Sell Chicken Smoothie (Poll Has Been Reset!)

[Glasssalt]

I don't really have much to add to this topic except that I wholeheartedly agree with most of the sentiments that have been expressed in this thread.

[Shy]

thanks for the summary, Tailish!

just popping in to add/reiterate some thoughts. feel free to reply or express disagreements, but this will be my only post on this thread unless something else comes up.

as a founding member of this site (silent wolf kennelz, anyone?), I've seen CS go through a lot of changes, and this site holds a lot of sentimental value for me. while I can somewhat sympathize with members who are feeling neglected/ignored by staff, and agree with a lot of what is being said, I do take some issue with the direction of this thread, namely the revolutionary attitude and the fallback goal being to sell the site.

CS was never meant to be more complicated than what you're seeing right now—adopt a cute pet, slap it in a forum signature, trade it for other pets, take part in a forum community. sure, CS needs to evolve to survive (sites usually do), but at what point do you let it run its course? not every site is built to survive an ever-changing internet landscape. even if admins were to constantly roll out new features and implement more suggestions, at what point does CS become a site that is unrecognizable, and unappealing to a large portion of existing members?

additionally, I have the feeling that no matter what admins do, it will not be enough for some of these members—just based on some of the threads I've seen pop up these past several months as well as some of the reactions to Nick's posts on this thread.

like many people have already stated before, our admins are adults with their own lives outside of managing a website for kiddos. they could've shut down CS a long time ago, and the fact that they haven't yet means that they're open to changing the dynamics of the site in some capacity. I think the best way for them to do this is to improve delegation and possibly increase staffers in specific areas.

increased moderation is always needed on this site, which is why it's beneficial for regular users to report posts that are inappropriate, because there are simply too many people for all the mods to manage. it can take a while for something that I report to be noticed and changed, but this isn't due to intentional neglect. a lack of moderation doesn't mean that the mods are ignoring you—they are overworked and spread too thin for the number of tickets they receive. also, as was mentioned before, mods are hesitant to reply to many suggestion threads as it may be seen as speaking on behalf of the admins.

like all of you, I would also like to see a higher integration of suggestions, and (possibly) the implementation of more coding staff positions to make some of the older and more popular suggestions come to life. as far as I know (and I could be wrong on this one), Nick is the only coder on this site. that would be overwhelming and stressful to anyone, especially if they were receiving constant criticism about a lack of site updates.

anyways, I think my bottom line here is that change is definitely needed on CS—hire more staff and learn how to delegate more work to keep popular/basic housekeeping suggestions implemented. this thread seems like it has good potential to start a basis for some more changes, but CS members also need to learn how to manage expectations to some degree. If you expect admins to work with you, you need to work with them.

that's just my two cents. I'm not here to debate or argue with anyone.

(another quick add to this post—I think that the poll is too broad. just because I don’t think the admins should sell CS doesn’t mean that I think CS is doing fine.)

[Serek]

I think this is a pretty good idea, but i don't support it in 100%.
Yes, cs is dying. In my opinion, the main reason is that there are no longer any big updates. There are new pets, new store pets, and new events, but everything works the same. Adopt free pets, buy store pets, collect tokens and exchange them for event pets. I think the last big update was the one with rarities, and it wasn't a new feature, just rarity revamp.
Also, a lot of people are moving to dv, giving their pets for potatoes and quitting. And that means cs is dying even faster.
If there would be new features (for example: simple minigames, more ways to obtain c$), then maybe chicken smoothie would become alive again?
Selling cs may be a good idea, as new admins could do many new things to revive it. But we don't know what would new admins do, and there is a possibility that they could change the whole site to something players would not like.

[Hamlet]

I think this is a pretty good idea, but i don't support it in 100%.
Yes, cs is dying. In my opinion, the main reason is that there are no longer any big updates. There are new pets, new store pets, and new events, but everything works the same. Adopt free pets, buy store pets, collect tokens and exchange them for event pets. I think the last big update was the one with rarities, and it wasn't a new feature, just rarity revamp.
Also, a lot of people are moving to dv, giving their pets for potatoes and quitting. And that means cs is dying even faster.
If there would be new features (for example: simple minigames, more ways to obtain c$), then maybe chicken smoothie would become alive again?
Selling cs may be a good idea, as new admins could do many new things to revive it. But we don't know what would new admins do, and there is a possibility that they could change the whole site to something players would not like.

I disagree with the "more ways to obtain c$", as that is a large part of the site income, but apart from that, I agree. If the admins don't have time to give the site the attention it needs, why just let this place die? I'm sure many other people would be willing to take it on.

