Now before everyone starts shouting "this has been suggested before", please hear me out! :P
I like many others, have had pets repeatedly booted from the spotlight nomination queue. I've asked on the spotlight thread, made the changes they suggested, and still the pet gets booted. So, rather than us keep clogging up the nomination queue with pets that have exactly the same problem as when they were booted before, I'm suggesting a quick 4-tick box reason to be given.
The tick boxes could be "coding" "graphics" "story" and maybe "inappropriate subject matter" (thanks for the suggestion :D), which while still vague, would at least point us in the right direction, so we don't rewrite the story 5 times (for example), only to find out that the profile coding does something weird on a certain screen size, or in a particular browser.
Taking my pet as an example (as I stink at explaining things :P).... Rejection number one: redrafted the story Rejection number two: redrafted the story again and tweaked the coding Rejection number three: redrafted the story again, and reworked the coding to work for extra-large screensizes Rejection number four: another coding tweak, to make the hovers behave Rejection number five: completely redid the graphics & coding
....now I obviously hadn't changed the right thing, and I have a feeling that I changed things which were perfectly fine, in order to try and find the right reason for the rejection. If we had a tick-box reason given, that would save potentially 3 or 4 rejections (as I'd know if it was the coding at fault, for instance), which would save the staff quite a lot of time (and sanity!), in looking over the same pet over & over again, only to reject it for the same reasons.
I'm not after a long-winded individually written reason for each pet, as that's just way too much! Just a quick tick box would be so much help, and could actually end up reducing the workload of the staff going through the queue, as it would point us vaguely in the right direction for what we need to work on :)
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This also links in with one of the suggestions here about having a notification for pet spotlight rejections :)
tl;dr Could we please have a tick-box reason given for pet spotlight rejections, such as "coding" "graphics" and "story", so we roughly know what needs working on to make it spotlight worthy.
pings
Pinging @ Tobias @ Nike @ ringo and @ ravens as I have a feeling you probably have opinions on this? :)
[edit] Summary of suggestions (as requested) - linked to the relevant post:
â— Tick box reasons for rejection - allowing for multiple reasons (suggestions include: "coding" "graphics" "story" "inappropriate subject matter" "Story needs work" "Story seems incomplete" / "Layout issue" "scrolling issue" "hover issue" / "not aesthetically pleasing" /"necessary info is missing") â— Notification for pet spotlight rejections â— Just slap a 25 CSC fee to request why a specific PS entry was rejected â— Spotlight days to swap between different types of pets (pretty profiles, actual designs, impressive themed TCs, maybe even impressive battle pets). â— Spotlight on Mon, Weds & Fri, and the other days to cycle pets with the most "likes" / high score pets (books / food / battle stats) â— Make the spotlight like the avatar spotlight on the front page of Subeta before you log in â— A pet "heart" system (just like the HA hearts) â— An official Subeta sanction council of users, who assist the user base by giving honest feedback. (idea develops over the following page)

I support this. Ever since the pet spotlight started i've been trying for a certain pet to win, which is years now. I don't know what's wrong with my pet, no one on the pet spotlight help topic knows what's wrong with my pet only the staff know and they keep rejecting the pet. It's extremely frustrating -_-
Sometimes you just reach they point where you are rejected for non obvious reasons and it's just upsetting being rejected for something no one but the staff sees and not knowing what to change but knowing that something has to be changed. Simple rejection reasons like this could make things easier and less time consuming for both player and staff. (unless the staff really has nothing better to do that constantly look at the same pets being re-entered)

This doesn't seem like an unreasonable request. [Edit] Another one that might be good to add would be inappropriate subject matter, I think there have been a few pets where staff has said, no you aren't breaking a site rule, but the content isn't something they feel comfortable representing the site.
I strongly support this! Its a nightmare not knowing at least a small hint what's wrong. I'm not expecting a full report like they do with cws, but a hint would at least help
I support! I don't put much coding/story/etc. effort into my pets, but I have a pet that if I tried on, and your suggestion was acted upon, I would really enjoy knowing what I did wrong. I don't like seeing you guys being in the dark about all this either so full support. :)

