PetRescue Platform Release Notes Archive (2022)

It was all hands on deck this month, as the team worked hard to build PetRescue’s 12 Pets of Christmas campaign. With some homeless pets finding themselves in care for months on end, it was an op-paw-tunity to shine the spotlight on 12 adorable pets looking for the gift of a loving home. This came as part of our larger Christmas appeal, which enables PetRescue to continue helping homeless pets connect with loving humans, by providing a free listing platform for rescue organisations and adoption platform for adopters across Australia.

Our Christmas elves continued to work hard this month, this time on Home2Home’s ‘pay-what-you-can’ program fee feature. The Home2Home program empowers a pet owner to find a new home for their pet while they continue to care for them, helping to stem the flow of pets entering pounds and rescues. The decision to rehome a pet is never taken lightly, and is often driven by factors like being unable to find suitable accommodation, financial hardship, changes in circumstances and human health issues. This update will allow our small, hardworking Home2Home team to help even more people and pets, while still being flexible depending on the owner's individual circumstances with no requirement to pay a certain amount, especially during times of financial hardship.

As part of our work to make our Home2Home program accessible and the different options for rehoming easy to understand, we gave the Rehome Your Pet Via PetRescue page a refresh. It’s now easier to find important information, especially during a very emotional time for folks who want the best for their pet.

What could be better than a pet-themed game to play with friends and family? Nothing, that’s what! The team created a fun ‘Ta-boop’ game for pet-loving folks to play at their festive feast.. No more awkward gaps in conversation at the dinner table this Christmas!

There’s nothing more satisfying than having a spring clean! This month, the crew created a new feature for users to have the ability to archive conversations (not just member organisations). This is su-purr handy for older conversations when a pet may have been adopted, for example.

PetRescue’s incredible donors make our work to connect pets with loving families possible! It’s so important that we can personally communicate with, and thank all the wonderful pet lovers who make our work possible - so the team created a way to ensure all of their information is up to date whenever we reach out to them.

Phew… yep, there’s still more! The adopter profile form also had a glow-up to make the style more consistent on the page. The form is now new and shiny for adopters.. Just like those Christmas baubles your cat can’t stop booping.

Lastly, the ‘Subscribe’ link shifted locations and got its very own header in the footer. It’s now easier to join the PetRescue community, and receive adorable pets looking for homes, pet owner tips, happy tails and fun facts straight to your inbox each month.

Like when your cat boops you when they want pats, we’re all about making things simple and crystal clear for potential adopters! This month the team created a new account sign-up confirmation page to replace the previous pop-up which could be missed. Now folks who sign up as members will go to a page letting them know to check their emails to confirm their new account.

While we were in spring cleaning mode this month, we jazzed up the conversations UI! Now when awesome PetRescue members are hopping into their chats with potential adopters, they’ll be visually treated to a cleaner and prettier page.

When people are researching their options to rehome their pet, it’s su-purr important that they can easily find the important information they need during this difficult time. This is why we made some content updates to the Home2Home page, adding more important information while making the format cleaner so it’s easier to find the resources that folks need.

It’s zoomie time! Thanks to some massive performance improvements, things are now running 25% faster, just like when your pet sees you pull out the treatos!

We know that awesome PetRescue member organisations are su-purr busy saving lives, so we wanted to make it even easier for them to catch up on important mews and updates, and improve their visibility. This is why we added a new banner to the top of the member homepage, which highlights important news and security updates.

When it came to updates for our paw-some PetRescue member community this month, we were on a roll! We’ve popped in additional features for conversations, making it even easier for the good folks who work and volunteer at member organisations to sort and view all conversations for a pet.

We’re all about making it even easier for pet-lovin’ humans to connect with wonderful rescue pets! This is why we added sitemaps to improve our SEO tooling - as this will help folks searching for rescue pets on Google to find pet listings.. And hopefully connect with their new furry best friend!

Thanks to a lot of optimisation work, the dev crew will be doing zoomies now that their ability to get code up online and running has halved! This will allow the team to get mew code to your screens even quicker than your pet runs when they hear their food coming out.

