Known issues and declined suggestions

Unusual dragging behaviour on mobile for sortable UIs

• The SortableJS library is far from perfect, and sometimes has issues when you drag items to the edge of a container, or when you’re dragging on a touchscreen (especially on iOS). Currently I am aware that tapping on interactive items inside a draggable element (e.g. a form field or a dropdown) will sometimes cause the item to get dragged instead, and am still fixing them around the site.
• Update: I've been told that some older versions of iOS may not support the same dragging events that are used by SortableJS. See if updating your OS fixes this issue.

Suggestions that are not likely to be implemented

Modulators that let the user select any target colour

• Colours are the only aspect of the chicken that's not easily changed with eggs. Adding the ability to pay to select colours would potentially defeat the point of breeding, and make customising chickens massively easier for those who are able to pay for eggs with USD. Therefore this is not likely to be implemented.

Anything highlighting first generation status

• I have no plans to highlight first gen status in status bars and the like because I don't want the site to treat it as special—chickens being first generation doesn't really have any atypical mechanical impacts and isn't a status resulting from the user's actions.

User-uploaded chicken petting sounds:

• This is a huge moderation load as profanity filters and sanitisation cannot be applied automatically. It would be hard to verify that every single custom sound meets the ToS.

New user feed

• A new user feed risks being a privacy intrusion. Users should have a choice as to when they become visible to the site (usually by creating their first chickens). This allows them to update privacy settings and block any users they want to first.

Showing sleeping chickens in their original roosts

• The purpose of the sleep mechanic is to keep unused chickens "out of the way." Keeping them in their roosts simply makes it feel like no coop space has been freed up.

Full stops in chicken names

• I don't want to allow people to trivially put URLs in chicken names, to avoid the potential to send people to malicious websites or for advertising - it is against the site design ethos.

Accessory, filter, and gene suggestion guidelines

I do follow some design principles based on the site design ethos. This is meant to help people suggest new ones that are more likely to be implemented.

General:

• When suggesting new accessories, I prefer that you do not draw the suggestion, mainly because of the site's very permissive CC-BY licence for chicken images. I prefer to avoid situations where I cannot reasonably prove that I have ownership rights over an image used in chicken generation. Adding accessories/filters that closely resemble a suggestion, to the degree where someone could reasonably claim that it was used without licence, could create copyright issues. I have considered making a submission form where you sign the rights over, but that's far down the pipeline at the moment.
• Generally, any cosmetics should not get in the way of seeing important information that helps with identifying that chicken as unique from others. This means I likely won't implement any accessories that cover the whole body or filters that blur or distort the image in a way that makes features hard to distinguish.
• For genes, I generally draw inspiration from real-world chickens. This means that if a suggested feature is seen in real chickens, it's more likely to be implemented, and fantastical ones will not be, although realistic features might be stylised to look better onscreen. (Colours are, of course, the exception to this.)
• For accessories, I strongly favour any design that will look good on as wide a range of chickens as possible with just one image file. For example, anything that interacts with the tail is less likely to be implemented, as it means having to draw different versions for every tail, and anything that sits near the head needs to either fully cover the comb or interact well with all combs.
• Filters must be easily applied equally on every single chicken, and should not differentially affect different traits.
• For filters, Forever 2.1 is the only filter that changes the whole image that I am likely to implement. I cannot do filters that change poses, for similar reasons to the accessory guidelines - they may impact the transferability of existing accessories.