MorphMarket News

For many years, MorphMarket was a side-project run by one guy.

Today, this site is run by a team of individuals who are dedicated to advancing the herpetoculture community. The new services we are building are only possible thanks to your support.

But who are these folks? Please take a moment to meet the team!

Between Morphpedia, Messenger updates, category promotions, attending expos, upcoming projects, and so much more, it’s been difficult to get this newsletter done -- but it's finally ready!

Read It Here to catch up on all the key updates and a special announcement of what's coming next.

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

Morphpedia is a new knowledge base of herp traits, genes and localities. In the last two months we've added 192 published articles. This week our team released version 1.2.

11 Categories in Development

The initial launch focused on Ball Pythons, but now we've really opened things up and have 11 categories "in development". This means that we've auto-generated trait articles from the MorphMarket database, but are editing and enhancing those articles in our forums before publishing them. We need your help to finish them out, so please come and contribute photos and information.

Meta Tags

Tags, like "Leucism" are used to group related traits and facilitate your exploration and learning. This week we added two special tags: "Issues" and "Complexes". They're special because they're automatically generated based on other data.

• Issues - a tag to quickly see all traits with some kind of documented issue.
• Complexes - a tag to quickly see all traits which are identified in a genetic complex.

Relative Availability Trends

Availability is our term that refers to the supply of animals for sale on MorphMarket with this trait. Relative availability indicates how this trait ranked against other traits at that time. For example, a value of 75 would mean that this trait had an equal or higher availability than 75% of all available traits.

Most traits now have relative availability graphs which show how availability has trended over the past 5 years.

We've haven't explored the results completely, but here are a few interesting availability trends we saw in Ball Pythons:

• Uptrends: Acid, Red Stripe, Redhead
• Down trends: Het Daddy, Bengal, Desert
• Other interesting patterns: Wookie, Static, GeneX

Some details:

• We do not yet combine data across aliases of a trait. For example, in Morphpedia we recognize Coral Glow as an alias to Banana, but the market data is not yet combined in this way.
• Data may be less reliable prior to the date these genes were added to our marketplace. While our site attempts to automatically tag older ads, it cannot do so in all cases. But this will improve over time.

Remember that these graphs show supply, not price or demand. Also, data always require interpretation. It's up to you to figure out what it means.

Conclusion

There's a lot of exciting projects going on at MorphMarket right now, and we couldn't be more pleased with how Morphpedia is going so far. But we need your help! Please visit Morphpedia.com to learn about these amazing animals and to contribute your knowledge to the community.

We have been hitting it hard on website development since Tinley, and we apologize for the delay, but new MorphMarket Merch items are available online now.

New Hats:

• Snapback Purple/White Trucker Cap
• Flexfit Multicam Tropic Green Trucker
• Flexfit Kryptek Sports Cap

Other Stuff:

• "I Break for Snakes" License Plate Borders
• Koozies in 3 colors
• MM/USARK Lanyards

Also:

• Restocked some of our other hats, but others are unavailable due to supply chain issues.
• Sold out of the MM/USARK shirts at Tinley so those aren't available at this time. Posters will be available at future expos as they are more difficult to ship.

We've just added attachment support to the Messenger! This is such a crucial feature and the new Messenger really wasn't complete until now.

There are actually two parts to this feature:

1. Messages with attachments that originate from email will now show up in the Messenger. Just click to open them as shown above.
2. You can add attachments in the messenger itself using the paperclip button shown above.

Attachments in email will continue to work just as they did before. For those of you who exclusively use email for communications, we hope you will now consider using the Messenger more often. This will give you access to powerful features such as the "Quick Actions" to decline messages or mark them as already responded to as well as other upcoming features.

Because attachments can sometimes contain sensitive information, we implemented have secured them with Signed URLs. Whenever you click or touch one of the links in your messenger, a special link is generated which can be used to view or download the content in the cloud for 20 minutes. After the link expires, you'd need to use the Messenger again to access the file. 99% of the time you won't need to think about this, but we didn't want anyone to be confused if they tried to view a link after it had expired.

One last note: In the app, there is a bug that occurs when a notification shows up at the top of the screen pushing content off the bottom of the screen, such as the Messenger reply bar. We are working to fix this, but for now, just click "okay" or whatever button is on the notification to clear it and the problem will go away.

Today we issued another round of trait updates to the market data which includes the following changes. In the future, we plan that the continuous stream of updates to morphpedia.com will drive the market data instead of these occasional updates.

You can view the discussions that led to these changes in the genetics area of our community forums as well as make your own requests.

Ball Pythons - New incomplete dominant traits: Smoke, Tango, Solar, Carnivore, Java, Striker - Urban Camo definition updated: sandblast, super cinny, pastel, het pied - Genetic Black Back type changed to “other”

Sand Boas - New recessive trait: HRP - Rufescens spelling corrected - Axanthic renamed to Anery as the primary name for this trait

Skinks - Pitch Black add as NBTS polygenic trait

Boa Constrictors - Albino (Caramel-hypo) renamed to Albino (BWC)

Corn Snakes - Palmetto changed to incomplete dominant

We still have a number of subcategory updates planned, but those take a bit more work and we wanted to release these changes without any more delay.

Morphpedia is a new knowledge base of herp traits, genes and localities. In early October, we launched version 1.0. In the past few weeks, we quietly released version 1.1 which includes new features and have also published many more articles.

Morphpedia now contains almost 150 published articles. We've also added support for multiple categories and now have over a dozen Reticulated Python traits.

Other recently added features:

• Better controls for exploring traits, including:
  • Searching by gene
  • Searching by gene complexes
  • A slider for origin date
  • Links from the trait index in the marketplace back into Morphpedia articles
• Availability data to show how common a trait is in the marketplace
• Symmetrical linking of related traits
• Footnotes, because references are important!
• Ability to share to Facebook - so you can help spread the word about this resource, and get more folks contributing

Upcoming features:

• Graph showing availability date over time for each trait
• Tags generated from complexes and issues
• Improved related trait data by incorporating gene complexes

Find Morphpedia on our website or at www.morphpedia.com along with videos that explain how it works. Please come and contribute knowledge to the community about your favorite genes.

Next weekend!

We apologize for the website being down this morning for several periods of time on Sunday.

This appears to be an intentional attack against our website, where our service is being intentionally flooded with requests from around the world. This makes it difficult to prevent since there is no obvious pattern of user to block.

It looks like someone doesn't like MorphMarket, and is trying to interrupt you from using it.

No worries, we're using this as an opportunity to improve our services and security.

Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE

10/30/21 - We have added Cloudflare and its DDOS protections to our website, and our services have been running very smoothly. Since last Monday, we only experienced 1 hour of downtime which was on Tuesday, for the same reason.

We're happy that this led to the evolution of our services becoming better and more robust.

We didn't feel right having all the fun this weekend at NARBC Tinley because we know that many of you can't make it. So we prepared a little treat.

We've just launched Morphpedia. It's our new community-powered knowledge base for herp traits, and it's now live.

We announced this project a few weeks ago and explained why we created it.

• Below are two videos which give an overview of how to use it and explain how you can contribute to it.
• You can read a lot more about it in this document, and this will grow over time as well.
• Please direct questions and comments into the Morphpedia discussion forum.

You can access Morphpedia from the menus or footer or via morphpedia.com.

We hope you enjoy it, and we look forward to your contributions as well.