A potential issue that comes to mind is that there are a lot of adopts in species/nolimit/cannot breed and not many in specific breeding groups, at least in comparison. There are a bunch of breeding groups with one, or none at all, species in them

What if the contest ran by another sorting category that already exists? Breeding group. That could lump some species together into larger categories (Avian, No Limit, Cannot Breed, etc.) There's still Species breeding, which can divide down the groups again, but that might help catch some of the "exploit" species that are more limited.

I see, thanks for the explanations. I think a limit to how many species would be cool, of it's being reworked, or maybe the system could refund if there's only one or two of a species. but regardless, I can't wait to see what you do with it in the future.

To clarify, the reason this is taken down is due to problems caused by species voting. Unfortunately separating out the species voting from this feature isn't possible without removing the feature entirely, since every part of the feature is built around species voting. There are three parts to the contest feature: 1. Entries. You can enter one adopt per species. To remove species voting, we will have to come up with (and code) a new system for entering the contest. 2. Voting. You can vote once per species. Again removing species means we need to recode the voting and come up with a new system for how votes are handled. 3. Rewards. Most of the rewards code is based off species votes, so this would also need to be redone. Ultimately, the whole feature would need to be redone from the ground up. This is going to take a lot more time. The Spotlight Contest was transitioned over from another site, which is why we were able to add it more easily. Making a new one will take many dozens of hours for coding, so at the very least it'll take a few weeks just focusing on that alone—but I think it might be a higher priority for us to work on fixing bugs and taking other player suggetions. This feature was nice to test out on 4dopt, but ultimately it seems to have some serious fundemental flaws. It works wonderfully on the site it came from, but didn't translate well to this site.

Judging by the conversation in the Discord the TLDR is just that lots of species makes it hard to vote effectively because going through every tab is just tedious, there were a lot of species with only one entrant and the system had potential exploits (like making an unobtainable species and then farming points by being the only entrant). There was a discussion about only selecting a certain amount of species + an other section for the species that aren't selected but that would mean a complete recoding so it's not a priority right now

If the amount of species possibilities was a problem, maybe the system could choose (ex)10 species per week to be eligable

Personally I thought the many species being allowed was awesome! And the more players there are on the site the better and fuller each species list would be!! It was GREAT that there was one winner and tons of others.

Can I ask what happened??? I thought it looked great