We are excited to announce a major update to our genetic calculator. This update adds support for allelic recessive genes. Also known as "visual hets", these are different recessive genes which can combine to create visual outcomes. Read on to learn about this and some other improvements.

1. Support for Allelic Recessives

In 2015, MorphMarket launched its platform with a genetics engine that powered its calculator and trait extractor. This system was later extended to other species.

One innovative feature of our calculator was the support for possible het output. For instance, when breeding a het recessive to a wild type, each baby will be either het or wild type, but a person can't tell from looking which is which. Each baby has a 50% chance of being het, so the calculator will label each one as “50% possible het”.

Yet there was a limitation in that it did not correctly model allelic recessive traits. Output for these combos included a disclaimer explaining that it was not fully modeled.

For example, in Ball Pythons, the Albino trait and the Candy trait are both recessive traits, but they share the same locus. A ball python cannot be both fully Albino and fully Candy, but it can be 50% of each, or "Double Het (DH)" for both. So if you breed a DH Albino Candy to a Normal, the calculator. would output "100% 50% ph Albino and 50% ph Candy". The correct output, which is now displayed, is "100% Het Albino OR Het Candy". This is because either one or the other gene must be passed on to all offspring.

These improvements are not limited to Ball Pythons of course. This fixes issues with visual recessives across Boa Constrictors, Reticulated Pythons, and Corn Snakes, to name a few.

2. Updated Gene Complex Data

We have updated our engine's knowledge of complexes from feedback in our forums. If we are missing any data please comment on this in the appropriate forum discussions.

3. Improved Offspring Generation

If you have used MorphMarket's Offspring Groups to track and advertise your breeding history, you have noticed that our wizard will assist by automatically adding traits to offspring that you add.

Initially, traits added were those which would be inherited 100% of the time. Now, we add traits which are most likely to be inherited, to minimize the number of updates you have to make to those offspring. For example, in a het x het scenario, the system pre-assigns all offspring to be 66% PH. You would now only have to update 25% to visuals, which reduces the data entry by 75%.

4. Simplification of Het Display

A simple but elegant change is that we now display 100% Het traits on the site as just “Het.” Het implies 100%, so there's no need to state this explicitly. This makes the interface a bit cleaner. We still need to update this in the select inputs but it is rendered in the new way on all pages.

5. Maximum Trait Count Increased

The calculator previously refused to process breeding pairs with more than 10 total genes. Thanks to optimizations in the algorithm, it now supports up to 14 traits. This is very helpful in Corn Snakes where there tend to be a high number of traits.

What's Left?

One thing that is still not resolved for ads is the representation of trait disjunctions. That is, the traits on ads do not yet allow sellers to label an animal as having trait A OR B. This is tricky for a few reasons, not the least of which is the interface to input this data.

We're glad to have finally tackled the tough issues mentioned above that pave the way for even more great improvements to come! These were important as we will be leveraging the calculator more extensively throughout the site in features for animal management.

The beautify of these animals is one of the best parts of our hobby. MorphMarket breeders have uploaded more than a million photos of these spectacular specimens over the past few years.

We've just made a big improvement that will help you showcase your animals predictably. We are now using the same aspect ratio (or width-to-height ratio) for photos of animals across the site.

Great photography requires great composition. Fundamentally, that's where you place the animal within the photo. You don't normally want to show buyers a photo with part of the animal missing from the image, unless you're providing multiple photos. In order to make your photos look great on our site, you want to understand how MorphMarket prepares and displays those images.

For consistency and versatility we have chosen to CONTINUE using the same aspect ratio which has been in use on our site since the beginning in the search results thumbnails. This ratio is roughly 6:5 (specifically 45:38). However, various other parts of the site were not respecting that rule.

You don't need to crop your photos to this size because our site will continue to do that for you. But you should be aware that this is a narrower photo than what your phone will take by default (which is typically 4:3).

Here are different places you'll see animal photos:

• When you upload your photos in the Edit Animal page, it'll show you exactly how it's going to look.
• This is the way it'll appear in search results as well as on the new animal ad pages.
• Note that users can still tap to zoom and see the full uncut photos on the animal pages.
• This aspect ratio is also being used on all the other parts of the site including Offspring, Collection, and Morphpedia images.
• This work was one of the important things for us to address before retiring the old search and old ad pages. Almost there!

We recommend animal photos which are at least 1500px wide, but more than 10mb in size.

Store logos are a different matter. We recommend a square format, but it will still show the original format of your logo on your store page.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Android users can now download the MorphMarket Android App from the Google Play Store. UPDATE: Apple users can also download the iPhone App as well.

The new app version provides a FANTASTIC feature to the platform called push notifications. Push notifications are the small pop-up messages sent by apps (as pictured). This is a game changer for communication on MorphMarket!

Push notifications will provide buyers and sellers with immediate alerts when they receive messages. This will help you send and receive responses quicker, leading to more conversions. They also link right into our Messenger which provides options not available in email, such as the ability to decline inquiries or block users.

These notifications open up a world of possibilities for other valuable alerts, like when animals you're looking for have been posted on the market or when someone you follow has new listings. These features are coming soon!

If you have already been using the older version of our app (which launched in March 2021), you'll want to uninstall that and get the new one from the app store. You can tell them apart because the older version has a black icon whereas the newer version has a gray icon. You can also see the version under the hamburger menu which is currently v1.0.8.

