Boltgreywing

Mine I hope to have my revamped site up and running in june/july time frame.

The new site has an improved forum, artwork, video, and music section. Also users have been updated a bit plus more stats.

On 12/20/2017 at 5:08 PM, Pepper-Head said:

WOW they are super adorable! Thank you so much for this lovely adopt <3 

@Pepper-Head This looks really cute.

Finally got back to updating things. Last remaining task for me is getting the forum up and running then my site is fully feature complete.

On 12/4/2017 at 1:55 PM, LuciBeingLuci said:

Due to lack of people in the event (there has only me lol), the event is now extended, and it'll end day 6.

 

View full news

 

So what can i do to help?

8 hours ago, Corleone said:

Hahahaha, still a closer connection that unwanted with mugshot.

Grinch!

Stole Christmas.

10 hours ago, Shinka said:

@Boltgreywing I totally respect your disagreement, but I'd like to address a few of your counterpoints! (: (I came back up here after writing the entire post, and I'm sorry it turned out so long! I got wildly out of control somewhere part way through and couldn't stop myself.)

Out of the five or so forum packages I've researched, none of them send email notifications out of the box, though this would be very easy to implement on your end with event listeners. Email notification is a behavior that's very prevalent in full forum software—things like MyBB, Xenforo, IPB, and so on—and while I don't explicitly recommend integrating your project with most of those (they tend to have complex admin panels and a lot of features that are ultimately unnecessary when the forum is only a secondary feature) it's extremely simple to turn off email notifications. I just took a look into my Xenforo admin panel, and it looks like I could do so by flipping two or three switches.

Beyond that, forums are simple, at their most basic. But that's still time spent implementing, testing, and future regression testing; which means it's time not spent on your project's core (i.e. most important) features.

I imagine that most virtual pet sims would want the following features:

• Weighted categories, weighted forums, threads, and posts, and their respective validations
• Nested forms for threads and posts
• BBCode or Markdown parsing
• Notifications
• Permissions
• Pinning, locking, and deleting threads
• Permissions
• Soft deletion

I wrote a very long breakdown of each feature, what would go into implementing them, and time estimates for each; but it was stupidly long so I ripped it out. If you're interested, ping me and I can throw it up somewhere.

TL;DR I estimate implementing the above features would take me ~12.5 hours, including testing; versus finding and plugging in a forum package would take me ~3 hours, including time spent adding in post vistas and user titles. The custom solution estimate is not including front end work—things like general design, AJAX paging or posting, and mobile responsiveness—which offhandedly I might estimate at another 12 hours, depending on design and JavaScript experience. The package solution estimate is assuming it comes with an elegant enough front end. (Out of the packages I mentioned, Chatter has a lovely front end, but Laravel Forum's is extremely basic and would require additional design work.)

(Maybe I'll time myself later and see how long it takes me to whip up a solution with those features. Hmm.)

When your developers are also working full time jobs, your budget is small or nonexistent, and you're trying to get out an MVP asap, 12 hours (we can even bump it down to 8, to be conservative; again, not including front end work) is a lot of time. Or maybe it's not for you—then implement a custom solution to your heart's desire!

Now imagine you have a dev who gets halfway through implementing this and then bails. The next developer has to get up to speed with the already existing code, which might not be particularly difficult but is still additional time.

That said, if you already have a solution for a particular feature that works and does what you need it to do, it's probably not worth ripping it out and replacing it with a package! But if you have a page of eventual improvements you want to make, maybe take a step back and reevaluate. 

I am probably also 100% biased because I'm sick of writing forum solutions and fixing other peoples' forum solutions.

But I'm currently hooking a site up with Flarum, which is a little different than what I've been recommending because Flarum is an entirely separate app that's outside of the main project, and I had to integrate its authentication with the main project's. Still, to write a custom solution as beautiful, seamless, and responsive as Flarum would take me a metric ton of time.

Anyway that is certainly enough of me ranting about forums.