As part of our ongoing work to ensure our site is safe and secure, we made furr-ther improvements to the enquiry page, improving the way we filter out spam enquiries and creating tests to ensure that less pesky spam gets through to member organisations, so they have more time to focus on their im-paw-tant life-saving work.

Like your doggo who borks every time someone comes to the door, we’re all about making sure everything is safe and secure around here! This month, we worked to ensure that contact information is hidden in the new conversations UI (stay tuned for more de-tails on this one..). This ensures that folks enquiring about pets can’t view the details of the individual at the member organisation that they’re chatting with.

At PetRescue, we’re paw-ssionate about connecting loving humans with awesome rescue pets! Improving the quality and detail of enquiries that come through for pets will help to create these connections, while helping to free up rescue group’s time spent sorting through enquiries. This is why we’ve introduced the need for an account to furr-st be created before a pet enquiry can be sent - it’ll ensure that the group receives more details about the enquirer’s home, saving time for everyone (and keeping away those pesky scammers)! To make life easier, when signing up for an account to enquire about a pet, it’ll be much easier and seamless for folks to go back to the adorable pet they were looking at. Bring on the adorable happy tails of adoption!

The only funny characters welcome around here are adorable rescue pets! The team fixed a pesky bug which was causing strange characters and symbols to be added to social cards when sharing listings on social media and programs like Slack.

It’s purr-ty awesome to see how many folks are mindful of keeping their personal data safe on the internet, and we want to make it as easy as paw-sible for everyone to stay safe! We’ve created an even easier anonymisation process to allow for removal of data (when requested) to happen even quicker.

Call se-purr-ity! As part of our ongoing work to ensure our site is safe and secure for all, we fixed some listing edit and manage access vulnerabilities.

Just like when you pick up your dog’s lead and it’s not time for walkies just yet, we’ve got a real teaser for you! The team have been hard at work behind the scenes to make conversations in platform between rescue groups and potential adopters even cleaner and easier. Watch this space..

🧹 The crew made sure to run their usual platform health checks, and deployed some dependency pup-dates to make sure member groups and paw-tential adopters are kept safe online.

Bump bump bump! When awesome member groups were ‘bumping’ pets to pop them at the top of listings results, they sometimes received a purrty annoying 404 error page. Fret not, we’ve fixed this bug and these adorable pets will be boosted to the top of search pages for paw-tential adopters to easily fall in love with.

Speaking of furr-strating bugs, when perusing pet listings, the number of pets displayed per page wasn’t the same as the number at the top of the page. This is all fixed, allowing you to enjoy looking at cute rescue pets without any pesky little errors.

We want to make it as easy as falling for your pet’s puppy dog eyes for council pounds to sign up as PetRescue members and start connecting adorable pets with loving new homes ASAP! As part of PetRescue’s safe and sound pounds work, we’ve removed the requirement for vet referees when pounds are signing up as members, so that there’s as few barriers as paw-sible.

In pre-paw-ration for NAIDOC week, we added an Acknowledgement of Country permanently to our website footer. It’s important for us as an organisation to pay our respects to indigenous elders and acknowledge the beautiful land we live and work on.

We want to woof from the rooftops about all the different work we do - PetRescue is much more than an adoption platform! This month we updated our Our Work page with THREE exciting new projects on the go, and four new innovations in progress, as well as updating and expanding our Fundraising pages. It’s now easier for both individuals and organisations to fundraise for us and find useful information about how to do so.

We know it can be overwhelming trying to select which adorable photos to upload of a pet when you’re creating their listing! This is why we’ve been working on making the image and video upload process a lot clearer and easier for members, adding in ‘save’ and ‘go back’ buttons to ensure they don’t lose their progress.

It was business as usual, with the team maintaining the site’s se-purr-ity; deploying dependency gem updates to keep potential adopters and PetRescue member groups safe online.

