Twilight Sparkle ✨

I'm cleaning house with MLPF's tagging system and, as part of that, converted all extant tags to lowercase. Going forward, all new tags will automatically be converted to lowercase, too.

Why do this? It makes tags all over the site more consistent. And, given the system is already rather freeform, gives us all one less thing to think about getting right when creating new tags.

@Kreativpony Whoa, your Celestias are beautiful! The way you draw lighting and shade your art really brings out her natural colours and elegance.

I love your art style! The Luna and Zipp drawings here are wonderful renditions of both ponies (they're among my favourite characters ❤️). They're so full of life and beauty with the lighting, composition, and the extra-large mane and wings you gave Luna especially. Your Sombra is so very ominous, too... looks far more dangerous than he did in FiM. I hope to see more of your art around here!

Is the Celestia in your avatar part of a bigger picture, @Kreativpony? Would love to see it if yes!

Pony.fm is back online! It is very much not gone and there are no plans to shut it down.

There were a couple of extended outages in the last few weeks involving the domain:

1. The first one, in February, was because, the domain ended up not getting renewed on time thanks to a perfect storm of inconvenient coincidences (that weren't and still aren't applicable to any of Poniverse's other domains, in case you're wondering) and it ended up in the so-called "redemption period" where getting it back is an expensive, manual process. I worked closely with the registrar to recover the domain from this state and got the domain back but it took about a week.
2. The second outage, that prompted you to start this thread, @Pulse Wave, was due to the domain somehow expiring retroactively and reverting back into the redemption period state. It's unclear what caused that to happen but the registrar was cooperative in recovering the domain - again. Reactivating the domain was much faster this time but still took a few days.

I hope this sheds some light on what happened. #1 was on me, #2 was on the registrar. Neither outage had anything to do with Pony.fm's viability as a service, as you can see.

With all that said, if the day Pony.fm has to close up shop ever comes - and I hope it never does but who knows what world we'll be living in 10, 20, 100, or more years from now - there won't be any ambiguity about it - it will be clearly announced. And, to whatever extent is feasible, that hypothetical future decision to shut it down will be communicated with advance notice and some form of succession plan for maintaining the library we've collectively spent so many hours building.

I recognize the importance of Pony.fm as our last remaining fan-run music hosting service and consider its role as a long-lived historical archive pretty important, too. I wish we had the staff or budget to actively develop new features and such but the site doesn't face any existential dangers.

Yep... that's an error all right. Good catch, @Sunamena, and thank you for pointing it out! I'll see to it that it gets fixed.

Out of curiosity, were you perchance looking for a $20 subscription tier (or any other amount)? 

2 hours ago, PawelS said:

I can't see the pictures in this status update: https://mlpforums.com/profile/46927-raykv423/?status=1020924&type=status

I sent an alert to the opsponies including a link to this very post. Thanks for mentioning you're experiencing a problem - I'll note that this one appears to be related to an ongoing server problem on our end and not the original subject of this thread.

Unfortunately, everyone who'd be able to investigate this is either sleeping or otherwise occupied by their "real lives" at the moment so it might be a few hours before someone can deal with it. We get a lot out of our (tiny) budget but sadly, we end up in this situation sometimes when we lack the funding for professional staff and certain fancier server setups.  Please bear with us and thank you again for mentioning the issue.

On 2020-09-28 at 7:49 PM, Codelyy said:

I imagine this forum will stick around for quite awhile. It's going to be an emotional day when it does eventually close 

Out of curiosity, what gives you the impression that MLP Forums will be around "for quite awhile"?

I have every hope of it being a long-lasting site myself too - I don't ask this to cast doubt on that. But I'm very curious to hear what gives you that impression as a user, what your ideas about a site's longevity are rooted in.

It is a good impression to have; you could say I have a vested interest in knowing what creates it as we all tend to like investing ourselves emotionally and temporally into things with staying power.

What if these problems didn't exist and they crowdsourced ideas from fans anyway? Now we get into the truly fun possibilities of this thread.

(I split this from my previous post because it goes into a different albeit equally relevant line of conversation - this way you can quote my posts separately to respond more neatly to either one.)

The first thing that came to my mind is how cool it would be for Fallout: Equestria to become the basis of an "MLP for Adults" franchise. The second thing I thought of was how various fanon ideas about alicorns could be incorporated into the official lore to finally give us canon answers about their power limits, lifespans, durability, physiology, and who knows what else - they're somehow still almost as mysterious as they were in FiM's pilot, even after six seasons with the show's main protagonist being an alicorn.

