PetRescue Platform Release Notes Archive (2020)

In the few seconds of loading our website, you may have sniffed across a rather embarrassing flash of broken checkboxes and button styles. Well, if you did - we’ve now updated our checkbox and radio systems across the site. It’ll also make using the forms on the platform as smooth as your doggo’s freshly washed coat!

As your postman is probably aware, no one likes to be barked at or yelled at - even if it is in the form of a flash message to indicate a form submission error. So we’ve made some friendly language improvements and now these alerts are a little less yelly, and a little more supportive.

In preparation for summer just around the corner, our Devvies did some SERIOUS spring cleaning! This included a bunch of purr-formance impurr-ovements, code clean-up and refactoring - enhancing the design, structure and implementation of the software, while preserving its functionality!

We meant it when we said last month that we value your inbox and the privilege of alerting you with potential new furry family members. We also understand that you could be on the search for a foster doggo, a kid-friendly kitten and a senior sheep all at the same time! In considering this, we’ve created a new pet alerts page and form making it easier for pet lovers to set up and manage multiple pet alerts, all with different personalised filters!

Yes - it’s November, and you know what that means! With Christmas less than a month away, our Devvies have a new feature in their sleigh! Like Santa’s little helpers, our Devvies have worked away on a thoughtful Christmas surprise for your pet-lovin’ loved ones. Whether it be a last minute panic shop (we’ve all been there), a plan to win the ‘best gift of the year’ award or you’d like to give a thoughtful gift that makes a difference to the lives of pets - you can now give the gift of creating happiness and saving lives with an official PetRescue Christmas gifting donation! When gifting this donation, you can now select the card style of your choice, and write a thoughtful message as to why you chose this gift for them too (they must be a pretty special human)!

The pet alert email design has received a refresh! We think it’s now as cool as a cat’s pyjamas. Now, it’s been realigned with on-site pet profiles, highlighting important aspects of the pet up front - improving promotion of pet listings AND including even more relevant content to encourage potential adopters to view the pet’s profile.

Extra natural language search tools added at the top of the listings page to help adopters find their furry, feathery or scaly friend!

We moved some code during an upgrade... aaaaaaand had to remove it again (we accidentally broke something, but then we fixed it - hooray!).

Our coding critters added handy dandy proactive code checks to our system so minor fractures on the website no longer affect the entire central nervous system.

Member rescue organisations work hard to respond to the claw-lossal amount of pet enquiries they receive. We've added some insights panels for rescues to be able to see and manage their total enquiry counts in their entirety.

Got a big heart but only a single bed big enough to share with a small doggo? Well, as part of the MatchMakers initiative, the size and gender info have now been added to dog listing cards to increase the visibility of suitability for adopters on the search for a furry family member.

When your doggo just isn’t cut out for security duties, we’ve got you! We’ve added the security measure of ReCaptcha to more areas of the website; helping to prevent pesky scammers and increase security to keep out unwanted bot mail.

Policy level filters enabled for potential adopters to search by the adoption paw-licies of the particular Member rescue organisation. Adding transparency with adoption policies means that expectations can be managed right from the initial pet search stages.

BIG news for our Member rescue organisations who like adding their purr-sonal touch when bulk messaging enquirers! We introduced customisable mass-message for when a pet is placed on-hold - ensuring enquirers can be kept up to date on the status of pets straight from the horse's mouth.

Humanely removed a pesky bug causing some display issues with pet listing videos.

As the stars align in finding your furry counterpart, so too should our platform pop-ups, so our Devvies fixed this issue on all devices.

We’ve fine tuned the adopter profile place-howl-der text to provide an example to pet lovers of what should be included in their adopter profile at a minimum; creating a better adopter outcome AND improving the quality of enquiries for our Member rescue organisations to boot!

For our Member rescue organisations who utilise shelter management software, we can now sync even more listings! Previously, enabling this external software meant those groups could only sync profiles of dogs and cats to our platform - well, now they can share a whole load of other species too! Hello, turtles and llamas!

Internal group statistics panels added to remind Member rescue organisations ​​of their impact and achievements. Time to celebrate those big AND little wins (i.e. their number of pets listed, pets adopted and profile views!).

We’ve been building bots! Long gone are the days of manually pushing changes up to the website as our Devvies have now made it is paw-ssible to ship these changes automatically. This means we can get these changes to you as fast as a dog will react when you say ‘walkies’! This clever automation creates an extra 4 hours of Devvie time per week which equates even more time to make even more platform improvements!

Our Member rescue organisations already have more to juggle than an otter (seriously, otters juggle rocks... if you didn’t know, well, now you do!). So we’ve made the onboarding process more efficient for new Members to integrate their external animal management software with our PetRescue platform.

We have A LOT in common with man’s best fur-iend, including the desire to follow our nose and roam freely (and securely)! So we’ve added a bunch of extra menu links for pet lovers to sniff out all content more easily around the site!

We’ve got a Source-ey new update when it comes to requirements for pet adoptions in Victoria. As of July 2019, all pets advertised for adoption are required by law to come along with their very own Source Number. To ensure that all listings on the PetRescue platform adhere to this, we’ve opened the lines of communication between our system and the VIC Pet Exchange Register - meaning all listings will meow be cross-checked to comply with Government paw-licies.