A basic PM system is simple. But my basic argument stands: it takes time and maintenance, and time is at a premium for small moonlighting teams. If you want to get into things like live/realtime updates, that's trickier. You could do write an AJAX solution, but that can be expensive depending on your request interval; but for proper realtime, you probably need to learn or brush up on sockets, which is time spent getting up to speed, implementing the solution, and then testing it.

I'm not sure what you mean by two tier, so I can't comment on that!

I appreciate the offer, but I've setup a couple before. (: When I'm learning a new web framework, I like to roll my own user authentication and authorization workflow because it touches on a little bit of everything. (Though I would never use any of these auth solutions on a live site!) My bias also comes into play here because if I never have to deal with Rails' mailer again, I can die happy.

I haven't used auditing before, but activity logs and model changelogs have been pretty vital for my workflow. (Not to mention for support on a live site! Restoring lost items is a cinch when you can see exactly where they were lost.)

Gonna skip the rest of your points because most of them boil down to the above. Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's worth the time and maintenance. I've implemented 90% of the features I listed about, as a learning experience or otherwise, and most of them are easy. Most only require one or two models and tables, basic CRUD actions, etc. But it's still reinventing the wheel! If you need a very customized or unusual solution, then that's different. Code away!

I very much disagree, but I respect that Bootstrap is not your cup of tea. I'm assuming you're talking about the HTML/CSS framework and not like, bootstrappers. Bootstrap can be a very powerful tool for teams that don't have a lot of design experience. (Back end devs are universally terrible at design, but give me something that I can use as building blocks, and I'm good to go!) Bootstrap's mobile friendly solution is eventually going to be superfluous as flexbox and css-grid pick up traction; but for now, there might not be enough browser support for those to be viable alternatives. The last software company I worked at spent a significant sum of money (a number that about made me swoon) for a UI framework and a few screens for the most important pages—and it was built off of Bootstrap 3! 

Bootstrap-based designs can look rather samey. I can usually pick out what sites are using Bootstrap, but with a little bit of custom styling, you have something decent looking for way less work than it would take to build from the ground-up. 

When I'm prototyping a hobby project, I almost always use Bootstrap, though I've taken a couple other CSS frameworks for a spin.

I'll qualify my philosophy of "Code as little as possible" with "... as long as the time spent plugging in a good package and adding in necessary features is less than the time it would take to write it yourself." If there are only a couple half-baked private message packages for your given framework, then absolutely write your own! Or if you want a "threaded" system (like how Reddit's comments work, where replies are nested), don't bludgeon an ill-fitting package into the right shape! Don't settle for something that isn't almost exactly what you need but understand the amount of effort it would take to add extra features vs start from the ground up. (Adding in post vistas? Easy. Adding a threaded post system? Probably more work than it's worth.)

This is way too long of a post, and I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record. No one philosophy is going to fit everyone's needs, but this is mine and it has served me well. (:

 

 

@Shinka: I was in the wrong when I posted it as I was emotionally charged. I am very sorry I took it out on you. Its my fault. I am just kind of mad at myself because I am not that good of a pet site developer. I can't even design a simple C++ game for my site, so that kind of contributed to the whole mess. I just don't have as much confidence in game development as I do in other aspects of programming. I need someone to help me out with building my first game cause i know its impossible for me to do this on my own. Can you help me out with the coding?

I am removing this post as it was emotionally charged and I was in a bad mood at the time I posted it. I reacted badly to a player and it was wrong of me.

On 10/27/2017 at 10:38 AM, Digital said:

Happy Halloween, now get your Demikin!

As a tricky little treat, enjoy the release of the Demikin. Available now through November 1st only!

 

@Artist @Game Owner @Members @Programmer @Writer

@Digital This is really cute.

On 8/4/2017 at 4:21 AM, chazerz said:

I love you @LIZ lol

@chazerz Hey chaz what do you think of the new Halloween adoptables?

Say how do I do this?

On 10/19/2017 at 7:31 PM, Digital said:

I believe they have definitely won the popular feature vote, which makes me feel good considering I coded it all myself.

