This is one of my favorite bugs, and because of various website redesigns it’s all but fallen off the internet, so noting here for posterity. I was reminded of it earlier today talking with a friend about what “four and a half nines” means in reliability, and I suggested “four nines and a horse” and got to introduce him to this bug!

Back in May 2014, Etsy had a bug where they accidentally replaced their half-star image in ratings with a horse. Twitter user marykuris thankfully posted a screenshot:

Etsy screenshot where the user’s rating is four star emoji and a horse emoji

I remember Etsy at the time embraced the bug, which was great, and even had t-shirts made for their developers, as modeled in this tiny screenshot of Ian Malpass from his 2015 Velocity talk:

Small blurry picture of a conference speaker wearing a shirt with four stars and a horse

There was also a great thread on the now-memory-holed Etsy community forums about the bug. The first page is archived here but, sadly, subsequent pages appear to be lost.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🐴