I like a good revamp but do not like this user picked winners. With almost every anything that has been User pick a winner it has always gone to the more popular players, even when it was "anonymous" (by anonymous I mean it was posted all over the forums anyway) it was still won by the -in crowd-

I don't think this is perfect, but it's definitely a great step forward, with lots of potential.

To see the queue of nominated pets would be beneficial, and a voting system might add more depth to the spotlight, especially with the added incentive of reward (though not sure about sP - perhaps an achievement based reward, or an item?). With the additional staff queue to allow for monitoring, especially with the checkbox to give users an understanding of what they can work on or change, also sounds great. The downside however, might be the opportunities for rigging or favouritism, as mentioned, but I don't see any ways of adding user-anonymity to pet profiles. Perhaps it could be trialled for a month to see how effective it might be?

I think it would give users the chance to interact more with the spotlight and add an element of 'community' to this aspect of the site.

not a fan of this change in general, i much preferred it to be one person nominates and the rest is handled through staff

I think that would be beneficial only if those users were actually hired as staff and not the pet council that has been suggested.

I think hiding the pet/user name is helpful to avoid a popularity contest, but there is still that risk since the people who enter are likely going to show their friends, hey look I entered pet spotlight come like my pet! And now that getting through the first round is user based, most will likely put links in their siggy or put up a banner ad to attract people to like their entry. Hopefully people will be honest and really only 'like' the ones they really like. :/

On the other hand though I am excited to see this go more interactive. I've not had any involvement with the feature at all. It will be cool to see the profiles that are up for spotlight and give the 'like' feature on petpages more of a purpose. I feel like being involved that way might actually help motivate people to enter. ^_^

Here's hoping it's a successful experiment.

(In the way of incentives to go vote for pets - may I suggest achs with forum titles. C:)

Oh goody. Visions of spamming "spare a vote" type posts everywhere like the neopets beauty contest are whirling through my head right now. Speaking as the biased ugly girl, I so freaking HATE beauty contest crap. Please tell me this won't turn into that. :/

I'd like to see wins expire (or have the ability to expire) after 6 months to a year (you'd have to disable nominations on a past winner once the time is up, then enable them again, in order for sucha change to take effect).

Then, I'd probably participate (or at least consider it). As it stands now though I move my names around too damn much and after a year I'd have more than a handful of unrelated trophies and that would annoy the crap out of me.

Otherwise I have no input for this really, other than interesting. [edit] Edit to add actually hell no to downvoting, please and thank you??

Users can be nasty/disheartening/assholish enough on the news updates for spotlight winners that aren't up to a particular persons "standards"... I'd really really hate to see what happens to every single pet without art/with a plain profile/fanpets/concepts that're not something others personally find appealing ... just no, please don't allow downvoting.

LOL RIGHT? I think the downvotes are meant to be for if the pet isn't following spotlight rules, etc, but yea I can def see people using this in other ways, which is sad c_c

I'm really concerned about giving users the power to down vote pets. It seems really unnecessary and slightly cruel.

Removing names is not going to help, in particular with fan pets.

- Thanks for the ping bb. <3 Definitely wanted to see this. :)

I have to say I'm not entirely sure about the user-based voting part but I am definitely all for the check boxes when rejected. I've seen time after time people get rejected, myself included, inquire in the forums as to why and there not be any reason for the rejection that could be seen and its super frustrating when we don't know what we're doing wrong.

has a really great idea though: hiding the pet name/user name makes it much less of a "popularity" contest and it gives people more of a fair chance at being judged fairly baed on talent rather than "Hey Sexy is my friend and I want her to win so I don't care f its a bad story, I'm going to vote for her anyways!" Make sense?

The rewards part...maybe instead of an sP based reward, do achievements? And if your each a certain tier in voting, along with the achievement you get a pet-themed item? or a Magical Keepsake Box/Multi-Compartment Keepsake Box?

Just some ideas to think over. c:

I would love this new system. I know my pets are not spotlight ready and it would be a great help if I got constructive input on how to improve them. It also sounds like fun, to help judge the pets who are "contestants".

Oh of course! Can also use the PS ping group to your advantage, since a lot of users rely on it for feedback on their pets and what not.

Maybe have users vote on the current selection in the queue. One vote per user, cannot vote for your own pet if that pet is in the queue. If say one pet gets x amount of votes within say a week, they get put into a smaller queue that gets picked for the coming week?

Yeah, I really kind of went "oh....." when I read about users voting. I totally understand giving the staff a bit of a break, but as other people have said, this is going to go hardcore into the popularity contest realm (and I'm not really sure why that isn't obvious?) I understand a revamp, and I'm not sure that I have a brilliant alternative suggestion, but I have to agree that users up voting and down voting isn't the best way to go.

And hiding the name/username is a good idea, buuuut, anyone that is active in the pet area of the site is likely to have seen spotlight nominee before. There's several people that I can tell that their pets are their own just by looking at them - which I love, but for this suggestion, is kind of counterproductive.

Why not have maybe 10 pets (randomly chosen) for 2 days be voted on. Users can use the dropdown list to "deny" a pet that doesn't meet the criteria, but other than that, they can upvote only their favorite of the 10. Then, after that winner has been chosen, it gets replaced by another randomly chosen pet to join the circle of 10. (Plus any pets that get flagged as being denied due to not being finished). So that there is always 10 in rotation, but it's not as much of a popularity contest.

Unfortunately, with user votes being taken into account, popularity will most likely win over every other aspect. On the upside, however, this community seems to favor genuine creativity over recycled ideas, so I'm sure we will see many worthy pets in the spotlight. We won't know for sure how well these changes will work out until they've been implemented for a while, so I'm all for seeing what comes with these changes. :)

Users vote and downvote?

No thank you, if it turns into a popularity contest, my Pets go out of the Spotlight again. :) And just like said. I can already see the "VOTE FOR MY PET" threads popping up... especially with CSC rewards added.

Knowing reasond for being rejected though is a good idea.

OH!

Also, the other problem I see with users being able to vote is bribes. Lets face it, bribing exists and people could easily be bribed into voting.

Okay that's all. :x

If downvoting is supposed to be like "this is something I found wrong with the profile" then it needs to be called "leaving a critique" for the pet, as in something that should be fixed to better the presentation. Downvoting is a negative term and there's already enough negativity with the spotlight due to clashes of what one user verses another finds appealing-- it doesn't need this on top of it.

Critiquing though, offers help and is stuff that can be corrected. Even then, it needs to be something that either a) doesn't count against the pet or b) can be removed.

Otherwise inb4 "+1 critque: your ideas are bad and you should feel bad".

Idea - Why not to give randomly referral points instead of sp? I see this as a social feature so it would be nice to get a social-related currency too..

But I'm here for achievements instead of sp too! like suggested.