You know that feeling of getting home after a day at work and your furry family member knocks you over with pure excitement and sloppy kisses? Well, that’s what our system experiences when our Member rescue organisations get showered with thousands of loving enquiries for their pets seeking a home. This experience unfortunately caused a borked profile management feature to hang for listings that had thousands of enquiries, resulting in it taking dog years to load. We’ve fixed that issue so our platform can now keep up with ALL the loooove!

Pet listing pages on our platform were running on dif-fur-ent services; and the delayed sync of these services caused some mismatch mayhem between what our Members saw in their list of pets and what showed in the public search. Thanks to our Devvies - the search page services now receives data faster so this means the group’s listing page and public pet search page now claw-rrectly show the same pets (okay, that’s enough puns for one month… ).

Impact panel added on our homepage to celebrate our collective impact together as a rescue community - including the number of pets adopted, amount of food donations and the new innovations in progress!

Look, if you thought you were getting distracted at work by viewing 15 pets per page on our platform then you might as well pour yourself a cuppa and settle in as we’ve gone ahead and upped the ante again to 24 pets listed per page! And of course there’s always the option to view more (which we would expect you to do anyway).

Searching for your furry, feathery or scaly friend shouldn’t be complicated, in fact it should be so easy that it feels natural! At the top of the pet listings page, you may have sniffed across a new natural language search confirmation feature (i.e. “you’ve found this many pets in this area.”) This special feature will make a claw-lossal improvement to accessibility and clarity while on your search for your new best mate!

A heckin’ cool Pet Hackathon Project has just landed with a page to go with it! Read more here *jazz hands*

Unlike Scooby Doooobyyy Dooooo, the pets on our platform aren’t down for mystery. All pet enquiries made should provide loads of information to help rescue organisations determine the compatibility between the pet and their potential new family up front, so we’ve created a toolkit on the enquiry page. You’ll now see an info checklist, reminder of the specific pet’s needs and placeholder text to guide your enquiry. Already, these tools have resulted in quite a significant increase in the length of enquiries, with inclusion of details about the enquirers home and lifestyle. Fun fact - the average enquiry length has increased by 184.15324557532807 characters, meaning a better chance of finding the most compatible match!

Removed a bunch of dependencies on third party code to accelerate your experience on the site. It's housekeeping, but someone's gotta do the sweeping!

Less clicks to get to your impawtant PetRescue platform tools! Member rescue organisations will now notice a new little black submenu appearing under the navigation menu for.… you guessed it - easier navigation!

Printable pet adoption posters - because we know websites just aren’t for everyone and sometimes a physical poster on a noticeboard is preferred, so we gave the design a bit of love to ensure available pets also get to shine…. offline!

Capturing the moment a dog smiles straight at the camera is hard enough without having to find a suitable file format to upload it. Now our platform supports HEIC (iOS) format image uploads so you can capture all of those candid pics from the convenience of your iPhone and upload them without the iHeadache!

We put our creative hats on to enhance the accessibility of our platform including a bunch of user experience updates from obvious style changes to more subtle consistency tweaks. These design adjustments will ultimately improve user accessibility AND increase visibility of the drop-[roll]-gorgeous pet listings!

Another style change you may have sniffed across was our pet listing cards - much more pleasing to the eyes with rounded corners and slight shadow… oooh, fancy!

Like a pupperino learning new tricks, our Dev team too needs to practice and test all of their cool new tweaks and updates for the platform. So we’ve ramped up the testing process meaning the faster we can review, test and approve platform improvements, the faster we can implement them for you!

Communication is hard enough when you’ve got precious Whiskers walking across the keyboard@#$heshfoe [knock it off, Whiskers]. Anyway, we’ve optimised chat threads to make life a little bit easier.

An issue with our automatic site update process has been fixed so it now actually tells us when there’s something wrong, unlike your supposed “guard” dog who’s too busy snoozing to notice the doorbell! Now, Issues are more likely to be rectified by our team before you even notice them!

Once upon a time there were two star-crossed lovers who lived in different states. The barrier of distance tried to separate the pet lover from their destined furry counterpart. Fortunately, PetRescue enhanced backend functionality with their external animal management software so interstate adoption became easier, the barrier of distance was demolished and the companions lived happily ever after!

The Member rescue organisation signup page had some user experience touch-ups, yay!

Rolled-out some website redesign features including MVP versions of our Cha-cha-charter and Our Work page so you can SEE. WHAT. WE. DO. *mic drop*

What’s cute as a button? Our buttons. We made our buttons cute.

Our driven Devvies collected some fancy tools to help fix issues on the site with ultra-efficiency.

We incor-paw-rated a new way of releasing updates to the website which is now much faster and much less error prone - freeing up more time for the BIG stuff!

Some of you may have noticed an issue with case sensitivity when entering your email address on our platform causing some accessibility issues. We managed to fix this little system bug (catch and release of course) so now, email addresses will no longer be CaSe SeNsItIvE.