@Digital I am sorry for being the dissenting voice on the new change. Its just I have seen so many with that type of interface and I usually only see that type of layout if a website has expired. Thats kind of why it scared me.

When a website uses a concept such as a watchlist how is it normally achieved?

Does it function as just a pure watch? [Someone just watches you without any additional functionality.]

Does it function partly as a subscription? [When new content is created does it trigger an alert to email the user.]

Should Friend functionality be included as part of the watch?

Should friends be separate from watches?

Should users start with watching only one account automatically that functions as a news feed? [For example a bot that generates just news automatically only on new members joining the site.]

Thoughts opinions on the matter anyone?

10 hours ago, Uber said:

I was just thinking about the best way to develop an inventory system and I thought this might make an interesting discussion.

So what style of inventory system do you prefer and why?

• All-in-one sortable inventories (as in all items drop into the same location, but are sortable based on item type).
• Inventory split into sections for each item type.

Do you prefer unlimited inventories or limited Inventories? For limited inventories do you prefer..

• Weight limits
• Space limits
• or Amount limits

 

Or perhaps you have other preferences. Please share.

@Uber: It depends on  what you are going for. Pokemon generation 1 lumped all items into the same box. However with gen 2 key items and other items had their own folder. This made things a lot easier to manage. One other thing to plan on is how to handle how many uses a certain item has in your inventory. If you allow each item with different sizes to be in its own class you waste a lot of inventory space. If you don't allow too few different sizes then an item with 30% uses left could become a 100% use left item. It is important to find the right balance of things.

3 hours ago, Dinocanid said:

I prefer both "all-in-one" and "folder" inventories. You can also do both at the same time, with a "show all" folder and have the remaining categories.

Limited inventories are good for strategy and server performance. You should always have amount limits in my opinion, since things can get kind of game-breaking if a user somehow gets 9999 of an item, you know? Space limits with buyable expansions are good money sinks for your game's economy, but I'm not sure about weight limits for a browser game. It kind of makes me think of if neopets had a skyrim-style carry weight system. It seems weird to me, but I guess it can be done if you're creative enough with it.

@Dinocanid Actually you are kind of forgetting Baulder's gate  had a similiar sort of system with weight. The more something weighed the less you could have. In Baulder's gate for the gamecube you were limited to how much weight you could physically carry and if you reached the limit you couldn't pick up any more items.

5 hours ago, Kesstryl said:

You know, I haven't seriously thought about giving out accounts with low account numbers because the account number is something I was obscuring as part of my security process.  The only thing people will see is your character name and character stats and info.  Usernames and account numbers are not going to be visible.  I don't know how much that will help or hurt.  I honestly wasn't going to charge for accounts anyway, it's a completely free game which will have ads.  I do plan on implementing something like removing ads for a monthly donation of any amount (a dollar or more) and having character class change being a pay for item, but I wasn't planning on monetizing a text based RPG very heavily because it's now a retro genre that I don't see having a huge player base.  I'll eventually add a few cash shop fluff like appearance items, but that's further down the road.  The game itself is fully playable right now.  I mainly need more art and to flesh out the lore and add some more features. 

@Kesstryl: Security through obscurity never really works and I have been told my security professors to never to use that approach. Obscurity doesn't make your site any safer. What makes a site safe is having multiple levels of protection. Instead of using a username and password as part of the login process you should use something else like some kind of id that only the user knows. This way your login process becomes instead of public information + private information it is private + private information this way no one other then the user who created the account can login.

That is good login security. If you want to make it more secure use capcha for only user's registering for an account not those logging in. What annoy users the most is having to go through capcha after the login information already verifies them. If they were a bot they should have not been able to register in the first place. Checking to see if it is a bot after the fact is a horribly bad idea. Account numbers should not be shown at all. Never ever show ids unless in your admin areas unless you have a purpose for them. You can never truly hide id's if they are used in the browser window.

