The Persona of the Week Contest has been judged! Congratulations to Brett on winning this week's competition.

This week's theme: Maeva

The poll booth has a new poll available for you.

This time, we would like to know:
Have you collected all the new Witch freebies for 2023?.

Go There: Poll Booth

Thanks for participating!

Congratulations to the following winners of Luck of the Draw, winning $100,000 PB :
blueeyes
horseg27
blueeyes
horseg27
Moon_born

If you want to be a winner next time, check out the Luck of the Draw - Available at the House of Luck in Badgeria!

Yay!...It's Halloween and time to gather some yummy candies from everyone and hope no one plays any tricks!


All decked out in my little devil costume, I went out the door and down the sidewalk.
When out of nowhere I happened upon this glowing goo trail. Curiosity got the best of me, so I just HAD to follow it!

It was getting kind of creeeeeeeepy, as I heard noises that made me tremble to the bones. However, I JUST had to keep going, even though the area was getting very heavily treed. I crept deeper into the woods, when I recalled an old town myth of a hidden area that all the undead gathered at. Even knowing that, I still NEEDED to see what the noise was and why the goo trail was there!



I very carefully, though even a bit hesitant, kept walking, when the goo trail....just stopped! I looked around, it was dark and I was scared to DEATH!..The noises got LOUDER, I wanted to run, but couldn't.

A tiny light appeared a short ways in front of me, so I slowly walked up to it and that is when I SEEN it!.........

It was an extremely frightful and paralyzing sight!
It was Selene33's Pumpkin Patch!

I looked fast and then run swiftly home before anyone or thing could see me!

Congrats! You win a boootiful trophy for your profile and ONE free month account upgrade!


Sign up here for your chance to win tomorrow!

It's time for a Developer Update! In today's post, we'll give you all the details for our new Pinglists feature, give you a glimpse of a major rehaul to our Custom Skins submission system, and catch you up with where we're at with Coliseum PVP.

The dust from the launch of the Achievements system and our first round of accessibility updates has settled, so the engineering team is once again moving to tackle multiple projects at once. Below, we'll give you some details on how things are going!



Pinglists

As of this post, we've launched a new Flight Rising forum feature called Pinglists.

We've been reading and considering your thoughtful discussions and feedback regarding better built-in support for notifying large groups of players in forum threads. The name is borrowed from the colloquial "Ping lists/Pinglists" term¢there are over a million references in our forums alone¢that players have been utilizing as a common method for thread authors to notify their readers of updates. These lists are essentially just long blocks of "@" commands and are very popular for community interactions like player-run events, hatcheries, and selling custom skins, just to name a few.

One of the biggest reasons we received this kind of suggestion from you centered largely around the fact that the act of building and maintaining these lists often happened outside/off the Flight Rising website, such as chat platforms, open collaborative documents like Google Sheets, etc.

To complicate things further, not all Flight Rising players used those types of external applications and methods to begin with, so list organizers would need to handle inclusion of those players on their lists manually.

We came to find that constructing lists like this, and with some of them being massive in size, in a public space was (and is!) both a headache and a security risk. We needed to find a solution that would fit the needs of our players that provided a safe environment for curating and managing those communities.

Enter "pinglists" proper!

The concept is fairly simple: Players can create their own distinct pinglists directly on Flight Rising, share them with other players, and those players can voluntarily subscribe to the pinglist¢without ever leaving the website!

The process is, by design, entirely in-house and opt-in.


Isn't this just the same thing as starring a thread to add it to your Forum Subscriptions?

Pinglists are intentionally designed to run alongside forum subscriptions as another way to more flexibly control your notifications. For instance, with today's launch, the following scenarios are now possible:

• You are unsubscribed from a thread because you're not interested in receiving a notification every time that thread is updated, but you do want to be notified when the thread author chooses to ping about specific updates.
• You have forum pings entirely disabled, but still want to receive alerts from a pinglist or even multiple pinglists.
• You have forum pings, subscribed thread alerts, and pinglist pings all enabled.
• You have forum pings, subscribed thread alerts, and pinglist pings all disabled, effectively turning off notifications for anything forum-related.

