Pet Spotlight Update!

July 29, 2016 6:33 pm

The Pet Spotlight has undergone a revamp! The rules have been updated and clarified to be a little clearer and simpler, and we now are able to give denial reasons when we reject pets from the spotlight. We've also updated our Pet Spotlight forum thread where we will be able to continue clarifying if need be, as well as adding things like helpful guides and examples.

One of the main rule updates is to the 'Show us your pet' section. Some users felt prior guidelines implied that as a pet spotlight, we were looking to spotlight pets only and not humanoid-type characters. We having been accepting human characters for a while, but have reviewed and updated the rules to be clearer: It is now a requirement to include your actual Subeta pet, or Custom overlay equivalent, on your pet profile. We want to see the connection between Subeta's artwork and your character creation!

We look forward to seeing your spotlight entries, and to helping you achieve those spotlight trophies!

Note: There will be a two-week grandfathering-in period in which any pet currently in the queue to win could potentially still win with their human character. We will be messaging each user in the win queue that doesn't follow the rule update to give them a chance to change it, but after two weeks the new rules will be fully in motion for every user.

July 29, 2016, 10:04 pm by

ok on the one hand yes i am very happy that these issues have been addressed... on the other hand i would VERY STRONGLY URGE YOU to reconsider the requirement for displaying the pet's image. it's a terrible fucking idea. please get rid of it at once. it is absolutely not necessary because not only are we required to display their color and species information anyway, but also guess what, when a pet wins the spotlight, what do people see on the news page? oh that's right, their pet image! please please please i hate this requirement, there is no need for it and it's a terrible idea and like. please. i'm literally begging you. everything else sounds great but really. whose idea was this. please undo.

July 29, 2016, 9:59 pm by

- apologies, the pet we mistakenly thought was yours had its profile made by you, and we got the name mixed up with the owner name. Thanks for pointing this out, we've now mailed the correct owner :)

July 29, 2016, 9:51 pm by

also when y'all send out messages about try to make sure you don't send a message to someone about a pet they don't own lmao

July 29, 2016, 9:48 pm by

a lot of profiles* : )

July 29, 2016, 9:48 pm by

Firstly, yes, adding a pet image CAN interfere with a profile design, and pretty drastically too. If I were to add an overlay to Remembered, for example, it would completely wreck the design, seeing as there's literally no space for it anywhere. A tab on one side or the other would ruin the balance. This can be said for a lot of the profile. The arguement that this is to ensure that a pet is ACTUALLY whatever species the profile says it is a stretch, seeing as it doesn't look like it's not required on quad pets and you still can't confirm if a pet is ACTUALLY a graveyard kumos if the pet is a custom graveyard kumos. This entirely limits creativity, and I'm really tired of seeing the it's PET spotlight not HUMAN spotlight arguement. If it was going to be that way, it should have been implemented at the BEGINNING of spotlight when it was added years ago. My characters are usually tied to whatever color/species I choose for them, and I don't see why this needs to be explicitly tied to the profile. Usually, people experience whatever pet color/species combo I have when I win spotlight because it's in the news post, and it provides a nice first impression of my character. I see no reason for this to be redisplayed on the profile. This is bullshit change that wasn't needed and wasn't even asked for.

But whatever!! I've always enjoyed the creative freedom allowed with pets. I hate to see that going away with this spotlight change!! : ) Y'all won't see my pets anymore I guess, regardless of whether this changed effects them. Still upset even effects Rosemarie, seeing as she was nominated a year ago.

Again, she's literally at the character limit for profiles. I don't even know if I'd be able to fit an image code in there. Not to mention there's some odd 50+ different outcomes to the pokemon battle in her story.

July 29, 2016, 9:47 pm by

Alright, can't say I agree but since it's something you guys are set on /shrug agree to disagree.

