I've been wondering this for a while but couldn't find an answer anywhere. I sometimes see people saying they have or are looking for pets with good IDs. I know the pet ID is the number in the URL but what's the significance of it and what would be considered a good or bad ID?

Each time a person creates a pet, it is given a unique ID number. It is actually how the site stores the specifics of a particular pet instead of the name. That's why the name can be changed. The numbers increase with each pet that is created so to get a smaller ID number, you have to adopt and/or rename. They don't recycle unused IDs (whether they're unused from an error or from the old way of clearing pet names) and I doubt they ever will, so as the site gets older, the smaller ID numbers become more rare.

Ok thank you, so it's just a rarity thing, got it :)

I just checked my own pet IDs out of curiosity, my 2 freshly created pets (this week) are 5.9 millions and something, my other pets who were created in late 2015 to mid 2016 are all in the 5.8 millions. My only adopted pet was born in 2010 and has an 800k+ ID. That's kinda interesting, looks like the IDs are moving a heck of a lot slower/much fewer pets are created these days!

Thank you so much for asking this, I was wondering the same thing yesterday but was too shy to ask haha! Most of my pets I created in 06-08 so their IDs are waaay lower compared to the pets I created this year that are in the high 5 millions. It's crazy to me that there are so many pets! Definitely an interesting observation though that fewer pets are being created these days, makes me wish I could see data about new accounts being created on Subeta over the years

I'm not 100% sure but my understanding is that there was an error (??) that "created" a pet (essentially used up an ID) when people were attempting to make pets just after a name cleared, like if they were refreshing the (creation?) page when a name was about to clear. So we don't really have that many pets most of those were made from when that was still something that could happen.

I think that's what happened anyway, I could be wrong.

Oh dang so there's probably thousands of I guess phantom pets, I can definitely imagine feverishly refreshing to get a name I would want. Thanks for that tidbit, pet IDs are so much more interesting/have more history than I previously thought!

At the bottom of each and every page of Subeta there's a tiny link called About Subeta. Right now and for at least the next half hour, there are 435168 total pets. Each user has on around two and two-thirds-parts-ish quantity of pets.

Five million is an elegant sufficiency of ID numbers.

My oldest pet going back almost twelve years is 311521.

I honestly don't understand why so much attention is given to ID numbers. It's not like there is any site advantage to having lower numbers. I can only assume people just like having the lower number IDs?

Pretty much, yeah. It's just something people may or may not be interested in, like specific types of names or whatever. It's a preference

I am curious now what the oldest pet on the site is. I just checked Keith's profile and he no longer has any pets listed.

This one :)

Just found the second oldest. I'm honestly surprised by its name, because there couldn't have been 850 Miffys before it. :)

That just means the name got taken when the owner went inactive. I think the string of numbers the original pet gets is just random

Ah!

That just shows you how much attention I've been paying to the pet aspect of this pet site. :D

To be fair though my first pet ever was choco_lover (as you can see on my profile lol... smh at middle school me) so ya never know, maybe they really loved the number 851 haha!

:D Yeah, I've given some pets some not so great names, but dang it, I named them so that's what they're called now.