Update

On August 18, we reported that Yahoo/AOL had been giving us trouble with email deliverability. We are happy to report that we believe those problems have been resolved now. On Aug 30, Verizon (also AOL, Yahoo)'s Postmaster said that for our domain "they're now seeing a 97%+ inbox rate over the past week, which is extremely good!"

That still doesn't mean on occasional messages can't go to the spam folder. One thing you should do to tell you email provider that MorphMarket emails are important is to whitelist our email addresses. Find out how to do that under step #2 here.

Also, PRO TIP for iPhone users using the Mail App: add '[email protected]' as a VIP address, which will star it, prevent spam and can even enable push notifications. Here are the full directions. Thanks to Stephanie at SNK Kreatures for this tip!

This past week, the website experienced some performance problems. As website availability is of utmost importance to us, this update is to let you know what happened and what we've done to address it.

This past week, the site was unavailable on Monday around 7-9pm, Friday from 3-4pm and 7-7:30pm CST. There were some other areas of brief slowdowns as well.

The first problem on Monday occurred as John was traveling back from the Daytona National Breeders Reptile Expo. Unfortunately he misdiagnosed the problem as a shortage of web servers and the steps taken to remedy the issues made it worse leading to the 7-9pm outage.

Since then we identified the actual problems relate to our database. As a result we have:

• Upgraded the DB to give it more resources
• Reduced size of the DB, deleting old and unused data
• Are working optimizing some slow queries and limiting long queries

Other than one 5 minute period from maintenance, the site has been running very smoothly since Friday night. We believe that all of these issues have been sufficiently addressed for now and have learned a few lessons in the process.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the downtime.

John & Team

John is Daytona bound! Can't wait to hang out with reptile family at the National Reptile Breeders Conference. I'll be spending about half the weekend manning the MM table solo, and the other half walking the room. Please seek me out and bring some feedback -- the good, bad and ugly.

We just added not 1, not 3, not 5, but TWELVE NEW top-level categories! All of these were subcategories that we promoted to full category status. For these herps you can now enjoy all the functionality that makes finding amazing animals so easy on MorphMarket, including ads indexed by trait tags, subcategories, store directories, and calculators.

The newly minted categories are:

• Snakes: Sand Boas, Rat Snakes
• Geckos: Gargoyle, Leachianus, Fat-Tailed, Chahoua
• Lizards: Skinks, Monitors, Iguanas
• Amphibians: Axolotls, Tree Frogs, Dart Frogs

Fun facts about the increases:

• New top-level categories: 12, which is +50% (from 25 to 37)
• New subcategories added: 67
• New genes/traits: 370
• New calculators: 12, which is +133% (including 5 calculators for existing categories)

You might wonder, how did we choose these categories? It was data-driven, based on quantity of ads listed. Occasionally, we add new subcategories to group ads which are in the "other" buckets. For instance, during this upgrade we also added several new Other Python subcategories for Pygmy, Scrub, Spotted and Water Pythons. And then, larger subcategories become candidates for promotion to top-level categories as we have done today.

We do not claim that our data is perfect, but we are always updating and improving it and we welcome your feedback. The best place for input is in our community subforum which has a form that you can fill out.

Special thanks to so many who provided input including Kylie Koskan, Doug Kulie, Anthony Vasquez, Macie Lewis, Sharon Kay Strohl, Matt Horton, and many others.

If you have ads in these new categories, you might want to review them to make sure the appropriate traits tags have been added. You can add tags by modifying the ads and updating the traits field with the relevant tags.

We hope you enjoy these changes. We are all about improving our data, design and functionality to be the best online resource for connecting the community of herp lovers. We'd love to know what you think in the comments below.

The latest newsletter is now available. It includes the new Messenger, our Moderation Policies, an interview with Snakes and the Fatman, and more!

Other notes:

• We'll be at the Daytona, FL expo next weekend, come and see us!
• We have restocked shop.morphmarket.com and added new items as well.

These emails are sent to all active sellers within the last year, but we will always publish them to our blog also.

We have added two new features to improve the convenience of managing your MorphMarket membership.

First, you can now pay on the site using credit or debit card in addition to PayPal. With the recent issues with PayPal, we knew it was critical to provide this flexibility. If you already have a PayPal account connected you can change this by using the "Disconnect" button, and then you can reconnect with the card of your choice. (Previously, we did accept cards but it required contacting us, etc).

Second, we added a new feature called "Renew Now" for triggering same-level membership renewals to happen immediately. This effectively allows you to pay in advance, without having turning on auto-renewal. This works in the same way as a membership upgrade, which prorates the new membership with any remaining time on the previous one. You will see this checkbox option if you are renewing at the same level as before.

All of this can be found on your Membership Page which you can access via the menu.

Please let us know if you have any questions or if we can help in any way!

Have you ever wondered how MorphMarket moderates our site and mediates disputes? And how does our effort stack up against other services? This is something we care deeply about and put many hours into every week.

To increase transparency, we've just published an article on our Market Moderation Policies which gives a brief but thorough overview. It describes our handling and resolution of a wide variety of issues involving users, ads, ratings, transactions, and more. It explains what we do and what we do not do. We believe this information is helpful for understanding your rights and obligations on our site.

This article is part of our growing set of resources in our Learning Center.

Last weekend at NARBC Schaumburg was a great investment of our time. We got to meet many folks face-to-face who live in a different part of the country from our usual stomping grounds (pictured here with boa breeder John Chausmer).

In addition to helping at our booth, I did my best to make it around to all of our sellers who were there. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and provide feedback and input on our business. You help me understand how you use our site, how do you benefit from it, what is frustrating, what's important, and what we need to do next. I came away with 13 pages of notes from probably more than a hundred conversations. We have some super exciting projects that we are working on, and I am even more excited now.

I look forward to meeting more of you this year at expos in other parts of the country, and of course in Tinley Park in October.

We are proud to announce the new MorphMarket Messenger. This is a major upgrade to our on-site messaging interface, which includes the following benefits:

• The ability to archive messages to keep your inbox clean and organized (use the "archive all" under ... to get a fresh start)
• More powerful filtering options, such the ability to view only messages TO or FROM you
• Faster and more mobile friendly interface
• Scroll down to load more messages - no more pagination
• Better use of Desktop space, showing both panes at once (with a 3rd User Profile pane coming to quickly see information about the other party)
• More intuitive timestamps

For mobile devices on the message list page:

• Swipe down to refresh
• Swipe up to load more conversations
• Swipe right to archive messages

While the system still supports emailing, our goal is to continue improving the messenger until it becomes the preferred interface of communication among our users for multiple reasons. First, the messenger is more reliable than email because we cannot ultimately control where email messages end up. Second, the on-site messenger allows us to add features to enhance your productivity which we cannot provide in email format. An example would be the Quick Reply actions currently available to sellers.

We realize that a critical feature needed to make the messenger more useful is support for attachments such as images and videos. We plan to add this later this year.

NOTE: We are aware of a bug preventing scrolling down for older iPhones and are working to fix it now. You access the Old Messenger using the option under (...) in the meantime. If you are experiencing another problem, please contact support to let us know.

Please let us know if you have any problems or have questions.

This video is an hour of tips and tricks for MorphMarket sellers from owner John Lehmann, recorded with Chris Eaton of the Snakes and the Fatman podcast. This is Episode 4 in a series that Chris is doing with experts across the industry.