I don't work much with my pets but I definitely support this because I can only imagine how frustrating it is to be rejected with no information as to why.
I completely agree with this idea. I gave up after a while with the spotlight because I just couldn't figure out why they were getting rejected. It would only take a matter of seconds for staff to click a ticker box. I think the time saved would greatly outweigh time spent.
This would be helpful. A vague idea of what's wrong is better than nothing. This would let us know which parts of the profile to focus on, instead of being left to wonder if the whole thing needs changing.
I love this suggestion - it would be so helpful!
Yay for support! :D I really do hope that this (or something similar) can be added in at some point, as less ambiguity in the spotlight rejections can only be a good thing, right? (especially if it saves the poor staff having to keep rejecting a pet for the same reasons, when the owner has changed everything but the reason for rejection the first time!)

I know this has been shot down in the past because PS is a contest and is free for entering, but at this point I believe things stop being fun for pet owners. Even if the tick box reason would only be applicable, say, from the 3rd booting on, it would help make the experience a lot more interesting / enticing for many, if not most pet people.
Will always support this.
Ideas like this have been suggested over and over, giving us a hint on what isn't right. But noooo it would be too hard for the staff and reasons like that. Oh well, I agree none the less, the pet spotlight rejection need to give us some idea on what isn't ok!
God please yes. I gave up working on my pets a couple years ago because of a specific pet that just kept being rejected and it was so frustrating trying to figure out why.
It sucks losing the passion for something I used to dedicate all my time on this site into.
Yes please. I have a pet that was accepted for AGES, and then the mass clearing happened, and my pet was accepted right away again, when the queue was low/empty, and it sat accepted for MONTHS, only to finally look again and see it rejected. Nobody can tell me what's wrong, so now I don't even try anymore, which is a shitty thing. It's actually part of the reason I half ass work on my other pets. I don't want to put in all the work for only one person to know why it's not accepted, and not be able to fix it.
Because of yesterdays news this is more than ever relevant. 3 instead of 7 spotlights a week, still a 2 week cooldown and people just quit entering because they are left staring at a pretty much perfect pet YET somewhere there is a mistake and only the staff seems to see it.
I think it would help making the spotlight more active again.
(i don't think it has been pinged yet?)

That's it. There it is. The reason why the queue is apparently so low- people get discouraged when they're repeatedly rejected and not told what's wrong. If I had my pet rejected even a few times I would just give up completely tbh.
[edit] And honestly I don't think it would be that much more work to include a small reason as to why a pet is rejected. I've never entered the queue so I've never been rejected from it, so I don't know exactly what happens when that happens, but I think you should receive an event that says "Your pet (name) has been rejected from the pet spotlight queue. Reason: (short statement.)" Like. "Story needs work" "Story seems incomplete" "Layout issue" "scrolling issue" "hover issue" "not aesthetically pleasing" "necessary info is missing" - like if someone accidentally hides the pet's gender or where it says owner:
There's a lot of reasons a pet could be rejected. It's very hard to fix problems when we're not told what exactly the problem is. I mean, it's the same thing when something breaks on the site and we're all "OMG FIX IT" and the programmers are like "if you don't tell us exactly what happened on what page and the error message and your browser and operating system blah blah we can't fix it" Well same thing with this... At least I think so.
After the new change, I have to agree that this is needed more than ever. In fact, in my comment on the news page, I linked to this topic. Just going to quote what I said here:
We seriously need to stop discouraging great pets and chasing away their owners from the spotlight. I know that "ain't nobody got time for that" has been the reason for not listing rejection reasons, but if fewer pets are in the queue, maybe "ya'll gotta make time for it" since clearly something needs to change.