Twilight Sparkle ✨

Three years of MLP Forums, three Making Christmas Merrier fundraisers, and countless unforgettable memories. After a year off, Making Christmas Merrier returned stronger than ever this year, raising a whopping $3111 CAD. This beats MCM II's total by 71%. How amazing is that? It might sound simple - knock up a call for donations, deliver cash to the hospital, call it a day - but the amazing staff of MLP Forums went so far beyond that. With everything from crowdfunding-style prize tiers to the fan club showdown, Making Christmas Merrier has only been further cemented as an event all our own. Bringing the MLP Forums community together to be silly, have fun, and bring smiles to real kids' faces in a way that hospital budgets usually don't - that's awesome, and it's a privilege to be part of this. With the final prize out of the bag, this marks the official end of Making Christmas Merrier III. Whether you contributed or not, I hope you enjoyed the activities and spoils of battle from the event, and look forward to MCM IV as much as I do.

Thanks for bringing this up. While MLP Forums doesn't officially support HTTPS, we do try to load assets over secure connections when possible. It looks like we have a ton of content that has HTTP URL's hardcoded from before we did this, which can be fixed with a script. I've made a note to get this script made and update these assets to be secure. I noticed that the thread you linked to has a number of HTTP Imgur embeds as well; I'll have this script address those as well.

We needed a little extra time after this weekend's server migration to bring search back online. Enjoy!

Thanks for the love. Kurtiss deserves credit, too; we co-founded this site, and it was originally his idea. And all the staff deserve mega-props, too; this site wouldn't be where it is without each and every one of us.

Look out for my PM! I'm sure we can figure this out - I helped a few other people with payment issues.

Hey SparkWolf! The question of what we do with that information came up earlier: Adding onto that, we'd let you know if we were planning to mail you anything. Rest assured, your bill for a donation here would be purely electronic.

I can have personal opinions, too, right?

I second Sapphire StarDust's advice - the way you treat an interest signals to others how they should be reacting to it. If you treat it as just another TV show/hobby/pastime in conversation, it sends a strong hint that there's nothing "wrong" with it. I make about as much of a secret IRL that I'm a brony as my being a Nintendo fan, UBC student, and a software developer. Result: I'm the one who stays chill if someone tries to freak out on me about watching MLP, and they only embarrass themselves.

MLP Forums and Pony.fm share the same IP address, and pony.fm just happens to be the "official" domain that IP address is registered to (the technical term for this is a "reverse DNS record"). As for the requests themselves, they're MLPF's notification system checking for new notifications. It does this every few seconds - it's standard behaviour. What's not necessarily standard is the number of errors that the system is getting (I'll look into that), but that shouldn't affect your experience as a user.

Your name and address are useful in preventing payment fraud. The info you enter into the payment form may be cross-checked with your bank's records to help ensure it's really you who made the payment. You'll find that any reputable merchant or other entity that takes online payments will ask for this info, to protect both you and them. Fraud's no fun for anyone, so that's why we collect that info - it has nothing to do with how we address you as a user.

If you're having payment problems, PM me and we'll work something out!