Then there are the 4chan leaks which proved to be eerily accurate - see @Dreamstar Moonlight's latest masterpiece of a thread for more on that:

It's fun to consider that some of the crazier-sounding ideas in these leaks could have been totally made up but then adopted by Hasbro, making the leaks retroactively true.

Now, again, while I have no way of proving that it's Hasbro is using Brandwatch to keep up with us, I did find evidence of Hasbro being a customer of theirs on the LinkedIn profile of Kevin Mullay, a Brandwatch executive:

Crimson Hexagon was acquired by Brandwatch (source) - so it's interesting indeed.

I'm not sure yet whether to feel creeped out that this kind of software is monitoring MLPF or honoured that someone with influence in Big Corporate thinks what we assorted rando ponyfans here have to say is worth paying attention to.

Hey Hasbro peeps - if you're reading this, and we all know you can if you want to, thanks for making G4 happen and working hard to make G5 a great followup! We'd love to have you join us here sometime - I know many of y'all who work on official pony are fans of it, too.

To those of us participating in this thread, I'm super curious to hear whom you think Brandwatch is showing our posts to and what kinds of decisions they might be making with what they find. For all we know, it might be a Hasbro team trying to make sure they can respond quickly if a Sonic movie reveal-type situation arises. Or maybe positive sentiment here is used to help fight for MLP to get more budget? Or to validate that it's worth making toys based on the animations' story instead of animations based on toys like G1-G4 were? I'd love to see where our speculations here can go.

***

To @TheGleaner's original prompt, it's fun to think about; we do know that Hasbro and show staff are well aware of the fandom; we have proof in the names Lyra, Octavia, and DJ Pon-3/Vinyl Scratch all having been adopted as the characters' official names. They tried to make Derpy's name canon too... that was sadly retconned on account of Internet outrage. We had Word of God reveal that Hasbro ordered FiM's staff to avoid reading fanfictions precisely to avoid the ethical and legal dilemma that accidentally (or intentionally) making an episode about someone's fanfic idea without proper credit and licensing could cause.

As to licensing a fanfic and properly crediting - they could hypothetically do that, but I imagine it's viewed as more trouble than it's worth when they already have their own creative team whom they pay to be familiar with the lore and come up with new stories to add to it. Practically, I imagine "properly crediting" fanfic ideas could be really complicated too with how freely fanfic authors share and borrow and steal ideas from one another all the time as well - tracing out an idea's original author might be really hard if not impossible.

Cute blep! This looks like a pony enjoying life. Are their eyelids painted or is that their natural colouring? Not a detail I've seen much on ponies before. I also adore the two-tone coat with the white underside, and the little shawl this pon is wearing. I'm curious to see and learn more about them!

That's a beautiful rendition of Izzy; thank you for sharing it with us, @jorge123esp. Her coat colour looks like Pipp's but it looks like you intended to brighten up the character in general - the electric blue mane contrasts wonderfully with that pink.

I love the life you've given to her - I can just imagine her giving us an comforting, inspirational pep talk while that elegant mane cheerfully bounces about. Makes me wanna squee!

Welcome to MLP Forums, @HeartTheCat19! Not even halfway into your first day here and you're already offering art requests? You're in my awesome book already.

I'd love to see what you do with my alicorn - here's a rough reference:

This poner should be sized and built approximately like Luna - tall and slender. I'll get a proper reference made one of these days that reflects this and a few other updates...

Some flavour text you may use for inspiration or choose to ignore: he has godlike cosmic powers (yes, I know), boundless passion for the science of magic, and is an inventor of futuristic sci-fi technology.

Shading would be really awesome but I echo @Neoeryn's sentiment that I'll appreciate whatever it is you want to draw. It's very generous of you to offer your time like this as an artist like this so it's most important to me that it's fun for you. Thank you for doing this!

Woo! Glad you like the idea of keeping this organized, too @Kujamih. Sorry for getting the names mixed up - all I did was "borrow" the titles of the other threads but I'm more than happy to teach you how to organize it yourself.

To edit the list in the OP, do the following:

1. Find the "Edit" menu in this thread's first post:
   
2. Use the "Link" tool to edit or insert a link (it does both):
   
3. A modal will appear in which you can set up the link!
   

Hey @Kujamih - this looks like a really fun project! I love it when creative shenanigans between users arise on MLP Forums and plan to read through it myself.