Well I wouldn't say they are only able to see just the character name, stats, and info. There is much more you are probably going to show them. When dealing with ads you shouldn't have to many. Think of adding ads later. The most important thing is to have a limited sets of features that work really well then have many features that are incredibly broken.

Anoua brings up several really good points. She is quite knowledgeable.

3 hours ago, Anoua said:

I think it's generally better to wait until you have something more polished. If you are able to release a study stream of updates releasing earlier can work too. But it's hard to keep up that pace even if it's your full time job. 

It can be good to get feedback though, but I think it might be better served by getting a smaller group to play and test things for feedback than just publically opening as people may just get bored and leave. At least until you have SOMETHING worth playing. 

After getting that base down though then I think having more public with options for feedback and ideas is probably more useful. Doesn't have to be a full featured release then, but just at least a base level. That is what I essentially did for Eliyo. Would have been a lot longer wait if I had to wait until the game was 'complete' as I have a ton planned for it. And it has been nice to have players and get some feedback and being able to make updates for players is motivating as well.

For me though definitely wanted something more than just a login, chat, and forums. Still I do have trouble retaining people, because I haven't finished up features that give more long term goals. So that's something to keep in mind.

A note on the low account security comment. Obscuring the account number doesn't really help with security. I think it could help with immersiveness however. But if you want things to be secure, then validate ALL user input (this includes url data, anything that comes from the front end should be treated as suspect). 

I think you need to have at least something complete. If nothing is really polished or complete the feedback probably won't be super useful, since it'll likely revolve around finishing things you were already planning to finish. It could be useful if you are wanting to discuss those plans with more people, and get feedback before finishing

@Anoua: These are really good points to bring up in the development of a great game. I am probably going the opposite way in all this. I am only going have 4 big features for my petsite's Beta but they will be really polished. The four bread and butter features of my site will be the forum, videos, artwork, and music along with donations. Is that a very bad idea? Is that not a good way to develop things. How many features is too little?

10 hours ago, Anoua said:

Are you referring to your new video upload section?

It's a neat concept I haven't seen before, though not sure I would have any particular use for it myself. Are the videos directly hosted on your site and viewed using your sites bandwidth? I could see that being expensive so that might be something to keep in mind. 

I think the general idea of being able to upload any creative endeavors to the site is an interesting concept and may appeal to more artistic people.

@Anoua: I am.

All the videos will be hosted directly from my website but only two formats will be allowed. Mp4 and Ogv files as they are the only html5 allowed files that function with multiple browsers. I figured that I'd like to provide it as free for creative endevors as well as a place to help sponsor other petsites. I heard a lot of talk at how bad youtube is and so I decided to develop my own video section to be a lot more user friendly.

Hey guys I like to know what you guys think of my latest bit of news.

I'd like to know if I was able to pull this off and if there is any additions i should add?

Has something like this been done before in a petsite?

What is the thoughts from the community?

I am finally done with building my video section. It required a lot of time and energy.It was a big challenge but I was able to pull it off. I am planning on taking another break as it wore me out. With this new section I am now able to have users to be able to upload videos.

Channel:

Channel show view:

Mainplaylist view:

Subplaylist view:

Movie view:

Movie view part 2:

Homepage with movies:

Homepage with videos part 2:

View full news

When designing a site initially you should plan on developing no more than four really cool features. Try to polish these four basic features as best you can before releasing it as a beta. This will draw users in and will decrease the amount of development time you need. Once you have seen that these features are working release another set of four. Keep doing this until you feel confident to open up your site fully. By adding small features each time your site will begin to grow at a steady pace till you have a full blown site.

One question you should ask yourself is how do you want to handle your registration process. Do you want it open, closed, or semi-open? Having an open registration is the easiest one to develop for. All you need is a user table that will handle all your users registrations. Users are automatically approved and can access the system. Downside to this approach is it is very open to bots to exploit it. When users signup is closed users are unable to access their profile.

