The two lines that changed every listing

Last week a working gundog went live on GenoVaq. His owner had done everything we ask of a breeder and then some — approved the draft line by line, sent his own photographs, set his terms in writing, said yes in so many words. We published, sent him the link, and about an hour later his reply came in. It was short. He said it looked good. Then he said two things, both prefaced with the words "my only thought" and "minor".

The first was that the photographs seemed to cut off the bottom of the dog — in the water, and in the portrait. Could we adjust them up a touch.

The second was that "1 dose available" seemed a bizarre choice of words, though he got the underlying principle.

He was right on both counts, and neither was minor.

The photograph problem

The listing page had been built to show every hero photograph in the same shape — a landscape frame, four units wide by three high — and to crop whatever it was given to fit. It did that with some care: the crop was anchored to the top of the image so that a standing dog kept its head. That decision had been made months earlier for a particular set of Border Collie photographs, and it was a good decision for those photographs.

It was a bad decision for a portrait of a Clumber Spaniel sitting in someone's lap, and a worse one for a spaniel swimming, where the interesting part of the picture is precisely the bottom half. The breeder had chosen those photographs. He had looked at them and decided they were the ones that said what he wanted said about his dog. We had then quietly removed a third of each.

The fix was not complicated. The page now shows each photograph whole, at its own proportions, and if that means a portrait stands tall on the page or a landscape sits wide, so be it. The photograph a breeder sends us is the photograph a buyer sees. Nobody at GenoVaq is a better judge of how a breeder's dog should be framed than the breeder, and it took someone telling us so for the page to reflect it.

The dose problem

The second point cut deeper, because it was not a bug. It was a sentence we had written on purpose.

GenoVaq began with horses as much as dogs, and a good deal of the equine side of the trade runs on frozen semen: a stallion's listing genuinely does offer a certain number of doses, at a price per dose, and a mare owner buys one. The listing page was written to say so, and when the first dog listings went up the same words were still there, because nobody had a reason to look at them. "£1,000 per dose. 1 doses available." For a dog standing at stud by natural mating, in a field in Wiltshire, to a bitch brought to him by her owner, that is not merely odd. It is wrong. There is no dose. There is a dog.

What makes it worth writing about is how invisible it was from the inside. Everyone who built the page knew what it meant. Everyone who checked the listing before it went live read straight past it, the way you read past your own name. It took a veterinary surgeon who happened also to be the dog's owner — someone for whom the word dose has a precise meaning and this was not it — to see the sentence as a stranger would.

The page now says "stud fee" for a dog and keeps "per dose" for a stallion, and it no longer counts something that cannot be counted. That is a few lines of code. The larger correction is the one we made to how we think: a template is a set of assumptions wearing the clothes of a neutral form, and the assumptions were made for the first animal we ever listed. Every animal after that inherits them until somebody objects.

The third thing, which he did not mention

While fixing the second point we found a third, which the breeder had been too polite or too busy to raise. Because his listing carried a fixed price, the page had routed it to a checkout button — the same mechanism a buyer would use to purchase a dose of frozen semen through the platform. His terms were nothing of the kind: a stud fee paid in two parts, half on a successful mating and half once the pregnancy is confirmed by scan, arranged between him and the bitch owner directly. A checkout on that page would have been a promise the platform could not keep and had no business making, on a listing where we take no fee of any kind — the arrangement we set out in the founding-breeder promise.

So that changed too. A rare-breed or heritage listing now goes to the breeder and nowhere else, whatever price it shows. A buyer sees the fee, sees that terms and payment are arranged with the breeder, and writes to the breeder. Which is, when you think about it for a moment, what a stud fee actually buys: a conversation with the person who owns the dog, not a transaction with the people who built the website.

What this says about the site

I wrote a few weeks ago that a photograph is not a listing — that the gap between what is technically possible to publish and what we have earned the right to publish is where a marketplace keeps or spends its trust. This is the same point from the other side. Everything on that listing was true, approved, and sourced. The dog was who we said he was, the hip score was the hip score, the terms were the terms. And it was still wrong in two places a buyer would have noticed and one they would not, because the frame around the facts had been built for a different animal.

The only reliable defence against that is the one we happened to have: a breeder who reads his own page and says so when something is off, and a platform that treats "minor" as a description of the effort needed to fix it rather than of the fault. The two lines arrived at 09:14. The page was corrected, for every listing on the site, by lunchtime. If you are a breeder listed with us and something on your page reads strangely to you, that is the timescale you should expect, and the reply you should expect is the one he got: both fixed, and both were fair points.

— Rene