[DarknessANDLight]

I agree with everything that has been stated in this thread, there are some things in cs that seem like easy fixes but will make playing it so much easier, I also agree with some of the users that posted before about events being the same, while I don't see cs changing the style of there events, I think I lot of users would be excited if there wasn't an event that was clicking tokens and trading them in for pets

There are only 4 big events on cs, Easter, Summer, Halloween, and Christmas, and with the breaks in between them, things can get quite dull. l I would love the see more events, some that might not be based on holidays, or just a monthly event.

I would also love to see different pets in the adoption page every month because I feel like it's the same 5 species every month and the new pets are not very exciting, I mean new pets are still cool but I would love to see some of the species that there aren't a lot of in the adoptions once in a while.

I think another great thing to see would be more pets available to be bought with c$, as the amount on the site is huge and no one really wants to buy 100 of every month's store pets.

Honestly to get lots of people interested in cs again the only option I see is a big update with new features, while small updates do help, a big change would change the way people see the game and might be interested in trading and collecting pets again

I see lot's of great ideas in this thread and if just a few were implemented cs, it would really help cs become more exciting again

[charlotte!]

Agreeing with DarknessANDLight, c$ is so easy to achieve that i’ve only been able to sell my c$ at a 3 gems per 1 c$ ratio.

C$ is so undervalued and hard to trade now and that is another issue with cs...

i agree. i think c$ are so undervalued and hard to trade. i find that i lose c$ more than gaining though - people are more stingy with it in my experience than they used to be. i'm happy c$ isn't a pay to win game though, like other interactive chat sites like animal jam. but still.

[CarSeatHeadrest]

I don’t think I can really say anything that’s already been said, but I agree. I’ve been back for 2 days after being gone for almost half a year I think, and I’m honestly already getting bored. I don’t collects pets bc I don’t rlly like trading with people, but the forums can be pretty dead a lot of the time. There’d usually be about 500+ ppl during less active hours, and usually at least 1000 during busy hours when I started, now I don’t think there’s even 500 during busy hours

[䏠xote]

i support this.

to be frank, this site has become a haven for racists, homophobes, and transphobes to be hateful and aggressive with no consequence. users are still allowed to exclude LGBTQ communities from their role-plays for God's sake, and the BLM thread is used more by people trying to agitate or minimize the movement than it is supporters. CS does absolutely nothing about it and only addresses issues when they blow up too much to ignore, year after year. what happened to child-friendly? i grew up on this site, but i certainly wouldn't want my kids on it.

[superior alex]

Agreeing with DarknessANDLight, c$ is so easy to achieve that i’ve only been able to sell my c$ at a 3 gems per 1 c$ ratio.

C$ is so undervalued and hard to trade now and that is another issue with cs...

i agree. i think c$ are so undervalued and hard to trade. i find that i lose c$ more than gaining though - people are more stingy with it in my experience than they used to be. i'm happy c$ isn't a pay to win game though, like other interactive chat sites like animal jam. but still.

it would be nice to have more things we can spend c$ on. the item store is so old and outdated.. new store items would be a great way to encourage users like myself who love doing dress ups and collecting items to buy c$ for the store.

I scrolled through the news page, and I'm pretty sure the last new thing they added into the item store was that hairstyle with the buns and bangs. Having new store items would help with the currency on this website.

[nickjr]

Thank you a ton for the summary, Tailish! Super helpful and I definitely needed that.

I've only read the posts following the summary in full, but I have to say that I completely agree with Shy's post, although I found CS a little later (but still in 2008 lol). Sometimes I don't like myself because I feel like I'm being a gatekeeper for what CS should be (I do NOT feel this way when I see the exact same actions done by other members! I only feel it for myself LOL when others post stuff like that, I'm like "heck yes I completely agree this is unsuitable for CS", but then when I go to post the exact same stuff, I hesitate lol), but I've been growing increasingly uncomfortable with some of the more "radical" feature suggestions, for lack of a better word, that I've been seeing that would make CS more into a pet site than the adoptables site that it is.

That being said, I absolutely agree that we need a larger moderation team, and I have absolutely no issue with the suggestions for quality of life updates, which are essentially all of the suggestions with significant user support--I am completely on board with those as they would make CS vastly better without changing what CS really is. I desperately want to see these changes too.

Because in terms of userbase, CS may be shrinking, but in terms of the site contents? CS is still growing, even if it's slower than it used to be! We have more pets, more threads, more posts, more groups, more drawings, more things to talk about on the forums, more stuff in general... We need more quality of life updates to manage the increasing amount of content we have, and we also still don't have enough moderators to manage what we do have. Mind that since moderators have to be 18+ (for good reason) and are volunteers, chances are that the vast majority--if not all!--of them are, by definition, people who don't have acres and acres of free time.