In the spirit of bringing more attention to awesome fan work, I tracked down your other Fail Safe threads, gave all of them the new "Fail Safe (comic)" tag, and added a few links to this thread's OP to make it as easy as possible for anyone who comes here to find the actual comic.

If this is meant to serve as the general "hub thread" for the series, think you could keep that list up to date? Or if that's too much work, I'd appreciate if you could apply that new tag to all new Fail Safe threads you make and leave a link to the tag in the OP; it'll go a long way to making the whole thing easy to explore.

I'm also curious: is this thread meant to replace the "Fail Safe (working title)" one you made in October (linked below)? My inner Twilight is curious what inspired this new one.

On 2021-02-24 at 8:45 PM, Skirmskirmskirm said:

I’ve been thinking about either taking commissions for custom pony bodypillows (which would cost quite a bit considering printing costs) or opening an Etsy shop in conjunction with a printing company but am curious to know whether these types of things are even in demand anymore! I enjoy drawing dakis and risqué art but I’m not sure where the market’s the highest. Please help me out!!

(PS, who would you like to see on a dakimakura the most? For research purposes)

I know of a few people who love dakis and would probably be quite interested, given the art style is to their liking.  There are also new fans coming into this fandom all the time, even if the pace is slower than before, who very well might get excited about a pretty oversized pillow with their new favourite character on it.

There isn't enough Tallight Sparkle in the world; I totally wouldn't buy the Tartarus out of a beautiful pillow showing off the elegance of Twilight's final form in Season 9, nope.

This is some grade-A sleuthing work you've done, @Dreamstar Moonlight; and I'm super happy to see it here in the form of a thread! I plan to keep it pinned and featured for at least a few days as a resource we can all rely on to get up to speed with all things G5.

I expect to have more thoughts on the topic later, after rest and work and other IRL commitments, but I want to leave a few notes with my impressions!

One, I found it quite interesting to learn about how many times it turned out that some rumoured G5 leak turned out be seemingly real. Quite a lot of random things leaked out of Hasbro and DHX over the course of FiM's run so I wonder if it's a systemic security problem or a guerilla marketing tactic to start warming up the hype train before a big release like yesterday's.

Two, having the full timeline of G5 information in one spot makes my inner "internet historian" really happy. Seeing how all the puzzle pieces that were dropped over the months and years come together to paint the big picture of what's coming our way - I expect to look back at this day fondly in a few years as the moment the G5 hype train left the station.

Three, the connection to Imalou- I had no idea about that before reading your post, and found it heartwarming to learn that a fan artist was hired by Hasbro to work on the very IP they love. I tend to hear more about companies keeping a cautious distance from hiring their fans - good reasons for this exist but I can still have the warm fuzzies over this.

And for my last point right now, as a pony fan with a tendency to get way too excited about aesthetics and canon theorycrafting, I really enjoyed the collection of images you collected to display here that take us from those mysterious blankets (we have a dedicated thread for those, by the way, for anyone who wants to rave or rant about 'em) to the characters' names and a cleaned-up version of the official logo.

I plan to return to this thread tomorrow when my brain is less mushy. I enjoyed the heck out of reading that opening post and would love to keep up with any future writeups like it that you make in the future. Thanks so much again for putting this together and sharing it here.

19 hours ago, Pentium100 said:

Big pipes.

I have used Cloudflare and some other pai tiers (including the enterprise tier of some other company) Seemed to work fine, as long as the real IPs did not leak (the pipes in that case were not very big). IIRC it stopped most Layer7 attacks as well and what got through was not a big problem.

OTOH, I remember cloudflare cutting off service by itself on the free tier if an attack reached a certain level.

I wonder who are that bored to attack this site though. And what they hope to gain.

Big pipes indeed, yes - measured in terabits. Earth will have bigger problems than MLP Forums being spotty if someone manages to knock our host offline...

Thanks for sharing your experience with Cloudflare. It's nice to hear a success story about it!

Out of curiosity, has all your experience with Cloudflare been on their paid plans? They advertised layer 7 protection as a "Business and up" (>$200 USD/mo) feature last time I looked into this, and the free tier's main option for mitigating such attacks meant placing the site behind irritating interstitial pages with sometimes-barely-working captchas. I hope it would work fairly smoothly, and transparently to a customer site's users, when one pays good money for it.

