Bidding a fond farewell to 2024, and looking forward to a bright New Year…

Holiday Greetings Gang 🙂

I trust you had a great year, with much to tell. Just a quick update to round off the year and wish everyone a Merry Christmas – so let’s get stuck in…

STRAPLINE COMPETITION

Thanks to everyone who entered our strapline competition on Twitter/X. We had some nice ideas there – we had a few essay-length straplines I’m not sure those folks quite got what we needed 😉

We have chosen a winner, and the winner is…

“ArtOfZoo – Live Wild!”

Coming to a trailer near you soon. I’ve already sent out a free movie to the winner, and also 3 runners up, because those were quite nice, and we might use them for something later.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

We’ve had a few Members emailing us in a panic, asking if we are closing down. Folks, right now we are super busy working on new stuff behind the scenes. New site 1 is almost complete – then we are on to new sites 2, 3 and 4. We’ve been dabbling in setting up a development team for our network – not a huge amount of success so far, but we do have a handful of great guys. So if you are an experienced and motivated developer and you’d like to join our dev team please drop us a line.

I said in the last newsletter (those that we managed to send) that I’d get the new Crew Needed area done by now – time was short getting this update out so I will add that once the pressure is off.

In the meantime, with the day to day stuff – you may know, we have a small team, and a handful of reliable volunteers helping. We have a lot to get through, so we are updating here and there when we have time. Doesn’t mean we are gone, it just means we are busy. Things are going well, we got a lot done last year. So please sit tight, and we will have some fun new things for serious Petfans soon.

OUR NEWSLETTER

We had a bit of a problem with our newsletter last month, some of you may have noticed the site downtime. The newsletter collapsed midway through the summer newsletter, meaning around 50,000 subscribers did not receive it.

We did have to ditch a lot of subscribers off the mailing list, it was getting way too big. We removed anyone who looked like they were not opening newsletters recently, hopefully leaving behind those more interested Members. Ditching data is never an exact science, it’s common for a few good Members to fall through the cracks. So, if you want to be absolutely sure you will receive our newsletter in future, please go and quickly subscribe again. It only takes a moment – and better safe than sorry. You won’t want to miss out when the things we are working on start launching. (If you subscribe and it does not send you a confirmation, it means you are already subscribed and confirmed).

AOZ MERCHANDISE

Members have been asking us for AoZ merch for years. We did get around to putting up a merch store, briefly, just as an experiment. A load of apparel, hats, cups and bags and whatnot with the AoZ logo. Of course the merch supplier shit their shorts and took our shop page down in 5 minutes, despite being just a logo. The handful of Members who managed to grab something while the store was up, it seems you now own the most exclusive apparel on the pet scene 🙂 One chap in Germany bought an entire AoZ wardrobe, that lucky devil.

We would not mind giving that another try, maybe with a merch supplier with a bit more balls. We have a list of all the major suppliers, we will contact them shortly and just ask them. We don’t hold up much hope of course, but like with most things, if we don’t try, we don’t know for sure.

So if any of you good Folks know any more obscure merch suppliers that we might have missed while making our list, please let us know. Any suppliers in countries where Petstuff is legal would be particularly interesting.

BARK, THE HERALD ANGELS…

I don’t know if you saw the latest South Park movie – it’s about ‘adult content’, and they did not miss the opportunity to get some doggy action into the credits…

CUM, ALL YE FAITHFUL…

As always, a huge thanks to all Members supporting our work and keeping things going. To everyone rocking in the Pet World, please keep loving those pets – wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and we will speak to you all on the other side 🙂

Adam and The Crew