The pet spotlight is currently one of the best ways to creatively express yourself on Subeta and get official recognition for it. People put a lot of work into their pets' profiles--coding, writing, curating TCs, drawing, etc.--and I'd reckon that it drives a lot of community involvement and sP spending on the site (for TC items, pet altering stuff, etc.). But, it's difficult to meaningfully engage with past winners of the spotlight. I'd like to suggest creating a spotlight archive, along with some specific features that it could have. I'm quite certain the idea of an archive has been suggested before, but 1) I couldn't find that topic, and 2) I thought it might be useful to put this in the Project Kumos suggestions subforum as this appears to be a solid way to keep suggestions organized for folks who want to provide input on Kumos' development. And, for Keith to see suggestions in one place, for that matter!

Front of the Archive When users first visit the spotlight archive, obviously the pet of the day should be featured. It might also be useful to include recent winners--maybe the past four, so as not to overwhelm the page. Additionally, the rules, description of the spotlight process, and submission information should be separate from the archive, though accessible through it. Remember, the focus is on the pets! From there, I'm thinking there could be a few links to delve into the archive:

• Random: Exactly what it says on the tin. A single click takes the user to a random former spotlight winner.
• Browse by Category: A list of categories (which I'll elaborate on below) that are applied by users, pet spotlight staff, or volunteers, which takes the user to a selection of profiles that are organized under that categories. The list that results from clicking this option should be randomly populated and organized so past profiles have a fair-er shot of getting noticed in this option.
• Browse by Time: What was the pet spotlight zeitgeist of March during 2014? Now users can see by selecting a year and/or month. This functionality already exists in the current system.
• Search: Narrow down spotlights by category, keywords, search by username or petname, search by species or color, and organize in various ways (e.g. alphabetically, chronological and reverse chronological, etc.).

Categories If the archive is a delicious pizza, with search functionality and browsing as cheese and sauce, the categories are the gluten that forms the dough that holds it all together. (That was a silly metaphor. I apologize.) I imagine that this part would require user input and participation. Remember when users tagged items? I think the same could be done with pet profiles. Another option is that previous winners of the pet spotlight could first be asked to provide their own categories for each pet that won, with a due date; those who haven't responded go to a pool that users provide input on.

Crucially, the category system should be rather limited. No cataloging system is perfect, and there will always be things that don't quite fit into just 1 category (in fact, my pet Joe Hill could arguably fit into three of these categories!). There should be some limitations and consistency in order for the browsing and search options to work best, and to make profiles discoverable. Spitballing some ideas:

• Fan: For pets based off of existing media.
• Original: For pets with original backgrounds/stories.
• Informational: Profiles that are meant to be educational/informational in some ways.
• Memorial: Pets meant to honor passed loved ones.
• Abstract: Profiles that don't quite fit any of these previous categories. Like, I dunno, a pet based on "the feeling of a symphony" might be under this category.

The categories are meant to be more general descriptors, like major sections in a library (fiction, nonfiction, periodicals, etc.). From there, keywords can be added, and these are more loose in terms of how many can be applied and how many exist in the archive overall. Perhaps there can be a process for adding more categories later, but I'm not sure what that would look like. Truly, my ideal for the pet spotlight would be something that's run by a panel of volunteers as a community-engaged activity, and requires little staff oversight; again, not sure about the specifics there, but that's beside the point of this suggestion.

Keywords Categories are the major sections, keywords provide more distinction (fiction > fantasy, romance, etc. nonfiction > history, science, sociology, etc.). Take my pet Pollinator for example: Category: Informational. Pollinator's profile is clearly meant to be a "how-to" guide for beginners of saving seeds from their garden. Keywords: gardening, DIY, food, seeds, written. Some of these keywords are based strictly on topic; I added "written" because though I put work into the art and TC, the writing is clearly center-stage.

The process for adding keywords could work similarly to what I've seen other sites do; the owner of the pet provides their own keywords as part of creating the pet's profile, and other users can add to that list of keywords for more nuanced organization/searching after the pet is featured in the spotlight. This could create disagreements or inaccuracies, but hopefully the number of keywords that could be applied would still aid in discoverability and overcome inaccuracies.

Inactive Former Spotlight Winners This is tricky. The reality is that many users have come and gone, pets have been transferred and the original profiles lost to time, etc. Check out the early winners--clicking on those pets will reveal broken or empty profiles. I'm not 100% certain what to do about these pets, since there's not much worth looking at or exploring for other users, but I think it's important to acknowledge that at some point, there was creative expression from a person here. If the data is available, perhaps there could be a "Lost Winners" page (the name should probably be tweaked!) that lists the name of the pet who won, and which user owned that pet when they won the spotlight. Perhaps it could even include the pet's species/color combination (as it was when they won, again if available), or there could be a placeholder image. I'm not sure how feasible this is.

Yes I know this would be a massive undertaking I'm not going to pretend that Subeta has a legion of developers available to make this happen anytime soon, or even in a final version that includes all the features I listed above. There are objectively bigger fish to fry during Kumos' development! Still, I hope that "pie in the sky" ideas are welcome in the Kumos suggestion forum as something to provide a bit of inspiration for things that can be done quickly, or could be worked towards as a long-term project.

The pet spotlight is one of my favorite aspects of the site and my number 1 way of expressing myself creatively here. I love the excuse Subeta gives me to make little pages dedicated to things I value or enjoy and create on-site goals for myself, so I've kind of gotten pretty verbose here! I'd love for folks to add their own suggestions/feedback too.

I really like this! I was just thinking earlier about the idea of more of a 'gallery' of pet profiles and such. I was thinking about how, while some people do actually make their pets... uh... actual virtual pets (and I have so much respect for them because I just cannot do that for the life of me haha), a lot of us use Subeta more like a website such as toyhou.se, where we show off original characters that have nothing to do with their virtual pets we use to represent them. Toyhou.se seems to have tags that people can use to organize characters as well as to search for characters of a certain type, and I was thinking about how cool that could be here as well. In the past, we've had a lot of people make kind of, like, forum compendiums for things like tribute pets, pets with giant themed TCs, etc., and it would be really neat to have a more official spin on that!

Anyway, yeah, big fan of this idea. And I feel like this has been said several times haha, but there are definitely a number of enthusiastic, passionate pet people that would be super interested in volunteering time to do what we can to help out with pet spotlight-related things. I'd be very happy to help out with reviewing past spotligt winners, keywords/categorizing and such. Subeta pets have been my way of creatively expressing myself for 19 years, and I'd be stoked to see something like this.

This is a cool idea! I would definitely be in to tag profiles and such.

I think we would also need a way to hide some profiles/remove them from the archive. There are a lot of old spotlifght winners who changed owner, got their profile wipped, or just are now a broken mess of deleted images. We would need a way to tag those profiles. It would be a cool way for pet people to also look back at the spotlight and only see profiles that are still up and functional.