July 29, 2016, 9:43 pm by

There's a lot of complaints about being required to have the pet image somewhere on the profile... I can understand the frustration if you aren't into that aesthetic, and I'm sorry for the people who now have to change their profiles to accommodate the new rule, but really, it makes sense. It is a pet site. It's not unreasonable for a pet site to ask that we make certain the pet art aspect isn't forgotten (even if they are, for lack of a better name, "vessels" through which some of us display completely human characters). Besides, we all have reasons for tying our characters to certain species/color combinations, right? The idea that it's nice to see the correlation between species/color and character design makes sense.

I'm even happier that we are still allowed to nominate pets with human characters, though! Lord knows I haven't had a quad character since my dark pre-teen years. :') Also, I'm really digging the fact that we'll now get rejection reasons - I struggled with rejection (from the spotlight, ahem) a LOT back when I was making giant, bold profiles, so for people who still do that I'm certain it'll help a lot! I know I have a friend or two who will be really pleased with this update.

July 29, 2016, 9:42 pm by

- and a good point about what to do :) I've added that to the first post of the Pet Spotlight sticky!

July 29, 2016, 9:42 pm by

I like the fact that there's a denial system in effect now. I remember when they said they wouldn't/couldn't give reasons and it was a pain in the neck to try to figure out what the problem was as to why something was getting denied again and again. So yay!

I don't think it's restrictive at all to say we need to link the actual pet in more than just the info of "the male arid montre" sort of thing. I like that on a site that has pets as a main feature of the site itself, (kind of one of the points of being here) that they'd like people to represent the site pets instead of just their own characters which can be shown on any character site out there. So yes, def okay with the changes/updates and me likey lots! ^.^

Also, for one clarification, the overlay doesn't have to be only quad- anthro is allowed too (just not human). =)

July 29, 2016, 9:40 pm by

- Aha, that makes sense! And that's okay! I know mistakes happen. :) Still good to know who to ping in case I need to in the future. ^^

July 29, 2016, 9:36 pm by

- oh, whoops! That was me, I looked super hard, I -think- that my hover wasn't working as I'd just moved my computer into a different room as I was checking those. I had realised that pages weren't loading properly and refreshed most of them, but because the rest of yours loaded except for the hover I thought it wasn't there. My fault!

As for communicating an overlooked/not seen feature, the best place to do this would be to ping me, or on the Pet Spotlight thread in the pet forum! (You can ignore that smail now, I'll take you off the list!)

July 29, 2016, 9:33 pm by

- I just received a sMail that one of my pets (Bairer) does not show his pet form... when his cybill overlay is there (it is hidden under an invisible hover, but when your mouse is over his human art, the pet image shows up quickly). This brings up two questions:

How should we communicate with staff if a reason for denial is due to a staff member overlooking something? (I know this is not a denial, but I want to make sure my pet is not marked for removal, when the image is definitely there).
If we hide the image, such as with a hover that does not have any sort of cue to hover there, do we have to make sure to label the hover area? Like, do I need to but some text that says hover? Or make it low opacity so that people know to hover to make it fully viewable? Just checking these so I know for future profiles as well.

July 29, 2016, 9:32 pm by

I still don't understand why people can't nominate their own pets but have to rely on other people to do so, without even being able to ask them to? On neopets you can just submit your own pet for the pet spotlight once it's ready, so why can't we, what's the reason?

July 29, 2016, 9:27 pm by

- it /helps/ with the misrepresentation thing. It's not a perfect system in that regard, but it helps to cut down on that particular problem. The other reason being that we want to see pets in our pet spotlight, it's what we love and why we started the spotlight in the first place. So it doesn't have to be the official pet image, it can be custom art - because we've already got the custom overlay rules set up, so anything that they allow is what can be shown on the page as pet art.

July 29, 2016, 9:21 pm by

So the new rule does require the official pet image somewhere on the page? If not, I guess I'm just not seeing how this would help with misrepresentation(accidental or otherwise).

July 29, 2016, 9:21 pm by

- Oh, whoops! Ok then, that's good :)

July 29, 2016, 9:17 pm by

I went back to read and I realized that I've confused myself too while reading. (but can't edit my comment). Thank you for answering back tho.

July 29, 2016, 9:11 pm by

- what do you mean about making a monologue? You've had a few pets win the spotlight already and you seem able to fulfill the requirements without having to change anything? (Sorry, just confused there!)