Who says that magical time machines don't exist? In the background, the devvies have been working on some campaign tooling optimisations to reduce the amount of repetitive work and introducing pawsome streamlining with automations. What this has made possible is more time to spend on future tools and features to help the rescue community get even more pets get seen and adopted!

In purr-y good news, PetRescue’s Home2Home program has now helped over 250 pets find paw-some, loving homes and stay out of the pound system! We’re constantly working to scale and grow the program to help even more folks needing to rehome their pet. Speaking of magical time-saving machines, some of our manual spreadsheets to manage the program are now automated dashboards equipped with controls for us to filter down to the important details. Less time spent on admin = more time to help people and pets!

Call se-purr-ity! The team deployed some regular dependency gem (not the shiny type) pup-dates to keep members and adopters safe while visiting PetRescue, ensuring it continues to be a trusted and secure platform for all.

Watch this space! We’re setting the stage for some furry exciting design updates in the future. As part of this, the squad created and implemented typescale and components - these progressive enhancements are making way for the website to look even more purr-ty and visually appealing (and of course - easier to use!)

The PetRescue squad works hard to create our library full of furry useful articles and resources for adopters and member organisations alike (sometimes we have to toot our own horn - toot toot!). We want to spread the word about these handy resources and make them as shareable as possible on different social media sites - which is why we updated the style of the blog social share buttons, which are paws-itively 100% cleaner and prettier to look at!

This month we were busy bees behind the scenes! We published a new Grow Your Family page - which outlines one of our new projects and programs we’ve been working on to help more pets - specifically to normalise and grow paw-some multi-pet households. This new page will make it easier to keep you all updated on all the exciting projects we’ve been working hard on - watch this space!

This month we loosened the leash on the requirement for extra security for adopter accounts - leaving it as an optional feature instead of a required one for folks who are simply browsing for a pet to adopt. Less hoops to jump through = more time enquiring about adorable pets.

We’re all about time-saving for amazing PetRescue member organisations so that they can spend more time on the important stuff (saving lives!) Now, when there’s a change of owner for a listing, the new owner is automagically assigned to conversations - making the whole process a heck of a lot smoother and easier for all!

The team gently caught and released a pesky bug which was causing the feature image on pet profiles to be off-centre on the main listing page. It’s now purr-fectly centre aligned. Phew!

Speaking of pesky bugs, the team also fixed a furr-strating one which was causing notifications to try to clear twice instead of once when folks were trying to clear them.

Lastly, in a bonus not-yet-released note.. The PetRescue squad worked together during a recent Hack Day on a very exciting secret project! This new project will put adorable rescue pets on a pedestal using technology, and is the work of our dev and marcomms brains combined! Make sure you check back in at our Charter to see what we’ve been building behind the scenes.

Group users and admins were treated to a brand new boopable toolbar navigation menu this month This update aims to improve usability and accessibility - so that platform tools and resources are easy to access on both mobile devices and desktop by making the clickable areas clearer and larger to find and see on the toolbar. The icons also assist with making it easier to navigate around and find what you need quickly.

There’s nothing that gives us the warm fuzzies more than adorable pets finding a home! As part of our National Pet Adoption Month campaign, we added a boopable ‘Just Adopted’ feed so folks can see some of the cute faces who have just been adopted and do a happy dance for them.

Including microchip details is su-purr important for PetRescue members when advertising pets for adoption, helping adopters recognise listings as trusted and from reputable members of the rescue community. This also ensures that we’re complying with laws around rescue pets, and the ability to prevent online scamming by putting in some safety checks! This month we made it a requirement to include microchip details - which can be hidden from the public for privacy reasons if needed. It's sometimes easy to mistype or copy and paste in the wrong microchip number, so we've also added helpers to prompt for valid microchip information.

As part of this microchip work we’ve included pre-adoption processes as part of the update. We’ve added an age exemption option for very, very smol kitties and pups (under 12 weeks old) to have microchip details included on their profiles so that we could help connect them with homes as soon as possible.

Beyonce may have said ‘to the left’ but this isn’t where we want our ‘edit form’ button to go! We fixed up a bork which was causing this button on every form on the site to be left-aligned and put it back to the centre.

