The recent issue with the Friends page has revealed a bit of a flaw in the pet transfer system: you have to be friends with a person before you can send them a pet. This is different from items, which you can send to anyone. If someone is not your friend, you can still type their name in the box and send an item. (Although there is an opt-out option for people who do not want non-friend gifts.)

I'm not sure what the original reasoning for this restriction on transferring was. If someone has to type a person's username into a box, they clearly mean to send the pet to that person. If they're just sending pets out willy-nilly to people who don't want them, then the recipient can very easily reject the transfer. And if they accidentally type in the wrong name, it's not difficult to quickly go to the transfer page and cancel the transfer.

While it's fun gaining new friends and pets at the same time, sometimes you just want to send a pet and be done with it. For example, people who are quitting or who plan on going on hiatus and don't want to have to cull their friend list afterward.

A write-in option is also helpful for people who have a long list of friends and have to spend a while searching for that specific friend they want to send a pet to.

tl;dr: Please create a write-in option for transferring pets to anyone like the "send an item" option. If necessary, also make a preference option to allow/disallow pet transfers (which can prevent people from being annoyed by others who want to abuse it).

That would be helpful. I don't spend a lot of time in the pet area, but I didn't realize we had to be friends to send pets (Or we could do it the old school Neo way - Anyone remember?)

Now I've got to transfer a pet, and we don't know when the friends page will be fixed.

This would be so helpful. I have a pet who I need to transfer to another user and there's been no inkling on when the whole friends page will be fixed.

Full support.

I've done the pet transfer through the pound and its just so stressful. Adding someone as a friend to transfer a pet was okay, a nuisance to be sure, adding time to the process, but not a huge deal. Now that the friend page hasn't been working though, it really does showcase that its become more than just a nuisance.

Supporting this with the additional preference toggle about accepting pet transfer requests or blocking it.

Lord almighty, I ran a free zapper pets for newbies thing on Neo about a million years ago. What a stressful system that was- toss the pet in the pound at an exact timestamp and have the person who it was for refresh madly at the URL it would appear at, and hope they click the adopt button before anyone else.

I fully support pet transfers without being friends, and the toggle. I've got a number of people on my friends list just leftover from pet transfers of yesteryear, and I like sending them holiday items as I'm not terribly social anyway and my friends list is small. But it would be nice to not have this little hoop to jump through and then have to periodically trim your friends list or wonder how some people even got there to begin with.

Support! Especially given how often the friends page seems to break :c

Full support with the preference option to block transfers to prevent abuse :) I'm a bit of a loner and prefer to keep my friends list pruned only to those I actually talk to, or like to shower with gifts, but I always feel a bit guilty removing people after transfers

I remember the old Neo way too haha, gosh it caused me no end of worry! The AC here is usually quite empty too, so any new pet can be seen and snatched up immediately :O

As an additional point we could have a confirmation page ('Are you sure you want to transfer PET to USER?' ..or something) that shows the pet and the recipiant's avatar and user hover, to make it easy to tell that we have everything correct Like how certain pages (zapper, cleansing pools, etc.) show the pet image of the pet you're about to alter

So long as there's an option to both accept AND deny non-friend pet transfers, I'm all for it.

Even though the friends page has been fixed. I still think this should be an option. Please include an additional preference toggle about accepting non-friend pet transfer requests.