Twilight Sparkle ✨

Woo! Glad to see that Poni Secret Santa will be a thing this year. I've signed up and I hope lots of others do as well! Thanks for organizing this, @AppleDashPoni!

@@tberty, I'm guessing you ran into this error while trying to log into your Poniverse account? There was a misconfiguration there that allowed poniverse.net's certificate to expire, which @AppleDashPoni and I just corrected. Are you still getting it? If yes, please reply with the following info: your browser and the version of it you're using the URL you experience the error on If not, I'd appreciate if you can let us know that, too.

The ability to stay out of threads you don't like doesn't necessarily mean there's nothing to gain by moderating them, making them less prominent, or banning them. There's a reason NSFW content is blanket-banned on MLPF instead of being permitted and left for uninterested users to ignore. Proactive moderation is part of MLPF's DNA. Running into content you don't like will negatively shape your perception of MLP Forums, and there are plenty of online communities which blanket-ban politics due to the heat and discomfort such topics tend to generate. In lieu of blanket bans, the Debate Pit and Life Advice areas were both created as a means to separate threads that are controversial, intensely negative, or otherwise not what most users expect to find when coming here to talk ponies. Maybe Debate Pit could be renamed to "Debates & Politics" to make it a better home for the threads @@EmeraldStar04 is concerned about.

FYI - This thread was about a server migration from many months ago, not the one that happened over the course of the last few weeks. The most recent one was mostly communicated on Twitter.

Hi NCMares! How long does it take you to produce an art piece now compared to when you started drawing ponies? I imagine it gets faster (easier?) after doing it for a while but by how much?

Editing your login name is unfortunately not possible at this time. It's not visible to anyone but yourself, though - I suggest using a password manager like LastPass to remember it for you so you never need to type it again.

@@Mortar, does this happen when you disable all of your browser's extensions and/or load MLP Forums in an incognito window? I'm using Chrome 52.0.2743.82 on macOS and it works fine for me, but I also use very few browser extensions.

I have a number of changes to share with you today, the biggest of which is that Poniverse - the organization that operates MLP Forums, Pony.fm, Ponyville Live!, and a bunch of other projects - is becoming a nonprofit organization! Wait a moment - what does that mean?! I've been the sole owner of Poniverse since its inception. Turning it into a nonprofit organization means that Poniverse will no longer have an ultimate ruler, so to speak; instead, it'll be led by a chairpony and controlled by a board of directors who are accountable to the staff and community in a new way. The by-laws that set out all the details will be public information and we'll have directors with specific duties like record-keeping, financials, technology, etc. It's a fundamental change in how our organization is run - one that ensures that Poniverse can last as least as long as the pony fandom does - or in other words, beyond any one person's desire to continue running it. At the same time, it's a way of making official, in a legally recognized way, what Poniverse has always been about: organizing and supporting pony fans in building amazing online communities. Pixel has been scaling Mt. Paperwork for months to make this happen. Art by SFyr. New leadership is inbound! Speaking of change, I'm proud to announce that Simon will be Poniverse's new chair! Simon first joined MLP Forums two and a half years ago, and has served on staff as a Moderator, Forum Team Leader, and Head of Public Relations. He knows how to see all sides of an argument, created our beloved Q&A series, built Poniverse's art and public relations teams, herded cats to represent our projects at various pony conventions, and can execute grand visions like nobody's business. I have full confidence that Poniverse has a bright future ahead under his leadership. That's not the only change in leadership that's happening today - leading this entire organization is a huge commitment, and to that end, Simon is handing off the PR department to writer, plushie maker, and moderator extraordinaire, Nervous Stitch! Stitch is bringing into this new role her candour, positivity, and business skills that we've come to know and love, and will be working closely with the board to spread all that Poniverse has to offer. As for myself... I'll be a founding board member and will continue in my role as Poniverse's chief techpony. Cue the personal monologue... Poniverse is near and dear to me, and it has been helpful to me in social, academic, and professional ways alike; but recruiting community leaders, overseeing six projects at once, managing pony politics, and handling administrative miscellania consume an unreal amount of time and energy. I'm committed to finishing my university degree and making the most of my career opportunities, and wearing seven hats at Poniverse is endangering my ability to do either. At the same time, the pony community deserves to have strong leadership and distribution of responsibilities at the top of an organization that operates many services for it. The pony community is a ton of fun to be part of and being in a position to organize over 80 people to facilitate communal gathering spots for it was something. I was a wee 16-year-old when I co-founded MLP Forums with Kurtiss - since then, I've graduated from high school, gotten halfway through a computer science degree, and spent a summer programming cars. Through all that time, Poniverse was the side project I came home to day after day, year after year. It has been an honour to lead Poniverse and play a role in building it (and it is only a role - this whole thing is a heck of a team effort), and I hope to continue being part of this community in my own way moving forward. It has been the ride of my life, an experience I wouldn't trade for the world, but the single best contribution I can make to the community at this point is to give it the tools to keep Poniverse rolling through one generation of fans after another. Thank you for sharing and supporting my dream. Onwards! Art by SFyr.