We know what it’s like when you want to shout from the rooftops about a pet’s amazing purr-sonality! This is why we doubled the character limit for pet profiles for members, so they can include a big ol’ description and help potential adopters get to know them and really fall in love with their adorable personalities.

What’s better than watching adorable pet videos?! Nothing, that’s what! This is why we increased the limit of our video uploader for members - bring on the adorable TikToks.

We vegan-beefed up our security even further this month by blocking enquiries that include untrusted links. This update aims to stop those pesky scammers in their tracks!

March is National Pet Adoption Month! We’re shining the spotlight on big dogs, cats and bonded pets who typically take longer to find homes - with the big, hairy goal to reach 4,000 pets adopted via PetRescue this month! We were working away in Furr-bruary to create a paw-some ‘love-o-meter’ which tracks the progress towards this goal, as well as a fun pet quiz to help folks find their soulmate.

The special connection between bonded pets means that they're inseparable. We wanted to make it su-purr easy for potential adopters to start their search for bonded pairs. This is why we made ‘pets needing a home together’ a special feature during valentines day and leading into the 2022 National Pet Adoption Month (March)

As part of our work singing from the rooftops about how great bonded pets are, we’ve popped our adorable ‘Bonded Besties’ sticker on top of all bonded pet listings. This is purr-ticularly handy for when bonded pets have separate listings, or when their feature image is only of one pet.

We were fast and furr-ious this month, and made some speed improvements to make searching even faster. Less time waiting for the site to load = more time looking at adorable pet profiles.

The only borks we like here are the adorable doggo kind you receive when you arrive home! The team fixed the footer headings which were visually borked and showing a squiggly line underneath.

Yikes! Another furr-strating visual bug meant that our awesome member organisation’s PetRescue feed wasn’t showing listings pro-purr-ly. The team got onto that one stat and it’s now looking prettier than ever.

Sweep sweep! While we were busy making things look purr-ty, we also fixed the search summary text size as it was the wrong size on mobile.

There are so many different types of pets on PetRescue! Unfortunately, the values for some of the more unusual pets were missing in the ‘other pet’ search summary, which resulted in a bug that was less than easy on the eyes. Fear not, this bug has now been gently caught and released!

We were su-purr excited to kick off 2022 by sharing our first state of adoption report, which included valuable insights from the rescue community, combined with data from our platform. This im-paw-tant report aims to capture the challenges and track the progress we make together in the rescue sector. We're sure you didn't want to try and decipher tables and tables of data and insights, so we carefully designed it to be as easy to read as possible.

This update has got our tails wagging because we love seeing that look on a pets face when they're enjoying one of their fave times of the day; mealtime! Which is why we updated the total amount of food donations we’ve coordinated to date on our homepage (that’s a lot of happy pets!)

Whoops - in a recent navigation menu update, we forgot to update our hovers and our clicks! This would have been furr-strating for many people, so we've fixed that up now.

Pro-purr-ly formatted numbers make us happy, which is why we popped delimiters into the numbers in our search sidebar.

Using their elusive dev magic, the team made the site faster by adding caching for feature toggles. Or, for us mere mortals, we added shortcuts to get data, optimised to improve performance.

Our dev crew gently caught and released a bug which was causing a visual issue with the spacing of alert page ‘tags’. Much better!

While they were busy gently disposing of bugs, the team also fixed the button alignment for enquiries, which was to the left.

Another whoopsie caused the pet search to always include pets available for interstate adoption even if it was unticked. With a bit of convincing and snoot boops, the function is no longer ignoring that request and won’t show interstate pets if this box is unticked (even though pets available for interstate adoption are great!)

While we were busy making things visually appealing, we also fixed the alignment of ‘tags’ inside the pet listing breed(s) input, making for a better listing experience for member groups.

Yikes, for a little time there, our handy help beacon was covered by a pesky ad - which meant that folks had to click to exit the ad before they could access the help beacon. We’ve now fixed the beacon’s positioning so that it’s su-purr easy to access these helpful resources again.