Yeah, if they've been there for months, or a year, this way of doing it doesn't work. At all.

It's like...the user admins just skipped over "too complicated" tickets and left them to rot for months.

I do not like this mentality of "oh, we don't know what it is about, but we're going to wait a little - maybe in the next months someone else will do it"

I also dislike that mentality.

And the fact that staff indicated that the pet spotlight was in need of updates/changing a whopping 14 months ago and all they have actually implemented in that time is increase the number of winners per week, which clearly has not helped at all with regard to those of us with pets in the queue for an extended period of time.

I am also not a fan of the practice of getting players to do the jobs of staff, but at this point, I'd be happy to see the proposed plan on allowing players to at least vote yes for worthy pets.

We haven't even gotten an alert to tell us if our pets were booted, which seems like it should be rather simple to implement (considering the other things that have been implemented in the last year). Utterly ridiculous.

Edit:

It's been almost a year since posted this on her tumblr ( posted a link in the Brainstorming thread):

I just... Ugh.

I've never understood why pets don't win in the order they were approved for the winners queue? It's not like the spotlight is a lottery.

It's also not like users would know how many pets were approved before them/when they were nominated in the first place (unless they look daily/someone told them they nominated their pet/etc)/when the pet was actually approved.. so it'd still be a surprise when they won?

I mean no pet is more worthy than the next, if accepted to win anyways, and this random ordeal hasn't worked yet so why not idk.. try doing it in order of acceptance? The only hitch obv is when someone has like 8 pets nominated/accepted in a short period of time BUTbut idk if there's coding in place to skip those pet's now (the cooldown period, Idk how long it is but I'm pretty sure it exists) then I dunno why it couldn't work the same way? Oh you have 12 pets in the queue one right after another.. the first one wins, then the other 11 just kinda sit there until the cooldown is over then the next one wins then the other 10 sit in wait.

Or idk, a person can only have 1 queued to win pet at a time. Dunno. But it couldn't be much worse than todays system.

This. The first approved pet, should be the first to win the spotlight, with the second being the second, and so on.

Random is definitely not the way to go with this. And this has been a recurring complaint for years now.

And if you approve someone's pet for winning, all of their other pets in the queue are bumped to the end of it to avoid winning twice in a row.

I feel like 4-5 of us can make it work much better than the way it is now

Why not? How simple is this?

Can we at least get a message the pet was approved while they sit and wait? It is so disconcerting to have one for weeks/months that is nominated and find out one day poof.. removed. :(

I have had one pet removed 5 times.. each spotlight win I look and see if the pet is still there.. waits

This situation, the extended wait is very frustrating to those that worked a long time on that profile. At least say they have moved onto the "approved" list?

I have three pets that have been nominated, Xian( most recent, within the last couple weeks), Bedtime, and Anatasiy.

Anatasiy has been in the queue for months now. Bedtime and Xian are more recent, but Anatasiy has been in the queue since sometime last year. He was nominated, booted from the queue when the new system went into place, and then re-nominated again and has had the nominated notification since. I'm pretty sure it's been at least 6 months and possible more than that since he was again nominated.

I agree that winning pets should be shown/approved in chronological order that they were put in the winning queue because right now it seems that priority is being given to recent pets over pets that have been in the queue for months and are sitting waiting for approval or rejection.

I am quite fond of [uder=Andrea]'s idea for 1 pet in the queue per user. It seems sensible that only one can be in at the time, providing a more equal opportunity for other users to win.

I'm not sure I agree with the queue becoming a waiting line for chronological order. I like the randomness aspect of the queue. My concern however is with the problems of the queue prioritizing newer additions. That bothers me and I hope it can be fixed to be more random.

I also would still love to see the addition of knowing which step a pet is currently in. I feel that just provides more transparency to the system and gives users more reassurances. It bothers me that "Queued" can mean anything from waiting to be seen or actually in the pool to be chosen from.

I am also bothered that very little has happened to better the queue. The Spotlight needs some love and attention but it keeps being consistently ignored, which is very disheartening from a pet lover's stand point.

Beckah and Jamey have been nominated for so long now I can't remember when they were nominated. Then I've had pets nominated for over a year that were suddenly booted. it's really disheartening and one of the things that has made e lose focus on my pets....even though I have ideas and things I want to do for them I seem to have lost all motivation. I loved having my pets in the spotlight but it seems very few people care about it anymore

This, so much. If I got messages of approval / rejection, that'd be awesome, just so I won't have to worry about pets being in limbo. If we could get messages with reasons why, that'd be even better, but that's been suggested before and shot down a lot with "it's too complicated" or other such things.

Just. Ugh. @ ___ @ I'm not as angry as before since my pets are actually staying in there, but Patchouli Knowledge has been in there for.. at least six months, I don't know the status on a few others, and so on. The complete lack of clarity for a feature that's become pretty big on the site is pretty iffy.