There are programmers at all skill levels. If you can write code to bend a computer to your will, you have reason to identify yourself as a programmer. Got a specific kind of project in mind that you'd find Java or C++ useful for? Personally, I like starting with a project idea and then picking a language for it. Backups, backups, backups. I sympathize - I lost one of my earlier attempts at developing a game when a very particular flash drive pulled a Houdini on me. I'm glad the loss didn't completely kill your desire to finish the project, at least. /) for co-ops. Can you share more about what you're doing on your co-op term? PHP and JavaScript aren't representative of everything there is to web development. Both of these languages have their insane parts (I'm with you on the JS date object...) but PHP, at least, is relatively avoidable if you don't want to go near it. That said, there are libraries and frameworks in both languages that go a long way in encouraging "good" code. I hold Laravel, combined with PHP 7, in especially high regard; Pony.fm's entire backend is built with it. Simple programs can be insanely useful. I like PHP and Python for hacking out simplistic procedural scripts that are too complex to fit in a "nice" Bash script but not complex enough to warrant having anything other than an interpreter installed. The vast majority of my own programming knowledge comes from building and maintaining stuff from Poniverse (it came with a healthy dose of "devops", too). I'm studying computer science in university right now, interspersed with co-op terms. So far, I've had a term as a full-stack developer, one as a data engineer, and now one in which I help program cars. I like it as a career path but programming pony projects has also been incredibly fun and rewarding.

@@AstroFX, I'm Poniverse's chief techpony. I'm happy to answer any specific questions you have about Poniverse's security but will also provide some general information in this post. First, a disclaimer: no one can promise perfect security. An element of unpredictability exists in any system humans are involved with. There's always room to improve but I like to think that we take reasonable steps to protect information that Poniverse is entrusted with, particularly considering this entire organization is a massive hobby project for all involved. The vast majority of our servers can only be accessed through our internal VPN. We block all ports by default in our firewall and only open/forward the ones we need. Access to the VPN and to individual servers is given to staff on a need-to-have basis. We outsource payment card processing to Stripe and PayPal, both PCI-compliant payment processors. If you're making payments to Poniverse, your credit card number never touches our servers. Our sysadmins use tools to manage all of Poniverse's servers at once, which limits our chances of a server getting compromised because no one remembered to update that old password on it. We won't reveal your email address, IP address, or other private information to third parties without your consent unless we're reporting criminal activity to law enforcement.To be clear, Poniverse's partners are third parties. The various conventions that have their forums here do not have access to Poniverse's records of your email and IP addresses. We don't mess around with your password. Our central login portal at Poniverse.net is the only site that you ever have to enter your Poniverse password into. All sites that use Poniverse logins use something called OAuth 2.0 to avoid ever touching your password. This vastly limits the number of ways that a hacker could intercept your password. Your password is hashed with bcrypt, a modern algorithm that the security community approves for this purpose. It is not possible for us to retrieve your actual password from the version of it that we store. The login portal uses HSTS. Most of Poniverse's sites use a modern HTTPS setup to encrypt traffic between you and Poniverse. Note that MLP Forums and Pony.fm are served entirely over HTTPS. I hope that sheds a little light on things. Let me know if you have further questions.