July 29, 2016, 9:08 pm by

definitely an improvement over the former rejection process, then.

July 29, 2016, 9:08 pm by

It is lovely. Especially since you can somewhat customize it to be specific to a user's entry.

July 29, 2016, 9:06 pm by

- way to post my tester rejection, I will at least use proper spelling when I do it officially!

July 29, 2016, 9:04 pm by

You do get an alert! We tested with one of my pets that keeps getting nominated, and this is the alert I got:

Taco's pet spotlight nomination was denied for the following reason(s): • Unfinished section(s) • Fill up that green box plz

July 29, 2016, 9:04 pm by

Well, at least this makes the pet spotlights a little less ridiculous. To have a pet site, with pets, and a contest for those pets, with tons of human RP character entries and winners that have nothing to do with those pets was just.... well, ridiculous. Not quite absurd, just ridiculous. I'd had to wonder why on earth you even bothered to call it "Pet Spotlight", or why it had anything to do with pets, when it was more accurately a generic "Character Spotlight".

So way to.... try to sort of tie it back around! Hopefully now there will be some more relevant entries, and not just stuff with characters and creatures from Nameless Planet ,165.

July 29, 2016, 9:03 pm by

... I posted early gdi.

But I'm not against the change. However, making a monologue about my pet because I need to explain ... it's just a tiny bit weird?

July 29, 2016, 9:01 pm by

Oh well. Bye spotlight 8)

July 29, 2016, 9:01 pm by

been a while since i've flexed my creative muscles and actually worked on pet profiles, so i can't complain or rejoice much, but i am happy to see denial reasons being implemented. i've always thought those should've been a thing from the start.

on that note, will users be getting an alert if they're denied, or how would that info be otherwise relayed?

July 29, 2016, 8:56 pm by

- often we have people who have the wrong pet without even realising it. For example, if you'd done a name swap with another pet but forgot to change the pet species, or if you had adopted a pet and changed the profile without changing the pet species/colour to be what you wanted, we would be able to message the user and just tell them that they don't match up, and often we've had users just thank us for pointing it out. If the pet actually wins spotlight and it's the wrong colour/species, there's sometimes a lot of user outrage and we'd rather avoid it getting to that point! We like to give people a chance to fix things before the mob sets upon them :)

July 29, 2016, 8:51 pm by

I'm aware of that, what I mean is that if this is meant to be an easy check for misrepresentation it won't work if someone wants to break the rules anyway.

July 29, 2016, 8:46 pm by

For anyone having an issue with the pet image or overlay being on the profile you're significantly forgetting that its a PET PROFILE obviously the pet needs to be on the page to win.

July 29, 2016, 8:45 pm by

What I mean is that they could change both, so the staff would have to check anyway. Besides, it's already been clarified below that it's not the official image that needs to be on the page, just some sort of quad form, even if it's not a Subeta pet at all.

July 29, 2016, 8:44 pm by

I'm glad that you are all making progress towards making Pet Spotlight better :) Please keep up the good work, I'd love to see mini mods on the pet spotlight reviewing committee~

July 29, 2016, 8:44 pm by

The "well I can't afford/make nice profiles ho hum" argument has always bothered me, too. If you really care about wanting to have your pets look pretty, why wouldn't you save up sP to spend on stuff like that? It takes me like less than an hour to do all my quests for a day, and that makes me several mill. I don't do them EVERY day but I still have 200mil sitting in my vault after like, a couple weeks of work.

Also, I've started teaching myself to code and whatnot. There's lots of free art programs, that I use, and I also started making my own profiles recently. Sure maybe they're not the ultimate best, but I still WORKED on them and gave it a SHOT, and have IMPROVED. That's kinda how any kind of creative thing works. If you wanna buy all your stuff, that's fine, you work for the sp. If you wanna learn to make it yourself, you LEARN.

I also make my own edited overlays. My first one was like 8 years ago. I've improved a lot. With WORK.

