I realised that this hasn’t been made its own suggestion, it’s only been lost in discussion on other threads.

Cat Census Search: A Cat Search but Not

So one of the major disagreements to a regular cat search (input cat features, output exact cats with ids and owners) is the issue of privacy, etc. But many of us still also want a way to see whether there are any, or how many of a type of cat there are.

So I’m proposing a stats based result to cat searches. Where instead of the search resulting in a list of all the cats that exist with those attributes, it instead just feeds a number back of how many of those cats exist on Not-Earth.

This would be fun for our statisticians, especially to be able to see how many of our common orange bois [orange mackerel tabby] there are out there.
It would also be a tool for those looking for a unique/wishlist cat to see how many exist, and be able to balance their expectations for how quickly they can get it.


There is a consideration to be made about whether citied cats get included, and whether they’re just added into the statistics as a whole, or given a separate column. My vote is including them as a whole, so there’s no distinction between citied or village cats.


Would love to hear other people’s opinions on this!

i like this suggestion! it'd be neat to see how the various kitties break down genetically speaking.

Support!

support

Please. I'd like to know if a cat I want even exists on site before I put aside resources and a thread for one. No real point in looking for one if it doesn't even exist and won't know when it will.

Support! I Want The Numbers

I think there should be options to search for only citied cats, only un-citied cats, and for both together. Similar to how there are those options for exalted dragons in FR. For example, if someone wants to make a thread looking for a certain kind of cat, and there are only citied cats with the traits they want, it'd be good to know that there aren't any that could actually be sent to them beforehand. And people looking for business card/nestor/etc. stats wouldn't have data biased by what people are more comfortable sending to the city.

support!!

Support! I love numbers, the more options the better

Support ^~^!

Support, with a suggestion: if the concern is privacy, why not make something like this opt-in only and have every account opted out by default? That way, you'd genuinely have to consent for your cats to be searchable, since by default the setting is off.