Wow, I can’t believe it’s already February! That means a lot of things!

There was a lot of “behind the scenes” work that got done in January. Probably the biggest change is that we’ve finally sorted out the “multiple credit” issue for our site artists: it used to be the case that for any item or pet, only one artist could be credited. No more! Collaborations are now properly credited :) Besides that, there’s been a lot of work done on some things that aren’t quite ready to be announced yet… and you may have noticed that daemon has been lurking around a little more this month. These facts are not unrelated :D

We also reworked a lot of “payment” code, to streamline the process and simplify a lot of the server-side stuff. If you buy something, you’ll notice that you get a much cleaner email receipt without the mountains of garbly information the old ones had. The logic on the back-end is also cleaner, to help ensure that your data is safe as always.

In the first week of January we gave out a Red and Gold Present, containing an avatar background. While some people elected to keep the present by not opening it, we plan to re-use the same item to box up future presents. As a result, the remainder of these unopened presents will open automatically a week from now.

Speaking of avatars, we made a lot of items visible on forum avatars that weren’t previously there, so the opportunity to decorate your forum avatars has grown considerably :) I’ve quite enjoyed seeing the results of this in the forums!

We also introduced a new feature into our chat server: die rolling. I know this has been a much-wanted feature for RPs and chat-based games, and was also used by me to draw the raffle in January. I also use it to make decisions on whether or not to silly-kick Myla out of the chatroom, so that when I do it’s totally not my fault don’t you know… it was in the dice! Instructions on how to use it are on the chat help page.

We’ve modified the customs shop page to give each artist a miniature “artist profile”. Artists can use this to tell you a little bit about themselves, how they work, what they’re good at, and generally give you a reasonable idea of what it’ll be like if they pick up your order. You can use this to help guide your decision on which artists to select when placing your order.

In addition, we’ve touched up a few of the forms: the custom order form will now ask you which lineart you would like, as well as the coat name. The “view your order” page has also gotten a revamp. Most importantly, you can now edit your orders while they’re in the queue.

With these tweaks to the customs system, there is one thing we would like to clarify (which is not changing). Artists will never re-use an exact same edit from one custom to another. However, certain edits are very commonly requested (such as expression edits, hooves and so on) and there’s only so many ways to draw a hoof. So while your edit will be unique, it may end up being very similar to another one in the future — in some circumstances, basic outlines may be reused. In short, when you buy a custom, you are buying a unique pet drawn to your specification, but you are not buying the right to ensure that nobody else gets a similar one.

We’re also adopting several new policies for custom ordering, to close several queueing loopholes.

First, a custom will always be delivered to the profile of the user who submits the custom order form. This is to prevent a user from indirectly being in the queue multiple times by ‘buying’ somebody else’s queue slot, or indirectly buying existing custom credit from another user. If you would like to gift a custom to somebody, please just send them custom credit instead. If you really want to gift someone a finished custom, you’ll have to trade it over after you receive it.

Second, any and all modifications to customs will now need to go through the queue. In the past, if it was a small enough fix, we would just do it quickly. However, the notion of “small enough” would sometimes get lost in translation, and artists would find themselves redoing whole hair edits. To keep things fair for all users, any modification whatsoever to any image file belonging to a custom will need to go through the custom queue in its own separate form.

If anybody has any questions about these new policies relating to orders they currently have in the queue, please feel free to echo Myla or myself.

We had a fun raffle in January, raffling off two Glowing Changingshrooms. This month, we will have a raffle whose tickets first go on sale around Valentine’s Day (or Singles’ Awareness Day, if you celebrate that one instead). And… well lets just say you won’t want to miss this one :D Your first ticket will be free and tickets will be available for a week, as usual.

We have an event coming up quickly! It’s scheduled to begin in about a week, so keep an eye out for an event thread popping up later today!

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Aaaaand that’s about it! I hope you had a wonderful January, and that February treats you well as well :)

EDIT: Oh and don’t forget, we have our AMA on the 8th! The time for this has changed to 14:00 server time. I hope to see you there!

I love the behind the scenes additions and fixes, especially for custom ordering! The ability to edit an order in the queue is absolutely fantastic :D

Raffles hnnng. I’ll be getting my freebie but I’m still doing my best to save up for the sparkly winter shroom in the shop D:

eee im so excited. :D -bounces about- i’m just getting more and more invested in this site. you guys are so friendly and you do such a lovely job managing everything, and communicating with us about what’s happening! unlike another pet site i could mention

i really love it. looking forward to single’s awareness day 8)

Raffles are pretty much my number 1 weakness aha 8| I am so excited for every month’s raffle.