Check out my Pony.fm favourites list - lots of pony tunes I'm fond of there, but I'll draw special attention to these two: https://pony.fm/tracks/1183-helping-twilight-win-the-crown-delta-brony-remix https://pony.fm/tracks/21232-the-friendship-express-feat-meelz

Payments go through either Stripe or PayPal (Stripe is used for direct card payments). PayPal does have a means of getting their exchange rate in an automated way, which we could use if/when this feature is implemented - I imagine that will give you a good idea of how much it'll actually cost you.

You mean showing an equivalent local price even when the official price (and the charge sent to your card) is in USD? While that's difficult to achieve with our current billing system, I'd find that useful for when we upgrade/replace it (which will eventually happen).

@@Mentis Soliloquy, I'm responsible for Poniverse's finances, so... I understand the issue - I'm Canadian myself and always have to watch out for what currency every website is charging in. The reality is that, unless we introduce region-specific pricing (which I don't see happening), something has to serve as a common measure of value for all MLPF users. We picked the USD for that because it's the local currency for ~70% of our users. The rest of us, when dealing with money here, have to consider how much USD is worth in our local currencies and do what we can to get the best conversion rates for it. To that end, I recommend researching the methods I listed in my last post - having a cheap way of getting USD is useful not only here, but all over the Internet.

We always charge customers and pay artists out in US Dollars. Any currency conversion is the responsibility of the customer (if buying something) or the artist (when receiving funds), and we encourage artists to consider this when setting their prices. How would introducing an intermediate "virtual currency" change the amount of money that artists receive or that customers pay? The virtual currency would still need to have an exchange rate against at least one fiat currency - DeviantArt's points, for example, are priced at 80 points per US Dollar; they're not offered in any other currency. I'm unfamiliar with Steam Dollars but Steam has region-specific pricing (I see Canadian pricing often being cheaper than US pricing after currency conversion), which means that the amount of monetary value that Valve and the developer receive depends on the customer's location. Is that what you're looking for? Though this might seem more equitable to customers in various economic climates, I see it creating an accounting nightmare and being unfair to artists. And only switching the currency won't change how much you actually pay - if we were to switch to say, the Canadian Dollar, artists will adjust their prices to compensate for the CAD's lower value. If it's currency conversion fees that are eating your money (ie. your bank or PayPal taking a 2.5% cut from the conversion), there are techniques to minimize those: maintaining USD bank accounts + debit/credit cards (these should be readily available in most countries since the USD is so popular) using a currency conversion service instead of your bank to buy USD (there should be a few exchanges in your city that offer better rates; there are also online exchanges like XE.com) using a technique like Norbert's Gambit to buy USD

This is possible - you can prepay for 6 or 12 months at a time from the subscription's page (this is possible for all subscription tiers, not just the Pink Fluffy Unicorn). I can set up other billing terms for a subscription if you want, too. Unfortunately, permanent perks would be disingenuous to offer, as they're out of step with our financial reality. Permanent perks might encourage a few large donations in the short term, but someone who receives them will then have zero incentive to ever donate again, while possibly even being under the false impression that their contribution will continue benefiting the community forever. Most of Poniverse's expenses are recurring (server bills, domain renewals, mailbox rental, software licenses, etc.), which is why all donor and subscriber perks come with expiry dates (donor perks expire based on how much you pay; subscriptions recur and expire by definition). Knowing that twenty people donate $10 every month allows for much saner financial planning than getting the occasional $200 and having no idea how long it needs to last. There's a hypothetical exception to this: a contribution so large that it allows us to employ someone for a nontrivial length of time. Think hiring a software engineer for a year to build out a bunch of new features that we'll all use for years to come. It would be on the order of five or more figures - at that point, I doubt your motivation to donate is based on getting perks that never expire, but there'd be a conversation about recognizing your contribution in an unusual way. Where getting a title is concerned... you can have the Subscriber title for about 2.5 coffees/month. The "Pink Fluffy Unicorn" tier is ridiculous by design.

It's now Buffy. Credit to Fhao for animating her and our other mascots.