***

On motivations for DDoS attacks - some general commentary (not specific to this attack):

Usually people DDoS a site for lolz. Little more than personal amusement from the power rush that comes with sending a shadowy anon some Monero and feeling like they get to play god by then pointing a botnet at any site they'd like to disrupt.

Less commonly, they're in it for profit and try to extort a ransom out of a website "in return" for "allowing" it to be online.

And sometimes, they're in it as haters trying to enact some sort of "cleansing" agenda, where the intent may be to damage the reputation of their target and drive users away from it, often by making users get frustrated with trying to use the site and making them resent its staff for being apathetic or incompetent.*

*Note: While I dislike drawing attention to attacks and attackers on principle, and we usually don't, the community has a certain right-to-know when one causes visible disruptions so we can rightfully direct our collective ire toward the malicious actors and even band together to defend our corner of the ponynet. So that y'all know it's not a matter of MLPF "dying," staff giving up on it, or anything along those lines.

We as a staff team aren't always great at communicating this since the sysadmins are usually more preoccupied with fighting problems than announcing them. But it never hurts to tell us or ask questions when something's not working right! The "worst" that'll happen is that your "X is broken for me" report will receive an explanation once the proverbial fire's been put out.

Regardless, DDoS attacks are fundamentally antisocial, they're jail-worthy crimes, and they're inevitable in this day and age when one does anything of note on the internet.

In fact, they're almost a testament to a site's notability - that someone thinks a site is a big enough deal that it's worth spending money and risking a criminal record to try and, if not totally take a site down, annoy its users and staff. Receiving one is like a compliment that your site matters.

2 hours ago, raykv423 said:

Is this the first time the MLP Forums got a DDoS attack? 

Nope; not even close. MLP Forums has been DDoS-attacked so many times over the years that we long ago stopped keeping count. Due to the defences we have in place, the vast majority of such attacks come and go with no impact other than the attackers' wallets lightening up and those of the criminals who run their botnets becoming a little heavier.

1 hour ago, Neoeryn said:

There was an account called epichacker something that created an account a few hours ago. Not sure if they're related to the incident going on, but just clicking on their profile cause me to lose connection, and we have a really strong internet service. Just wanted everyone to look out for this account just in case!

I appreciate your intent of looking out for your fellow MLPF users. Without commenting on any particular account, including the one you're referring to, I want to say that the connection issue you experienced was almost certainly the result of the DDoS attack itself and not anything specific to any one account.

Coincidental random fluke. Unless you happened to try accessing several profiles repeatedly and consistently observed the connection drop on just one - I really, really want to hear about it if that's what you observed.

1 hour ago, Pentium100 said:

They manage to get around cluoudflare protection? Or did they managed to find out your real IP?

We don't use Cloudflare's "protection" for several reasons but, above all, because it has historically caused us more downtime than it ever prevented - it's been tried a few times here over the years. I know their marketing is slick and many other sites use them but I've found their free product creates a false sense of security, makes promises it can't keep, and generally creates more problems than it solves. Almost like security theatre.

Our "real IPs" are public but this doesn't worry us because our datacenter is effective at stopping the kinds of attacks that knowledge of a site's "real IP" normally enables. Attack traffic that gets through that, Cloudflare is ineffective against as well - at least on their free tier (I can't comment on their paid tiers as we never had the budget to try them) - so our sysops team would be actively working, as @tinker explained, to mitigate such attacks either way.

2 hours ago, Pentium100 said:

I think that fewer people see status updates or blogs. I know I see fewer of them, just because I have to scroll down on the main page and I do not always remember to do so after refreshing it.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Conversations are the lifeblood of forum communities and, while blogs and statuses are "just" other ways to have conversations, it's good intel to have that as a user, they kinda disappear from your world. This isn't great when you're looking for more conversations to participate in! It is also not-great if you're the one writing up a blog entry in particular and hope to expose it to as many interested people as possible.

I'm still happy to hear other perspectives on this too like @WWolf's and anyone else's. If you ask me, there exists opportunity to revisit how we treat these "status-y/blog-y" topics as forum communities are ostensibly about encouraging good conversations and it sounds like the current approach might actually be discouraging them.

6 hours ago, WWolf said:

A lot of threads from the old days would be locked now if revived as they’re “blog/status update”-y.

Can you please share more about this? I know MLP Forums didn't always have blogs and I'm curious what your experience with this encouragement of moving certain topics into them has been like from your perspective. In particular, I wonder if it ever feels like it stifles your or others' efforts at conversation at all.