Closed registration takes a bit more coding. To do closed registration you need to have a separate table called signup which will handle all user signups, registered users will be stored in the user's table. The admin will then be able to close down the registration process if he needs to. Downside to this system is that it will require the admin to manually create the users in the users table from the signup table data.

Semi-open requires the most coding of the three approaches. Semi-open registration requires two tables like the closed registration process does but it does things a bit differently. When users signup through the signup table the admin or staff can manually approve or deny the individual registrations. If the registration is approved a new user account is created automatically from the data specified in the signup table. If denied the information is then deleted but if coded correctly can be used in a seperate filter table to prevent other bots from gaining access to the registration system. This system is the best of both open and closed registration systems. Semi-open systems registration can also be closed as well without affecting user profiles. Main disadvantage is that the coding required requires a lot of time and effort and tends to be kind of complicated.

Well I just built a clock. It now has the potential to be displayed in Military Time or Standard Time as well as a variety of user timezones.

I thought it add a bit of variety to my site.

On 9/11/2017 at 5:36 AM, owlmanatt said:

Is calz executable?

chmod +x calz

@owlmanatt: It is as can be seen by ls -la

eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ ls -la
total 44
drwxrwxr-x 2 eric eric  4096 Sep 10 14:44 .
drwxrwxr-x 3 eric eric  4096 Sep 10 14:44 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 eric eric   579 Sep  9 23:38 boxrate.cpp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 eric eric  2976 Sep 10 14:44 boxrate.o
-rwxrwxr-x 1 eric eric 13528 Sep 10 14:44 calz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 eric eric   130 Sep 10 14:44 Makefile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 eric eric   952 Sep  8 22:59 tax.cpp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 eric eric  2448 Sep 10 14:44 tax.o

4 hours ago, owlmanatt said:

The `calz` binary should be in your shell's $PATH. $PATH is a list of folders it'll check for executables, which is what allows you to just type calz.

You have two options: you can move it to a folder in $PATH (run `echo $PATH` to get the list), or you can add another dir to $PATH.

nevans@chi:~$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games:/home/nevans/.composer/vendor/bin/

nevans@chi:~$ cd test_913/

nevans@chi:~/test_913$ ls
dummy_executable

# This is the problem
nevans@chi:~/test_913$ dummy_executable
-bash: dummy_executable: command not found
nevans@chi:~/test_913$ ./dummy_executable
Hello world! I have run successfully!

# Solution 1 - move it somewhere in the $PATH
nevans@chi:~/test_913$ sudo cp dummy_executable /usr/local/bin
[sudo] password for nevans:

nevans@chi:~/test_913$ dummy_executable
Hello world! I have run successfully!

nevans@chi:~/test_913$ which dummy_executable
/usr/local/bin/dummy_executable

# Solution 2 - add a new folder to the $PATH.
nevans@chi:~/test_913$ echo 'PATH="$PATH:/home/nevans/test_913"' >> ~/.bashrc
nevans@chi:~/test_913$ source ~/.bashrc

nevans@chi:~/test_913$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games:/home/nevans/.composer/vendor/bin/:/home/nevans/test_913

nevans@chi:~/test_913$ dummy_executable
Hello world! I have run successfully!
nevans@chi:~/test_913$ which dummy_executable
/home/nevans/test_913/dummy_executable

Note that solution #2 is only adding that dir for your current user. If the webserver needs to add an entry to its $PATH, that'd be a mite bit different.

@owlmanatt: I tried this solution you gave me but it kind of failed.

eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ calzNo command 'calz' found, did you mean:
 Command 'cal' from package 'bsdmainutils' (main)
 Command 'calc' from package 'apcalc' (universe)
calz: command not found
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ echo $PATH~/Resources/Code/donationbox/:/home/eric/bin:/home/eric/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ sudo cp calz ~/Resources/Code/donationbox
[sudo] password for eric:
cp: cannot create regular file '/home/eric/Resources/Code/donationbox': No such file or directory
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ source ~/.profile
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ ls
boxrate.cpp  boxrate.o  calz  Makefile  tax.cpp  tax.o
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ echo $PATH/home/eric/bin:/home/eric/.local/bin:~/Resources/Code/donationbox/:/home/eric/bin:/home/eric/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ echo 'PATH="$PATH:/home/eric/Resources/Code/dbox"' >> ~/.bashrc
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ source ~/.bashrc
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ echo $PATH/home/eric/bin:/home/eric/.local/bin:~/Resources/Code/donationbox/:/home/eric/bin:/home/eric/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/home/eric/Resources/Code/dbox
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ ls
boxrate.cpp  boxrate.o  calz  Makefile  tax.cpp  tax.o
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ calz
No command 'calz' found, did you mean:
 Command 'cal' from package 'bsdmainutils' (main)
 Command 'calc' from package 'apcalc' (universe)
calz: command not found
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$ ./calz
eric@eric-PORTEGE-R830:~/Projects/Local/Websites/Resources/Code/dbox$

I am having difficulty setting variables in linux.

I have a program called calz but it seeing it as ./calz instead of calz to run. Its C++ and I was wondering how do I tell it to do calz instead of ./calz.

I have tried changing my linux profile but it wound up screwing it more and I could use a lot of help to get this working correctly.

I need this to make my donationbox ruby code actually work.

Hey guys I now have videos now working on my homepage upon the newest content being reviewed and will change depending on the user's age limit.

Only 3 videos will be allowed at a time on the front page.

This is only working on my linux computer but this a significant boost to my moral.

All that is left is the mailer and a couple of fixes I still need to do.

4 minutes ago, Dinocanid said:

I might be understanding wrong, but you could try zooming out of the page while recording. Google chrome allows you to zoom out, and I'm sure Firefox does it to. That's what I do when I need to take full-page screenshots.

@Dinocanid: I am not talking about recording videos. I am talking about already recorded videos that are uploaded at the default 100% zoom size. Like how much of the screen should the videos take up?

Would it be this much <-- -->, <----     --->, or <---                                                                                                                                                                     ------>

That type of thing.

How big should video content be in terms of width when being dealt with from a reviewers perspective of new content to a site?

I am a bit curious as my current system takes up 85% of the screen in the movie section which is good there but from a review perspective it feels like it needs to be smaller.

Any advice guys?

7 hours ago, Hare said:

Oh! This sounds like an interesting feature, and I can see why it's popular. I can also see why there's an issue with players wanting exclussitivity. I added a customs feature on my current game, which allows you to order new colors (existing colors in the game, but for breeds that don't come in that color). There's been a few times when players were confused and thought they were getting exclussive rights to the color. Anyway, thank you for all of your input, and your site sounds very interesting and fun for artists. =o It is nice to hear that this is being done.

 

Agree that a site where players create their own base would need to be started that way. You would know, as your site already has a playerbase and culture set. These are things I wouldn't have thought of, though. Very good points.

The space and cost issue was something I was concerned about. Yes, this would be a lot of images hosted, and it would need some way to make revenue even with players creating most of the items and pet artwork for the game (cutting out those expenses). I've seen the custom items before I think on Subeta? it's a nice feature. =o

Yes, only same species would be able to breed. =o That way it could be automatic, no waiting on staff or extra work involved. I like the Aywas system too, but yeah that's been done already!  We could have both though, and use a manual method for the crossbreeding. Maybe players would pay for that.

Thank you for your input! Yeah I'm thinking this kind of idea could go very wrong or very right depending on how its executed. It will need some careful planning! 

Sweet! Does it have the layering and breeding too?

@Hare: I don't have breeding and I don't really know exactly what layering is. When a user creates a pet on my site it goes through an approval phase. If the pet is approved then the user receives a small amount of points for its creation and is then automatically made available to everyone on the site. When it has not yet been reviewed only the admin and pet creator can see the pet itself.

If it is denied then the user needs to just edit the content to have it reviewed again. Pet uploading only requires a file of either png, gif, jpeg to be submitted the site itself.