It's quite sad for a pet site to neglect the needs of the pet people for such a long time. It is not the first time I've started a thread here, but real actions have never been taken. Raising the spotlight from 3 to 5 per week was - in my opinion - a rather ceap act with zero effort, that didn't solve real problems. The real needs of us users have been ignored. We have often pointed out that there is something massively wrong with the pet spotlight, we posted countless suggestiosn how to solve it. But as already said here, it was skipped and shut down. Though, remember, this is first and foremost a pet site. This is what subeta has put on its flag.

I've read so many good ideas just in this thread and with a little effort most of them could be made real with a few days of work from the staff. It is not that the programmers would have to reinvent the wheel and the staff would not even have to think about something, as very useful ideas and solutions have been written right here in this thread.

I hope this thread won't be just shut down like the last one, and there finally will be some useful changes in the spotlight issue, that now lasts for years already! I hope for the staff to finally properly responding to our needs, as I - and I guess many others too - are tired of the silence and the lack of progress. I know it is not easy to reply for the staff, if there is nothing new to say. But that is simple to solve: Take action!

It's also very difficult for me to believe that anything is happening behind-the-scenes on this since we are seeing almost no progress or changes to the system in over a year, while getting what reads as a canned response, such as:

"Ongoing project" is Subeta's new "soon".

EDITED TO ADD:

I personally think the suggestion to limit people to one pet in the queue would be rather difficult to implement, without clearing all the existing pets from the queue, considering there are many people with multiple pets in the queue currently. And clearing all the existing pets from the queue is not something that should be considered. Not monthly, not quarterly, not even just once.

I'm just baffled that they aren't even reviewed in order.

Street who just got thrown out was nominated the same day as Bram & Bovyne (18th january 2015). Bram won exactly a month after nomination on 18th February 2015, Bovyne didn't get thrown out of the queue until months later and Street got thrown out this week. 3 pets with exactly the same nomination day with a massive difference in judging.

I'm just so so upset that after THIS LONG my pet got thrown out while a pet with exactly the same nomination date won a year and five months ago.

The pet spotlight has had quite a few good discussions dedicated to it by users in the past few years, there was loads of feedback and nothing happened except for making it 5 days a week again.

wait, your pet Bovyne was nominated from January 2015 undtil this week and then got kicked out? O.o Just asking to be sure I get it right, because, this would be super upsetting!! Seriously.

Overview: So they all got nominated the same day in january 2015: Bram - Won exactly a month later Bovyne - Got thrown out a few months later in 2015 Street - Got thrown out this week.

That's why I'm so upset, after a year and a half I assumed Street was in the winners queue but he wasn't -_-

Another pet of mine, Janne was nominated back in February 2015 as far as I could trace back and he was also thrown out this week. So I had 2 pets thrown out this week: one after a year and a half and one after one year and 5 months.

O_O ... this really can't be, this is really upsetting beyond words! It just can't be that after 1,5 years a pet still isn't judged and gets kicked out! >___< I don't have words how angry this makes me, and these are not even my own pets! >.<

The staff HAS TO DO SOMETHING! This can't go on forever like this! :/

I totally feel with you, this angers me so much as well!

I think what's most perplexing about this whole thing, is how we have users who had their pets nominated for over year and a half, and in that time frame we were at 3 days a week, because there weren't enough pets in the queue. But now suddenly there are enough to go back to 5 days a week, and pets are being booted from the time when we had such a low amount that the wins were reduced? To me, this looks like the review queue was just plain out being neglected/ignored.

How often are the queue's really looked at? Most of the answers I've seen say they're done in huge gaps, like every 4-6 months. This seems like an easily avoidable problem of adding extra wait time if reviews were done more consistently, like weekly/monthly. Because really, people will assume if they haven't heard anything in 6 months, their pet has been accepted into the win queue, when it reality it hasn't even been looked at.

There needs to be a way to determine where your pet is sitting, period. Waiting to be reviewed -> in review process -> in winners queue.

Waiting a year and a half to even be LOOKED at is unacceptable.

EDIT: Ariel's ninja typing... good to know it's being taken a bit more seriously. Though it really shouldn't have been left to it's own devices to get this bad in the first place.

Gosh some of you guys have been waiting forever for a pet to win or be kicked, that's crazy. Here I am being impatient and it's only been about a month and a half now for my pet. I'm going to have to be even more patient I suppose.

Sorry for the ping I don't know if it helps, but I checked Street's page and the text is spilling out at the bottom a bit for me. Maybe that was why he was rejected? Not sure. Really wish we had explanations for rejections, it'd make it so much easier

Reading through this thread I'm really confused as to why the winners are chosen randomly. Surely a pet that has been in there for over a year should've won long before then. Something needs to be done about this and hopefully can figure out how to weed out the inactive users with pets in the queue and some other things will be put into effect to help us!

Thank you for taking this under your wing... even the "approval/deny" with minor things to help would be just 100% improvement.. I can stand the wait much longer if I knew it was a matter of time BUT my pet was approved.

If denied I'd be happy to work on the problem but it is the uncertainty that is also such an issue.

if you are interested in the Spotlight, some issues that may be looked at. (if not ignore the ping :) )