Twilight Sparkle ✨

I can neither confirm nor deny that. I can only confirm that alicorns have many unusual and powerful abilities. ;P

> implying Poniverse is a professional operation I'm a student, too. I only said that I was a professional developer myself; this organization is a scrappy volunteer effort. Please do get in touch if you see something at some point and think "sweet Luna, even I can do this better!"

reCAPTCHA has historically been awful in practice and, as a professional developer, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Because it's so widely touted as the solution to spambots, it's also by far the most heavily targeted by spammers. In particular, it does nothing to stop business-savvy spammers who employ kids in Bangladesh for $0.10/hour to click pictures of traffic signs. There's also the philosophical issue of Google using reCAPTCHA to extract untold hours of labour from the unknowing masses, which gives them an incentive to not go too far in thwarting this particular kind of spammer. The list of issues goes on... Any custom captcha that is specific to a given site is better than reCAPTCHA or other third-party captchas. They'll confuse human spammers who barely understand English and no bots will exist that understand them. MLPF had this in the form of a Q&A captcha that asked (easy) trivia questions from FiM's first season between its launch in 2011 and the introduction of Poniverse logins in 2013. It worked, and unexpectedly even hampered an attempted raid from a car forum at one point by trolls who didn't know anything about ponies. For reasons I'm not going to delve into, having a similar captcha on Poniverse.net never made it to the top of the priority pile until recently, and we're short-staffed on developers the task can be given to. Yes, this is a low-key call for help.

There first needs to be an active staff developer to give such tasks to. It would be an understatement to say that there's been turnover since I started MLPF in high school in that regard which hamstrung MLPF's or Poniverse.net's abilities to get technical updates at all. Are you volunteering to help? We could use it.

I donate to Poniverse every month (you should, too, if you like this place!). This is my favourite nonprofit. I used to give to the local riding associations of political parties I supported as well, but recently cut down on those. I've given a reasonable amount of money to BC Children's Hospital and charity:water in the past as well, largely through MLPF's annual Christmastime fundraisers.

Nope. We only did that for forum posts.

That's not quite right. The reasoning for attachments in PM's being a subscriber feature is mainly because PM's are hidden away from the public. We're happier to foot the bill (read: spend subscriber money subsidizing a feature for everypony) for attachments in public content because great public content helps attract new users to the site. This property does not hold for personal conversations, so getting a subscription pays for the resources your attachments there will use.

I'm so very happy to see the progress on this. Your persistence and attention to detail with this will soon pay off, DDR! One thing I wanted to comment on was the following: Some versions of MySQL set the innodb_file_per_table setting in my.cnf to false by default. If this is set to false, then all InnoDB tables will write their data into a single "ibdata" file in your MySQL data directory which will forever grow and never shrink. MySQL tries to reclaim space from "deleted" tables but it's not perfect. If this setting is disabled, and you previously imported a database and deleted it, it's possible that you lost some disk space to that pesky ibdata file.

I went to a Wednesday screening at a VIP theatre (an adults-only theatre with a bar/lounge and restaurant-style service). This particular screening was organized by Cineplex, BronyCAN, and Entertainment One for the local pony community and sold out. It kinda turned into a meetup, too, with lots of people showing up early and hanging out in the lounge afterward. It was a ton of fun but also admittedly a very unusual screening.

I know this post is a little late but PayPal isn't a requirement - if you have a credit or debit card with a Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover logo on it, you should be able to use it. Maybe that helps? It's usually possible to get a MasterCard or Visa debit card that links to your bank account (and open a bank account if you don't already have one) even as a minor.

We accept credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, and money orders for commissions and subscriptions; and PayPal for one-off donations to the site. You can also contact me to work out alternate arrangements or get help with using one of the above.

My real name is not hard to find; it's not constructive to threaten me with "exposing" that we don't have resources assigned to MLP Forums - that is a rather plain, non-contentious fact. Starting drama will only waste a lot of time and mental energy. What would be constructive is volunteering to help out. There's been an ongoing search for a new MLPF lead developer since @Lavo left that post, which has not proven very fruitful so far. Its scope will be expanded soon but we had a few other channels to try first. A project's lead developer is normally supposed to be the person communicating with the general public about technical things and it's hard for that to happen when that person doesn't exist. Our volunteers are not a mindless "resource" that can be assigned to whatever tickles a manager's fancy, and Poniverse isn't a magical source of them. Volunteer developers typically sign up to contribute to projects that they have a significant personal stake in (ie. they have a dream to realize or are strongly motivated to work with a particular technology). Canterlot Avenue's technical staff volunteered very specifically for that project - it's wishful thinking, and ignorant of social dynamics, to suggest that they'd be working on MLPF if only I tore them out of Canterlot Avenue. One of the first tasks the new MLPF Lead Dev will get, assuming IP.Board doesn't scare them away, will be to go through the Feedback and Site Questions sections and learn what all the broken things are that need fixing. Their next task will be to get to work fixing them.

In light of this thread, I'm considering revisiting that rule and opening up some kind of user-to-user marketplace here. I have two possible approaches in mind right now - comments would be appreciated! making "for sale" threads a thing you can buy - ie. paying $10 (as an example - actual pricing might need more thought) to put up a thread in which you're allowed to sell something adding something resembling a proper marketplace, where you can post items for sale, arrange payment, and MLPF/Poniverse takes a small cut from the transaction (there's an IP.Board add-on for this, so I don't anticipate it being a strain on our troubled access to dev resources) @StormBlaze @Jon the Bronynerd ^

Note for everypony: I've allowed @Jon the Bronynerd to post this thread. Check out his auctions!