Three years ago, we created the Founding Member badge. This was a gift to all the sellers who began supporting us with membership in 2017 and have continued that support to the present time.

Since then, many other sellers have supported MorphMarket with membership even if they were not with us at the very beginning. This led to the idea of creating additional badges for sustained membership. Beyond that, we could think of other achievements to be recognized, such as receiving positive ratings, gaining followers, and getting likes on ads.

To accomplish this, we've just released a new feature called Store Badges. This feature is part of the Basic membership plan. If you are a member the badges will show up on your Seller Profile. If you are not a member but become one, whatever badges you have already earned will begin displaying right away.

Badges are organized into badge groups. Currently we have over two dozen badges in five different groups. When the profile loads, a summary of the badges displays only the top badges per group. By clicking the "View All" button, one can see the full set of badges you have earned.

You can also click on a badge to see an explanation of exactly what the badge means and how it's obtained. For example, the new Annual Membership badges are earned by sellers for each year when they maintained membership for at least half of the year. This means even monthly members can get the Annual Membership badge.

The image above shows the badges shown on Dave Palumbo's profile.

With this system in place, we have many more plans:

• The ability to search for stores by badges
• More seller badges
• Badges for users

What badges do you think we should add?

MorphMarket is proud to be a Gold Member of the US Association of Reptile Keepers because they advocate for our freedom to responsibly keep Reptiles & Amphibians. Not only does this organization need your financial support, but also your name. Its membership count reflects its significance to outsiders in the same way the count of signatures on a petition reflects its level of support. Let policymakers count you among those who stand with USARK.

To raise awareness about USARK and amplify its voice, MorphMarket will now be syndicating its official alerts to a new category in our community forums and to our home page.

On the home page, these alerts will show up under the Community section with an official USARK badge as shown in the picture, where they will remain for seven days, while the other topics remain only for a few days.

You can learn more about USARK and become a member at their website. There you can also subscribe for email updates or via their RSS feed.

Auctions are now LIVE in our community forums to raise money to help breeders who were severely affected by the recent cold and outages.

We already have several 24-hour auctions in progress with a lot more to come. Visit the auctions here and place some bids! Current items include:

The Reptile Relief Fund 101 Charity Group was organized on Facebook; however, their first few attempts to setup the auctions there were shut down by Facebook. Thus we are honored to host them in our forums and support the #reptilefamily. Every time $10,000 is raised, it will be disbursed to 20 individuals.

We have prepared some instructions for how this category and auction will work along with some tips on how to use the forums, so read this first. This also explains how you can donate items if you feel moved to help out.

We just sent out our February newsletter which contains marketplace highlights from the first 5 weeks of the year.

Read the Newsletter Here.

We do monthly updates to our genetic data. Here are highlights from the updates which just went out, collected over the last month.

Burmese Pythons: (after adding the whole category a few weeks ago):

• added pied alias
• added dwarf tag

Bearded Dragons:

• added phantom leatherback gene

Ball Pythons:

• added chimo and mosaic genes
• removed granite from soul sucker
• changed jolliff tiger to inc dom
• added chocolate/spotnose/wookie complex
• added hidden gene woma to spider complex

To request a trait addition please follow the instructions here: https://community.morphmarket.com/t/how-to-request-a-gene-addition/119

To request a trait change, please create a public topic in our community forums under the appropriate species: https://community.morphmarket.com/

We just promoted Burmese Pythons to a top level category. That means it now enjoys all the trimmings: trait tags, store directory, calculators, etc.

This is exciting because it's the first time we've elevated a category from an "Other" category to top level. As mentioned a few weeks ago, we are preparing to promote a number of other subcategories this year in similar fashion.

You can see what categories we are working on and provide input if you're an expert in these community forum topics. Thank you to everyone who contributed!

As you can see, we are kicking off 2021 with a fully redesigned home page. With this new layout there are a few minor changes worth mentioning.

When you are logged in, the update sections (blog and community) show up on the first page like before, because we want our regular users to be aware of changes.

If you are accustomed to jumping into a category using the Categories section, there is a faster way. In desktop, you'll see a new button "Browse by Category". In mobile, you can click the search icon (as pictured), and click "Browse by Category". The upcoming app will have a top level button just like desktop.

We hope you enjoy the new professional look. Stay tuned for the redesign of more pages, among other improvements.

We are preparing to promote a number of subcategories to top level this year with all the trimmings: trait tags, subcategories, store listings, calculators, etc.

We are conducting a survey of these species and need your input. Would you help us by reviewing our draft and providing feedback on anything we're missing or mistaken about?

The ones ready for you review are:

• Burmese Pythons
• Sand Boas
• Fat Tailed Geckos
• Axolotls

We are preparing a number of others and will be soliciting input on those soon.

We just ramped up the number of social media fields that sellers can display on their profile. Previously, we had two slots: home page and facebook. Now we've added 3 new fields: instagram, youtube and twitter.

If you previously had used one of these social media sites as your home page, we've moved that into the appropriate field. That includes 486 sellers using instagram, 343 with facebook, and 46 with youtube. Interestingly no one used Twitter as their home page.

All sellers should go and update their profile with these additional fields now to give buyers the full picture of their presence.

This covers the vast majority of the links used by sellers. If you have a presence on some other website that isn't one of the above, you are still free to use this as your home link.

At MorphMarket it's our job to make it as easy as possible for reptile, amphibian and invertebrate breeders and keepers to connect. And with 4,000 breeders and 50,000 animals from across the world in our marketplace, there's a lot to search through!

We recently rolled out a big upgrade to our search capability. Previously the search box gave no feedback as you typed into it. The new version has several benefits:

• It automatically completes your search so that you don't have to type as much and are less likely to typo. It also helps you discover what's on the site.
• It suggests several kinds of searches over the Ads. You can search for ads by Title, Category or Trait.
• You can search for Stores and not just Ads. You can search all the stores in a Category or even jump straight to a store page by Store Name or Owner Name. This option only displays if there are 3 or less matches. Stores included in this search are the same ones included in the Seller Directory, which requires active ads and/or membership.

It's worth noting that context matters. If you're already in a subcategory, suggested options will be limited to those applicable to that section. This helps to narrow down the overwhelming number of matches across all areas of the site.

The advanced search filters are still available, of course, which you can utilize instead of or subsequent to one of the searches above.