Feld0's leviathan spiel on all things ads, ad blockers, and how they make and break the Internet. Ahem. Don't take my position as a web developer and site operator as that of the opposition. Those who build the Internet as you know it are Internet users, too... not all of us are out to milk every last cent from a "freeloader's" visit. I'd like to note that good ads are mutually beneficial. There are three key parties involved with an ad: the advertiser, the publisher, and the end-user. With a good ad, the advertiser reaches end-users highly relevant to them via the publisher. The publisher receives a fair payout from the advertiser for their work in rounding up their particular group of end-users and allowing the advertiser to communicate with them. The end-users are informed of something that is relevant to them (it better be if the advertiser has paid to communicate to them), and if the match is right, the ad purchase generates enough new interest in the advertiser's wares to offset the cost of the ad. In a good ad deal, everyone wins! Between the three types of ad you brought up, Wind Chaser, I'm inclined to pin anything with autoplaying audio as the worst. It crosses the line when an audio ad begins playing minutes after a page has loaded - often while you're on another tab. Cue a frantic game of whack-a-tab to find the offender and shut it down. Ads like that, which depend on making their presence known when least expected, are more annoying than helpful. Popups in the traditional sense - literally spawning a new browser window - have largely faded in popularity in favour of on-page "modals"; these are panes/overlays that appear within your open page, usually covering up content and sometimes darkening the screen. While they can border on the annoying, there are legitimately good ways to design an ad like this and integrate it into the natural experience of browsing a particular site. For instance, if I read several articles on a blog, I might actually find an obvious "hey, it looks like you like our stuff - why not subscribe to our email newsletter?" callout helpful and enticing at some point. I do not recall specific examples, but in recent memory, I'm under the impression that a "hover timer" has become more commonplace - where you actually have to hover over the ad for some length of time before it grows across the page. A poorly built hover ad combines the worst elements of popups (covering your content in a way that makes you rage) and autoplaying audio (unforgivingly forces your attention onto it), but I haven't run into enough of them recently to feel I've been very bothered by them. A tangent on who's to blame for this very discussion follows: I've laid out my full stance on this in the thread I linked above, but to complement that, I wanted to add a few notes: It's incredibly common, especially for smaller sites, to completely outsource the sales and placement of their advertising to one or more services like Google AdSense (the one you've probably heard of), PulsePoint, Chikita, TribalFusion, or others. These advertising networks don't give site operators direct control over the ads they serve - this is necessary for them to function. These networks also typically require site operators to literally inject code from their servers into their websites, completely and fully trusting the network to not destroy what the site's users see - again, this is necessary for them to function. Ad networks are ridiculously convenient. Ad networks don't pay anywhere nearly as much as direct advertising deals. Direct advertising deals tend to work out really well because the advertiser and site operator explicitly and mutually agree to show the advertiser's content on the operator's website. This means, ads that generate more conversions, make more money for the site, and are more relevant to the site's users - everyone wins! Due to various reasons, direct advertising deals tend to be well out of reach of the Internet's smaller sites. Ad networks are ridiculously convenient, assuming you trust them to not destroy your site and can live with the lower payouts - get an account, paste some code, wait for the cheque. Sites that depend largely on ad networks for their income find themselves between a rock and a hard place when the networks they trust employ more aggressive means of presenting ads - the operators have no direct control over this, as the networks have unfettered access to what users see. Smaller networks often pay even less. Trying new networks can be risky, depending on how thin a site's margins are. There is a widely accepted mentality that Internet-based services and content should be "free". Nothing is truly free. If you're not paying for it, you're usually the product. Properly implemented ads can solve the issue by providing what is essentially highly relevant content to the right people. Properly implementing ads in a way that benefits everyone involved is not a simple problem to solve. Ad networks are ridiculously convenient. There is a school of thought that massive ad networks like AdSense did something to democratize the Internet in that they made it possible for just about anyone to sell some space on their site to an automated system and collect some pocket change for it - with a little luck, it'll be enough to pay for the site's online existence... but that's only one way to look at it. The payout is comparatively abysmal before you get into millions of pageviews (hence, ad-funded websites are often "optimized" to generate more of them by splitting articles across multiple "pages" or otherwise artificially making you load more pages), but there are few other options that consistently generate revenue online when it being "free" is a fundamental part of its purpose. Did I mention ad networks are ridiculously convenient? More thoughts here.

MLP Forums currently embeds a version of any attached image no larger than 600x400 into your post. I take it you find this to be too large? If you find this size to be too big, a more elegant solution than adding a resize facility (which could make for an awful lot of inconsistency in the size of images people see around the site) would be to lower the maximum size of an embedded image. What kind of size would you find better, CD?

Hey NLR, , thanks for the post. Only accounts with one or more published tracks will appear in the list of artists. That leads to the next point, though... Not being able to publish your tracks isn't right. I'm unable to reproduce this. Could you please provide a screenshot of exactly how the track edit screen looks after you click "publish"? The songs from Rainbow Rocks have been added.

Integrals involving trig functions sometimes "loop around" when you take the integral by parts a few times and pull the original integral out again, at which point you can usually solve it algebraically. Is this one of those integrals?

While we had no streams this year, we recorded almost every panel. I'm part of the team that's working to publish these recordings - it'll be worth the wait! I hope my panel wasn't a letdown; with everything else going on (I ran the IT department, and CloudBolt had his plate full with Celestia Radio), not nearly as much prep time went into it as either of us would've liked. I heard some good feedback, though. How many of you did I unknowingly run into throughout the weekend? I spent a good chunk of the con manning con ops, and a lot of people went in and out through there.

I fixed this. Thanks for the report.

The big issue with requiring prior experience to get a particular position is that it perpetuates a chicken-and-egg problem. If everyone who can give you experience wants you to already have some, how do you get a foot in the door? If you have relevant experience, it's certainly good for us to know about - the "other comments" field in the application form is the perfect place to list it - but it's not a "weeding signal" if you don't have it. Even an inexperienced volunteer can be an excellent teammate if they're a cultural fit with an organization. Your old profile URL's will continue to work if you change your display name - that's what the ID number in it is for. If you're interested in a moderator position, please submit an application through the form. As I mentioned above, the form's "other comments" question is an excellent place to detail your prior experience.

Adding a forum section implies that its theme is of substantial relevance to the MLP Forums community. How well does IT help fit with this community? While I'm sure we have plenty of technical people here who are capable of diagnosing and resolving computer problems, I can't help but feel that more enthusiast-oriented communities would be much more appropriate venues for such things.