This additional level of agency is something that we know many of you would appreciate, so we took extra care in making sure it was included. The power is yours!

Creating Pinglists

Let's say that you run a forum thread talking about how much you love puppies. You would like to be able to notify a group of players who share that same interest whenever you make an update to your puppies thread, or perhaps even another thread where puppies are being discussed. A pinglist is perfect for that!

To make a pinglist:

1. Tap the following button at the top of the Flight Rising forums:
   
   
   
   
2. This will take you to your Pinglists management page, which allows you access to creating or editing new lists, as well as listing every pinglist you're already subscribed to.
3. In the top right corner of the page, click the Create a New Pinglist button.
4. From here, you can give your pinglist a name and designate an icon to give it some extra flair.
5. When you're finished, click Create Pinglist in the top right, and you're ready to start sharing and/or using it!

Sharing Pinglists

To make the process of subscribing to pinglists as easy as possible, we've implemented a brand new BBcode forum widget that will help you share it with prospective subscribers.

Once you've created a pinglist using the steps above, you'll you have the option to copy the widget command to your clipboard. When this command is formatted into a forum post, it will render a cute little widget showing the name of your pinglist, the icon you've chosen, and how many players are subscribed to it. Would-be followers can simply click the widget to sign up¢it's that simple!

If you click the widget for a pinglist you've already subscribed to, it will take you that pinglist's page, where you can unsubscribe if you don't want or need updates from it any longer. You can also tap the flag emoji in the bottom right corner of the widget to easily unsubscribe without navigating away from the thread.

Side note: these widgets fit really well in forum signatures!








Using Pinglists

Once you've created your pinglist, you can use its unique ping command (appears right next to the widget command mentioned above) within a forum post to notify its subscribers. Like individual pings, this will generate an alert for every player on that pinglist, so use it wisely!

Summing Up & Sunsetting Mass Pings

One final note: In the near future, we will be removing the option to send "mass pings". Simply put, this means the method of pinging multiple users that has existed until now.

Among the other good reasons we had for implementing pinglists, cutting down on large blocks of individual ping commands is in itself an optimization and could help improve the browsing experience in the forums especially.

While we have yet to determine when we will turn that forum functionality off, we want you to know that the "mass-pings" threshold will be 12 pings, or '@' commands. Please note, that we reserve the right to evaluate this cap after its implementation and adjust it based on how the permitted 12 pings are used, or mis-used. We will communicate the "mass-ping" end date to you several times before pings are capped. This is a transition period and we want to make sure you and your fellow players have time to adjust to this new system.

That being said: we encourage all players that curate these lists¢especially the large ones¢to start moving over to the integrated Pinglist system now so that when the time comes, you will have all your communities covered. This is not just feature adoption, it will actively make your Flight Rising experience more secure by removing the need to leverage other platforms where we're unable to investigate, identify, and action bad-faith or malicious third-parties.

We want to thank our community for not only finding new and interesting ways to keep in touch with one another directly on Flight Rising, but for sharing the desire for us to create and improve those channels. We're constantly reviewing your thoughts and discussions and happy to provide tools where we feel it will genuinely benefit all players. We hope you really enjoy creating and sharing pinglists with one another!

Custom Skins

Custom skins & accents have been a hallmark feature of Flight Rising since it launched, and in that time, we've made a few small changes here and there to try and help accommodate creators and offer a better turnaround time for repeat orders, or "reprints". The custom skins system has been so popular, in fact, that we're struggling a bit to keep pace with all the wonderful creations coming in.

Over the past couple months, we have been starting work on a rehaul to the entire system, and we wanted to share a few of the early concepts with you today.

Better Flow, Better Feedback

One of the most challenging parts about the current system is that there's not much in the way of feedback as you are setting up and submitting your order request. Because custom skins have to follow a fairly strict set of rules, we understand that it can be hard to remember them all when creating your art, and even more discouraging if your submission is sent back for required edits, especially when that turnaround time can be a few days or longer.