ALSO EVENT YAY and the custom shop changes are great because I used to bother Myla like 394089348 times per week just to change custom things cough I am so pumped for everything, I’m so happy Mycena became my new home :I

The custom shop changes are really awesome!
And excited about the event :3

I celebrate half-price chocolate day on the 15th. XD

I love all the new Avatar items, they’re fun to play with.

And yay event! Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out time to participate.

I can’t wait to see what the raffle has in store for us.

So much fun stuff!

14 o clock! I might be around for 14 o clock!

*screeches at this news discussion*

Valentine’s Day raffle..? I smell breedings!

And I’m excited to see this month’s event! <3

Dang, I probably won’t be able to see very much of the AMA next Sunday.
I get ready for work about thirty minutes after it starts.

I am personally really excited by the changes made to the custom form - thanks so much guys! C: I have to second Crow in the “CHANGING MY MIND WAY TOO MUCH” and being able to edit our form without jumping in and out of queue is just… beautiful. ;O;

Also thrilled for new event & raffle! Thanks as always for being an awesome staff!

Another quick update to custom forms:  we’re doing away with the “.99” pricing and charging whole round numbers for customs. While it was an interesting experiment and may have resulted in somewhat increased sales, we feel it’s more respectful and honest to charge good clean round numbers, and is also more in keeping with our general philosophy of avoiding “tricks”.

This change applies to all customs which have not yet been marked as paid. However, if your custom order is already in the queue (i.e. placed before 13:30 ST on February 3) and want to be charged under the old pricing scheme (e.g. $39.99 instead of $40), just let your artist know and they’ll be happy to knock the penny off when setting the final price :)

Quick update: the forum history tab now allows you to toggle “mature” content - that is, whether or not to show posts from threads with the [M] tag in the thread title. You can control this setting in the Filter area (where you can also switch on or off specific forums)

Remember, according to section 2 of our site rules, any thread which contains mature content (e.g. non-trivial swearing, adult themes, etc) must have “[M]” in the thread title. This allows viewers to decide whether or not to be exposed to these themes before clicking into such a thread, and can now decide whether or not to see these posts in the forum history as well :)

@Kiwi: :) i’ve been meaning to do that for a while.

In other news, this is a few days later than I said it would happen, but all un-opened present-boxes have been opened ^^

uI am under the impression daemon ate the chat server. This is what happens when Myla and glitch leave and nobody feeds him poptarts regularly. -sigh-

I told them this would happen.

Edit: Chances are this will have to be resolved by glitch when he returns, which means the ETA for chat coming back up is ‘probably somewhere tomorrow’ :D; Unless it magically fixes itself. Which, given that THE CAVE IS MAGIC, is possible, but not probable.

Sorry!

New items have just been released! :DDD

New to Sullie’s Closet: Studded Collar, Black Arm Warmers, Gothic Charm, Footy Warmers, Broken Heart Earrings, Black Rose, Red Rose, White Rose, and Black Rose Fascinator.

New to Leetle Companions: Friendly Turtle and Sugar Glider.

Thanks goes to Tamako for creating all of the new items! <3

Oh my god, guys.
I’m on a terrible back log for shop items since Darcy’s shop opened.
STOP MAKING BEAUTIFUL THINGS I CAN’T AFFORD ;o;

Now I have to have self control to finish up making nuggets to max out the breeding instead of buying a bunch of items owwhsgiohdgf ilu/ihu all

I seem to have temporarily broken the “who’s online” feature… so the “Who’s Online” page will only show a few people and most of your profiles will show the “offline” mushroom regardless of whether you’re online or not. Sorry! I’ll get it up and working as soon as I can <3

EDIT: this has been fixed :)

I’ll talk about this more in tomorrow’s news announcement, but thought I ought to mention right now:

You can check out the new guide, with what you can do and how, over here. It’s been completely written from scratch and I took care to be as backwards-compatible as possible. At this point, we implement pretty much all of the bbcode spec in some way or other.

One thing that isn’t backwards compatible is our old image alignment tags (i.e. [img-l], [img-r]). I know some of you like to use this for your layouts, and don’t worry it’s not going away permanently. We’re just still trying to figure out how we can get floating alignments back in, done properly this time, and in hopefully a more general way (not just limited to images!) :)