More details about push notifications:

• Notifications aren't sent instantly, but every few minutes.
• If you check your messages or reply from email such that the system knows you've "seen" the message, you won't be bothered with a push notification.
• You can enable & disable email and push notification alerts for various events under your Settings > Notification Settings options.
• If your app is open, touching the notification should go straight to your messenger. We are fixing a bug right now, where if the app is fully closed, it will only open the app and not go to this page.

Let us know if you have any questions!

We apologize for the site being down for the last hour.

The platform our service runs on is called Heroku. They are currently experiencing an incident with DNS right now. Thankfully we were able to hack our way around this and get things running again while many other websites are still down.

You can view the status of the underlying issue here: https://status.heroku.com/

We've rolled out a new help system at support.morphmarket.com!

• All documentation is now found on this site. The new system is easier to navigate and search. It also makes it easier for us to add new articles and videos that will help you get all the benefits out of our platform.
• If you can't find the answer to your question, just click "Contact Us" to send a message directly to our support team. All correspondence goes to your email as well. You can also see previous conversations there.
• On our side all support conversations are organized in a customer support portal which helps our team get you great answers faster and more efficiently.

We know this stuff is a bit boring -- that is, until you need it!

It's our pleasure to serve you!

There was a partial outage last night and this post gives some details.

Tuesday night, Cloudflare had an incident with its analytics which led the MorphMarket website to think it was under attack. This cased it to increase its security settings which blocked some users for a few hours until our engineers restored the status.

This experience gave us useful data on how to improve our monitoring and avoid a false alarm like this. We are also adding a mechanism to automatically restore the status once a threat has passed.

Also, the wording of Cloudflare's message made it sound like an individual might have been specifically blocked from the site, which was not the case. We'll see if we can revise that wording so it's less confusing.

While most users were not affected, we apologize to those who were temporarily blocked. Thanks. :)

This is a Public Service Announcement and a reminder to not share SMS reset codes with anyone.

This kind of scam could happen anywhere, but someone has been persistently trying to trick breeders by using the contact information publicly listed on our site.

It goes like this:

• They text you as if they are interested in an animal.
• They tell you a code is being sent to you which you should give to them so that they know YOU are not a scammer.
• What actually is happening is they're trying to do a password reset on some account of yours, such as Instagram, which the scammer has also found. This service is sending YOU the code to make sure you are really trying to reset your password.

Some variants of the text message from the service trying to be reset clearly say "Do not share this with anyone", but we just wanted to help spread the word to avoid anyone getting tricked.

Since the communications are happening via text message and not on our site, there's nothing we can do to block them. We mentioned this in this the April 9 blog, but felt it deserved its own announcement.

In order to avoid this issue, you may wish to remove your phone number from your Store Profile on MorphMarket, your website, or other public sites. We also have an option to hide your name and phone number from users who are not logged in, found at the bottom of your Store Profile options. It is unclear though whether this would be enough to prevent this situation.

On Friday night, the site was down for periods of 5 minutes or so at a time for a total of about 30 minutes. Thankfully due to protections we put in place a few months ago we were able to fight off this attack with minimal impact to our service.

Also, another PSA -- someone has been texting some breeders directly, trying to get them to share the SMS code which Google sends for a password reset. It's a pretty obvious scam. The Google text message even clearly says "Do not share this with anyone", but just want you to be aware. Since it's not on our site, there's nothing we can do about it.

These issues are just par for the course when running a public website which has become well known. It's our joy to serve you!

Sellers: To prepare for new features coming out as part of MorphMarket's NFS Initiative, we've made some back-end changes that improve our system's flexibility. We are going to FULLY explain these changes soon as we release new features in the coming weeks.

For the most part, you should not see any differences at this time, but there is one exception sellers should know about. ON HOLD is no longer a separate checkbox but part of the ad's availability setting as an alternative to FOR SALE, SOLD, etc. To account for this change, we had to convert ads which were previously marked as both ON HOLD and SOLD.

For older ads, we know these animals really are sold, and the on hold setting was just never updated (this is part of the reason why on hold is now an alternative to for sale or sold). However, for more recent ads, we realized sellers might have marked the animals as SOLD when they were actually still in their possession. This can happen in some cases while waiting for payment plans or good weather. We did not want sellers to lose track of these ads.

To account for this, ads which were marked as both SOLD and ON HOLD and were last modified in the last TWO months have been moved to ON HOLD and INACTIVE. While they will show up in your primary inventory tab alongside the FOR SALE ads, they are NOT visible to users because they have been rendered INACTIVE.

If you have actually sold it, you can simply go through and mark it as sold again (note that the new inventory system will soon make bulk updates like this very easy).

We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience. We viewed this as the least confusing way to move forward.

We will explain the full set of changes along with the exciting new features soon. If you have any questions please contact our Customer Success team, and we're happy to help!

Sometimes you put in new landscaping, repaint the exterior, or add on another floor. Other times you need to work on the foundation or replace the A/C. The latter is what we've been making a lot of progress on this week.

In particular, today we moved our image image processing "higher in the cloud" using AWS Lambdas. Images were already stored in the cloud on S3, but now we are generating all the image variants, like different sizes and formats there as well.

Why this matters:

• Less load on our servers means the whole website goes faster (about 20%)
• Lambdas pave the way for processing higher resolution photos than our current limits
• More space in our database for other information
• Less code that our developers have to maintain so they can focus more on new features!

Besides this, we dramatically simplified and sped up our development environment this week which again makes it easier for our dev team to build new features. We also moved the MorphReport over to Postmark, which is a fabulous mail service that we love.

Meanwhile we ARE working on exiting new features that you will be able to see and will share more about that soon.

Just a few nerdy updates for those who are interested in what's behind the scenes. =)