Our current plans are to break the submission process into a few more steps that will provide skin creators with critical feedback earlier. If implemented correctly, an artist will know if their art meets the image size, coverage, and formatting requirements long before the submission even takes place. This should allow the player submitting the design a chance to make any necessary fixes and alterations before the skin is reviewed by our team, which in turn will hopefully improve the fulfillment time for skin item creation.

Here are a few (but not all) of the systemic checks we are hoping to build directly into the submission process:

• The system will ensure your image file is the proper size in pixels.
• The system will ensure your image file is of the correct document format (.png)
• The system will evaluate whether your art extends beyond permitted sections on the selected dragon sprite.
• The system will provide you with a percentage estimation of how much of the dragon sprite your art covers, which determines whether the design is a skin or an accent.

The reasons listed above are the most common reasons that skin submissions are rejected and sent back¢barring rule-violating content drawn right into the artwork¢so we're hopeful that changes like this will improve turnaround time, reduce confusion, and make the skin and accent submission system experience more pleasant and streamlined for everyone.

Below is a mockup of what this interface might look like:




Your Skin, Your Icon

Another improvement we're hoping to include is allowing the author of a skin submission to design their own item icon. This concept bears fruit in two major ways:

• Artists get to choose which part of their skin they want to highlight in the actual item's icon, which is what all other players see.
• It entirely removes a manual and time-consuming process from our skin moderation team.

The goal is: once your artwork has made it through the evaluation checks (mentioned in the section above this), you'll be presented with an interface where your skin art will be layered beneath the skin or accent icon template, and that template having a transparent cut-out to directly represent how the final item icon will display. Easy-to-use controls on this page would enable you to pan and zoom that artwork around so that you can showcase what you believe to be the best representative section of your skin's artwork.

Below is a mockup of what this interface might look like:




This part of the flow is really exciting to us, because it means custom skin orders can be fulfilled so much more more quickly than before.

Beyond that, we are making a lot of technical improvements under the hood that will further aid our skin moderation team to more rapidly generate the in-game items themselves and ship them back to the players. There's a lot to look forward to!

Reprints

One thing that our team hadn't fully considered when we launched Flight Rising was that players would later return to the Custom Skins system with the desire to make simple "reprints" of skins they already ordered and had fulfilled. We did not build the tool to support this order type in the beginning. Obviously, we've learned a ton about the creators in our community since then, and it became clear: a simplified reprint process was going to be essential.

We're happy to say that full reprint support is a focal part of our work on the system revamp, and here is our current idea behind how it might work:

1. You submit a skin or an accent order and have it fulfilled by our team.
2. The skins produced from that fulfillment (because they have passed evaluation and have been created) would be flagged as eligible for reprints.
3. You visit a page showing every skin item you have submitted that are eligible for reprints and, as long as you have the appropriate blueprint(s) in your inventory, initiate an automated reprint on the skin of your choosing.
4. The really cool part? We want this to be nearly instant.

Now, there will be some caveats and limitations, at least at first.

As much as we would like it, reprint eligibility will not be fully retroactive. The technical changes are significant enough that we can't flag all previously-ordered skins as eligible for instant reprints. There are a few reasons for that:

• There are thousands of custom skins and when you make a global data change to all of them, it is both non-trivial and carries data-related risks.
• Over the 10 years Flight Rising has been running, there have been changes and updates to the rules for player conduct and the skin system itself. A skin that was ordered and fulfilled 7 years ago may not meet the qualifications of the system today.

That being said, the reprint page will communicate the reprint eligibility status of all your skins, and it is our goal to allow you to re-submit older skin submissions through a truncated version of the new flow so that they can be reviewed again. Due to all of the changes discussed so far, we feel that even this process will be quicker, so as long as your skin meets the current version of our rules, it should make it through fulfillment and then be flagged for instant reprints going forward.