July 29, 2016, 8:44 pm by

Ah okay thanks for that explanation :)

July 29, 2016, 8:39 pm by

It says in the rules "If your “pet” is a human character or anything else disallowed by the Custom Pet Overlay rules, that’s fine! But you must still include a Subeta pet representation on the pet page." and also "Is your pet the hero of the story? Or maybe an information pet? Or maybe even a tribute character. We want to know!" so I think fan pets are still just fine, any type of character is fine you just have to have a subeta representation of the character.

July 29, 2016, 8:38 pm by

"I've long been over "pet sites" "

well subeta is a pet site.. so....

Using unaltered official subeta art as an overlay is already against the rules in general.

July 29, 2016, 8:37 pm by

That's the point I am making. Besides having the requirement to keep the text now there is an easier way for staff to check that the text is accurate. Without a pet image there you would have to go through site code or through the user's battle page to see what species the pet is. That is if they hide their pets from the profile. It makes it easier for staff to be like YUP it is X color X species. Even if it is just a tiny little image in a hover

July 29, 2016, 8:33 pm by

We're already required to keep the text for that, though, and someone who changes the text for their common pet to say angelic instead could easily swap the image out, too.

July 29, 2016, 8:31 pm by

Oh, and I just read this, but thanks for making full crediting a requirement! That's really good.

July 29, 2016, 8:30 pm by

Because that way it is easy to confirm a pet's color, pet's species (requirements of the pet spotlight since the beginning) especially if those are put in the graphic versus coded.

July 29, 2016, 8:30 pm by

I'm still confused and I enter my pet I think only 3 times :) I guess I will never get it lol :)

July 29, 2016, 8:29 pm by

Wow I wasn't expecting something so soon, thanks so much for giving the spotlight a little dusting off. I don't think the new requirements are too harsh and are probably pretty easy to do with only minor updates to peoples' profiles.

July 29, 2016, 8:26 pm by

I agree with completely. I enjoy this site to show off my characters. I've long been over "pet sites" and customizing my HA in general but use Subeta as a place to have pretty profiles and show off my awesome characters (Winning a spotlight is a lovely bonus feature the at makes me feel like my characters are on point and unique) I enjoy the freedom subeta has over other sites but this feels more restrictive :( Some of my characters were inspired by subeta pets but most were not.

July 29, 2016, 8:25 pm by

Not that I'd probably enter anyway because I can't make or afford profile layouts/overlays, but what I'm getting is fan pets won't will all together now and you have to have an actual pet design, not a human design overlay for the pet name?

July 29, 2016, 8:24 pm by

so humans aren't supposed to be pets?

July 29, 2016, 8:22 pm by

❤ Yay, we finally get denial reasons! I think it would be nice to also know what queue we're in.

July 29, 2016, 8:21 pm by

If we're allowed to hide the image through hovers or whatever anyway, what's the point of requiring a pet/quad image? It doesn't add anything to the page if it's hidden. It's just a meaningless restriction, and this is coming from someone who does keep the images showing. Not every character was inspired by a Subeta pet, either(absolutely none of mine were), some people just like being able to show off the characters they already have.

July 29, 2016, 8:17 pm by

lmao yeah it's super unfair that pet profiles on a petsite have to be tangentially related to the pet itself in order to win the pet spotlight

July 29, 2016, 8:10 pm by

Also if you have a pet image you need to be made transparent and can't do it yourself, just msg me I'll do it for you for like 100k lol

July 29, 2016, 7:57 pm by

- that's correct! And it doesn't have to be the exact site image of the pet, if can be artwork of the pet or some kind of pet-form representation.

- it doesn't have to be the default, white-background pet image. It can be any pet-form image, and you can use any coding you like to hide it behind a hover/dropdown - as long as we can access it somehow from the pet profile.

July 29, 2016, 7:56 pm by

Oh yeah and for some of my pets that have non-overlay-dimension art, I use a hover, like my pet Girouette. There's creative ways to do it and I guarantee this won't destroy your profiles forever.

Use @username to mention someone. Supports markdown formatting.

Logged Out

Pet Spotlight Update!

Leave a Comment