

I'm starting with just 5 pets from the existing queue. This is a test run to make sure the system works and feels fair before we open it up to everyone.

We will honor the results. Whatever the community decides for these 5 pets, that's what happens.

We Want Your Feedback

After you've tried it — whether as a judge or a pet owner — please reply to this thread and tell me:

• Was the review process clear and easy to follow?
• Did the criteria make sense?
• Did the feedback feel useful (for owners)?
• Was the sP reward fair?
• What would you change?

Your feedback will directly shape the final version of this feature.

What's Next

If the pilot goes well, I'm planning some improvements and changes to the system:

• Seasonal themed spotlight competitions tied to holidays (Morostide, Luminaire, etc.)
• Top 3 seasonal winners with special trophies
• More rewards for active judges (reactions, avatar borders)
• Opening the full queue to community review
• Potentially moving back to more winners being drawn more frequently (we've got over 300 pets waiting to be judged!)

Head over to the Pet Spotlight to check it out!

this is why i'm not asking everyone to do this — if giving rating feedback isn't your thing, that's completely okay! pet rating isn't for everybody and there's zero pressure here.

the star ratings matter though, because they're the backbone of the reputation system i'm building behind the scenes. if you're rating every pet a 1 when other users are giving them 4s and 5s, the system starts trusting your ratings less and less — and eventually it'll pull your rating ability altogether.

that kind of automated moderation is what's going to make this sustainable long-term without me having to manually babysit everything.

also! pushing a fix right now for the pets-not-in-review issue. so many of you absolutely flooded the system that a few pets got promoted straight to the main queue ahead of schedule — and i said i'd respect the outcomes, so those are staying. but i'm going to move a few more pets in and bump that threshold up by... a lot... while we're still testing.

seriously though, thank you all for jumping in so fast to help test this. 🙏

Don't start redoing them! I'm hoping to get them closer in alignment today, and I'm going to link to the Kumos profiles as well (so that you can see them there - I think they're basically right) and then get back to making the legacy ones match how they're supposed to.

I removed over 10,000 lines of CSS from Legacy that weren't needed on most pages, but created cascading issues for the pet profiles, that you've all been dealing with for 10+ years. Things you just shouldn't have needed to do, and I think I can nudge things back to how they're supposed to work.

My real hope is that you shouldn't need to modify anything, and I should know for sure in the next day or two 🤞

I would really like that too! This is very in the weeds:

It's been a couple of weird things, so we're importing a new library (Tailwind 6) which sets some defaults that we wouldn't have, like making all of the images block instead of inline - which is why there are weird image issues around the site. In most cases this is a really sensible default, but adding it to a site that was doing it the old way for 20 years obviously... broke a bunch of things.

So my choice is: A: Override that, make images inline again (which is not the default in most browsers in 2026) B: Run around our 400+ pages and fix images to look better set to block

I will probably do A in most cases 😅 which will also mean fixes to pages like the pet proflies.

There is an achievement, and it's mentioned in the post (it's just not created until we are out of a trial phase / decide to move forward) The sP is because this is time consuming (hence why there are 200+ pets in the queue). I'm pretty okay with it being a way to earn sP, because it's beneficial to the community. If you aren't helpful your reputation score will go down and you will lose the ability to rate pets.

I've just pushed up:

1. Links to the Kumos proflie as well, which for now is very accurate
2. Tweaked some of those tailwind defaults to get us closer to how they're supposed to look

And I'm making a few more tweaks to explain the reputation system and the rating a little more. Thanks for the feedback so far everyone!

To be clear, this is a bug and is being resolved - it's using a lot of assumptions of how I feel like this will work once we were to launch it more broadly (and people don't make it part of their "daily flow" on Subeta) and not for people rushing to test it as a trial because its' on the front page. I'm pushing up fixes for the limits so that the pets stay in the queue longer.

Ahhh, oh no! I think it just hasn't posted news correctly but has been silently making winners. I'm going to roll those back, anyone who didn't get a news post, and fix it. I'm so sorry :(!