Below is a mockup of what the reprint page might look like:





Coliseum PVP

We know it's been awhile since we provided an update on the revamp of the Coliseum PVP system, so we wanted to say something briefly in this Dev Update. We apologize that it's taken awhile to roll this one out; much of the reason for that were other high-priority projects taking focus, namely the recent Achievements system, which was a 9-month full team effort.

While we still don't have much in the way of concrete information for you today, we are happy to say that the feature is quickly approaching an important internal milestone and we will soon be conducting playtests as part of an internal alpha within our team. We've made some modifications to the scope of that alpha so that we can truly target the important networking and infrastructure changes that needed to be built as the foundation for our future plans.

If internal alpha testing is successful, we will make an update to the community on our plans for kicking off a public beta, which we hope you will be a part of! Our first goal is narrow and simple: general stability, connectivity, and flexibility. The beta will focus on what we're calling "Friend Battles", which are voluntary, invite-based 1v1 battles with no stakes. There will be no matchmaking systems or ratings as part of this first phase, so that we can focus solely on the system successfully accommodating many concurrent multiplayer instances.

Another thing that this particular project is teaching us is how we can build a robust and modern multiplayer framework for Flight Rising. The successes and failures of Coliseum PVP testing will inform us how we might be able to implement the backbone of other major features in our development plans.

"Adventure" and "Dragonmeet" are terms that have been around for a long time, and while there isn't a lot we can say (yet), creating a stable multiplayer ecosystem will be integral in making sure those projects (or whatever name or form they end up taking) are set up for success. The Coliseum PVP system isn't just a rewrite, it's part of a larger R & D initiative for the future of Flight Rising!

---

Thanks again for taking this journey with us! We hope this peek inside our workshop was interesting, and we appreciate your patience while we're tinkering back here. We are looking forward to how the community interacts with the new Pinglist system!

Last week's round of What Am I has ended.

The item description was: Some ichie`s you just can't trust.
The answer was: Black Heart Ichie.

3 out of 4 Ichuans answered correctly.

A new round of What Am I has started. Good luck!

Yay!...It's Halloween and time to gather some yummy candies from everyone and hope no one plays any tricks!


All decked out in my little devil costume, I went out the door and down the sidewalk.
When out of nowhere I happened upon this glowing goo trail. Curiosity got the best of me, so I just HAD to follow it!

It was getting kind of creeeeeeeepy, as I heard noises that made me tremble to the bones. However, I JUST had to keep going, even though the area was getting very heavily treed. I crept deeper into the woods, when I recalled an old town myth of a hidden area that all the undead gathered at. Even knowing that, I still NEEDED to see what the noise was and why the goo trail was there!



I very carefully, though even a bit hesitant, kept walking, when the goo trail....just stopped! I looked around, it was dark and I was scared to DEATH!..The noises got LOUDER, I wanted to run, but couldn't.

A tiny light appeared a short ways in front of me, so I slowly walked up to it and that is when I SEEN it!.........

It was an extremely frightful and paralyzing sight!
It was Ramon's Pumpkin Patch!

I looked fast and then run swiftly home before anyone or thing could see me!

Congrats! You win a boootiful trophy for your profile and ONE free month account upgrade!


Sign up here for your chance to win tomorrow!

Congratulations to our Snapz! of the week winner: M947382


If you want to have a chance to win next week, make sure to keep your Snapz! updated and current for the season.

Today's winning Mega Money Madness number is: 3917

There were NO winners.

If you want to be a winner next time, check out the Mega Money Madness under the GAMES icon.

Congratulations to the following winners of our Scavenger Hunt:
Dragonflower, Suzanne38, QueenFlower, Drottning, d4rk_saga, steenbokker, lynxcat, Kazzy, jamileigh17, fifercats, Oz, ralmap, RedMist, Malorta, joey11, SweetFire, Caleby, AnitaCupaCoffee, Smudged_Note, Newtatious, Eanda, -Twixy-, ARB408, crys_4now, Paul123456, fireheartone, blueeyes, Kathrina, fulpgirls, bellcatsmeow, Bunchy, Zero, Buliwyf, Cindermella, TheMetal,
They were randomly selected out of the 35 correct entries and have a received a vault code for Investigator Alvac Stuffy


The correct answer was: Chisel


Play the Scavenger Hunt on the 25th day of every month!