On 2021-02-09 at 6:30 AM, BornAgainBrony said:

The only problem I've seen it cause in the past is the creation of spam threads. Threads that literally only exist for people to boost their post count. On some forums these ended up consuming 50% of all post data or more.

Other times, users responded to every thread they could almost like a social network bot with nothing real to contribute. Just "Cool story" or "nice." Probably why the character limit exists but that's a minor hindrance to folks who do that.

So yeah, some DO indeed use it like a social status indicator, and I guess I could've easily imagined that happening years ago. I've seen no indication of it now though.

The ponies that founded MLP Forums were veterans in the community management game and found many of the behaviours you described to be problematic in nurturing and maintaining an inviting, pleasant community. Human Pony attention span is finite so even if users don't "give in" to the psychological temptation to increment that counter next to their posts, it'll still constantly pull attention away from it and make one notice it a little. I'd rather that attention be directed toward the contents of the thread and personalities of its participants.

It's no coincidence as well that post counters are not incremented by "spammy threads" and that they have a dedicated place to live in in the form of the Forum Lounge area.

On 2021-02-09 at 6:30 AM, BornAgainBrony said:

Yeah, it is. And I hope that doesn't mean those icons are next on the chopping block, since they're at least a relative indicator of post activity.

I second @Jeric on the species ranks being here to stay. They add a lot to the site's theme and are designed to function more like milestone or seniority markers than as quick dopamine hits, and so they serve more as recognition of ongoing activity than as a direct incentive to get addicted to spammy posting.

On 2021-02-09 at 8:49 PM, Harmonic Revelations said:

Back in the day, if my memory isn't simply failing me, the amount of brohoofs you got was also at some point visible on posts, and I think that was removed for similar reasons. To discourage metagaming from people who are trying to min-max stats instead of creating actual worthwhile content. 

Correct!

On 2021-02-09 at 10:00 PM, Rikifive said:

You can still focus on grinding brohooves when on mobile tho 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 Yeah! 

That's unintended and will be "fixed". Thanks for the heads-up! Enjoy it while it lasts.

1 hour ago, Califorum said:

That makes sense however seeing numbers go up due to something you are doing is satisfying for everyone I bet.  

The "rank badge" under your avatar (that starts at Blank Flank, then progresses through Muffin > Cupcake > etc.) is meant as a fun replacement for in-thread post counters that rewards you with a progression of new badges as you make more posts over time but without emphasizing the specific number as an important piece of information for all the world to know while reading your content. The FAQ page that contains the list is sadly broken at the moment (there's lots to still fix up that broke during the upgrade) but here's a partial screenshot of the list from the admin panel:

These badges fulfil the "fun" aspects of post counts but differ spirit by reinforcing MLPF's pony theme (everyone starts as a Blank Flank, just like newborn foals!) and feel more like long-term rewards for ongoing contributions to the community; watching a generic number count up with every post, in comparison, is more like the short-term dopamine jolts from getting a like on a Facebook post. Yes yes, I know we have a brohoof/reactions system but there are no "rewards" for it beyond the software's "won the day" thing and a somewhat hidden "leaderboard"). Being motivated to earn the next badge is more fun and creates a friendlier community atmosphere in my opinion than being motivated to increment a counter over and over again.

Most forums show post counters because that's what most forum software does out of the box but I've observed it subtly breeding elitism over time on many sites, creating a sense of classism between longtime users and new ones. This has torn apart more forums I've been on in the past than I can count; de-emphasizing the counters helps make the site more welcoming to newer as well as less active users by not constantly intimidating them with higher numbers than their own that we humans reflexively compare and generate feelings about - and making MLPF fun for new users is just as important as keeping it fun for everyone who's already here.

Please give the new look without these counters a chance and pay attention to your feelings about posts and their authors as you read various threads and write your posts. The difference is psychological and might be pretty subtle but I expect you'll feel a friendlier vibe to the site after an adjustment period.

On 12/15/2020 at 5:28 PM, CypherHoof 🐎 said:

My paypal just has my email address; I don't trust them with my mobile number.

This is an interesting datapoint! It contradicts various posts I found on PayPal's own forums that state you can't use PayPal without providing a phone number.

I'd appreciate if you could answer some or all of the following questions in the hope of generating communal wisdom:

• When did you sign up for PayPal?
• Which country is your PayPal account based in?
• Do you recall PayPal ever asking you for a phone number (or demanding it) during signup, verification, login, payments, or at any other point? If yes, how did you bypass the request?