A long time ago, a bug was introduced that really messed up some synchronised listings from an external animal management software - we’ve now cleaned up the aftermath of that.

Through the implementation of a Facebook landing page and chrome extension, we’ve added the capability for Members to join the exclusive PetRescue Member Facebook Group DIRECT from the PetRescue platform - keeping the rescue community connected!

Our Member groups will notice some cool new tools for archiving pet enquiry conversations when the pet’s listing status is changed. They can also archive the chats prompt when the listing is marked as adopted. These tools should aid in communication demands and hopefully clear some mental space for our paw-some rescue groups when handling enquiries and adoptions. Hooray for communication and transparency!

We wanted to make sure that our pet lovers are able to find info on our site as easy as a dog to a bone - so we’ve embedded a help beacon in our contact us page. This means you’re now able to find answers quick-smart! And if the question is rather peculiar, well, just send your question through to us via the beacon and one of our friendly team will be in touch with you to assist.

It’s fair to say that our Member rescue organisations have a claw-lossal amount of work so now we’ve built in bulk-messaging when updating a pet to “on hold” status. It’s a win-win for rescue orgs and paw-tential adopters allowing for super efficient communication.

Our rescue organisations are busy bees and shouldn’t have to worry about remembering pesky admin updates, right? Well now they can just keep buzzing because we’ve set up a modal prompt to remind Members to update their group details annually. We hope this creates some peace of mind knowing that there’ll be regular reminders to update Members’ details so important communications will not be missed!

In the background, our diligent Devvy’s have enhanced integration between our platform and external pet management software, enabling us to recognise any pet listing synchronisation errors and resolve them promptly for our Members. This means that pet listings will be reconciled faster and displayed more accurately than ever before.

Were you experiencing issues logging in, using 2-Factor-Authentication? This was an oops from us. All fixed!

More site maintenance to ultimately improve platform speed and security, including the reduction in chat notifications nagging the server - you’d be surprised how much impact this small change can have. Our server is now free to do all the backyard zoomies it wants!

Finding foster fams was this month's jam! Enhancing the ability to match interested foster carers to rescue organisations with pets in need of foster care. The search filters and pet alerts were supercharged to help meet the pandemic surge in demand for rescue pets. This means you can quickly find pets who are in need of foster care AND you can be alerted when more pets are listed in your area faster!

Now even more pet blessings per page! Apologies to YOUR workplace for distracting you on the job now that you could look at even MORE adorable pets (but also, you’re very welcome). We’ve increased the default display of pets per page from 12 to 15, and provided options to display even more pets looking for love at one time.

On the back end, our admin capabilities have been upgraded in order for our team to respond to your enquiries with higher quality and greater insight - we’re committed to connecting pets with their new families, creating happiness and saving lives!

Here at PetRescue, we understand the importance of mental health for all of our paw-some rescue organisation Members - a strong mind is essential in the work they do! So our Members can now temporarily pause their organisations’ account with us. This means that when a break from rescue is needed, our Members can reset with the peace of mind knowing that their account has been temporarily paws’ed, ready to come back to when needed. The organisations’ profile will temporarily go incognito to the public and everything will be ready to re-activate and dive back in when they’re ready! We want to encourage all of our rescue-rockstar Members to take the break whenever they need to.

The rescue directory received a facelift and you can now choose a map view making the search for your local rescue organisation easy-peasy!

Security improvements on some of the website's forms so Members will receive less spam - heck, we wouldn’t even feed that to our cats…

Do you feel your frustration levels rising to uncontrollable limits when your pet snail moves faster than a loading web page? We can relate - so we’ve optimised communication between the platform and our database. Pages should now load a whole lot faster than Spongebob’s Gary!

Further improvements to the navigation and user interface so our pet lovers and their furry counterparts can find each other even easier.

The Members only area received a few helpful additions! The exciting release of a “Members library” helps keep the rescue community informed on what’s happening across the industry as well as PetRescue updates.

Remember last month when we did a little freedom for BREEDom trial? Well we soon realised that hiding breed labels in the pet search is a GAME CHANGER for ALL pets and it’s here to stay! This is the beginning of social change to reduce breed bias and save more lives! That’s what we’re here for, right? Learn more about the Love knows no breed movement!

We shipped 2 Factor Authentication, delivering a secure link between your PetRescue account and yourself. This ensures your account is protected from any prying paws.

More helpful menu items for all you pet-lovin’ folks to sniff out more good stuff on the PetRescue website!

Security updates & platform health advancements following some rather pesky phishing activities. Fortunately, no fish were harmed in the process.

Freedom the BREEDom! Did you notice that breed labels were hidden across the pet searches? We’re trialing this adjustment to listings, but we have a squeaking suspicion this may just stick around for the long-haul. Learn more about the Love knows no breed movement.

PetRescue is designed to be a safe place for pets and people alike. Conversations that breach our Code of Conduct can now be reported via the platform. That's right - we won't hesitate to send inappropriate communications to the doghouse!

Auto-syncing rescue platform management systems to officially say good riddance to tedious manual updates! This isn’t a lip sync, but definitely something to sing and dance about!