There's a lot to do, a lot to see, and a lot to buy! :D

Here, have a handy dandy Festival Thread as a guide.

However, don't look if you don't want spoilers. (But then you might miss something!)

Mwaaa haaa haa hahaaaaaaaa

Happy Danse Macabre!



All the pumas and petites are putting on their costumes and attending the Danse!

Visit user profiles each hour to collect goodies!

All you have to do is knock on the door..







We also have a campaign!

Each profile click will contribute to the new campaign.

[ Attend the Danse Macabre ]





New Trunks & Shop!

Last, but not least, we have some wonderful new Trunks this year!
Additionally all of the trunks (new and old!) have been moved to a new shop.



[ Something Wicked ]

You will find the old trunks there for 7TE!

Plus our new Trunks for 5TE!

¢¢ Vintage Masquerade Elephant Costume Trunk
¢¢ Vintage Masquerade Hedgehog Costume Trunk
¢¢ Vintage Masquerade Zebra Costume Trunk




Click for the Vintage Elephant Sample
Click for the Vintage Hedgehog Sample
Click for the Vintage Zebra Sample


Also a reminder that we still have a Buy 5 Get 5 sale on Tiger Eyes right now!

[ Buy TE ]



Sorry for the delay everyone, I hope you enjoy the Danse Macabre!

Past Events Now Available

As with last year, several past Halloween events have returned. Revisit the 2017 Hatchling Dress-Up, 2019 Rise of the Zombies, and 2021 Haunted Harvest events for the next two weeks (until 11/8).

New Event: Pumpkin Carving

In this year’s event, carve new homes for Pumpkin Dragons. Design your own, or choose from several patterns and see how accurately you can recreate them. More patterns (and decoration capabilities) will unlock throughout the event.

Trick or Treating

As in past years, trick-or-treating is enabled across the site. Find hidden treats all over and click them to grab them. There's 54 items this year, and you can once again gather old treats as well. Trick-or-treating will be available for the full two weeks of the event—perfect for catching up on years past.

Halloween Dragon Breeding

Halloween dragons from previous years are breedable until November 1. New event dragons won't be able to breed until next year. In addition, the Halloween event biome has returned. Grab previous Halloween dragons directly from the cave, but only until November 1. There's no limits here either, so catch them before they're gone.

A new dragon will be released on 10/31 and drop for 24 hours. After that, it's gone until next year.

Congratulations to luvedragon, who has just won the Ichu Lottery! The jackpot was worth 37,000 iP and the item prize was Malfunctioning Lepardos Robot!

This week's item prize will be Rainbow Devia! Lottery is drawn every Wednesday.

Winners announced for: End of Subtember Trivia Raffle Create an Existing Sub Design a NEW Sub Winner Winner! Winners announced!     End of Subtember Trivia Raffle: .♥.  NIDA / 20725 - Gold IS Token of choice 👻SPOOKIMBO👻 / 43466 - Silver IS Token of choice -  Excluding mystery, seasonal, and limited release. PAINTEDSTAR💡 / 370341 - DNA of choice (not Staff only) ANWOOO / 53238 - DNA of Choice (not Staff only) SPOOKY JULIE / 46218 - Dye of choice (not Staff only) VEINANGEL / 63016 - Dye of choice (not Staff only) AES / 356230 - 5 CWP SPOOKY JULIE / 46218 - 5 CWP МΙ∂ΗΙТЄ / 23012 - 3 CWP ESTEL / 366287 - 3 CWP Create an Existing Sub: .♥.  Grand Prize (dress up custom, judged by staff): Calm, 150538 First Place (RNG, undressed custom) Shadowed Star, 67770 Second Place (RNG, 10 CWP) MatchSticks, 376970