Twilight Sparkle ✨

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

Incoming shameless plug! You should check out all of Poniverse's other communities - MLP Forums is just one of several projects that we operate.

• Pony.fm - unlimited pony music hosting, streaming, and downloads
• Ponyville Live! - convention coverage and 24/7 pony radio
• PoniArcade - pony-themed Minecraft and Terraria servers
• Equestria.tv - share videos with others in real time - also hosts weekly episode streams and other events

Volunteering with fandom organizations can also be incredibly rewarding - personally, that's where I've spent most of my time in the fandom. I see on your profile that you're studying computer science - Poniverse is always recruiting developers if you're looking for cool side projects.

I'll remember that--I truly have liked your forum for a while y'all do a good job. Do you guys have a yearly budget where one person could pay a chunk and not have to worry about it--or is it just a straight up monthly payment.

 

Didn't know if you guys had a year pack of each so for those who do donate could just do it at once if they choose to, for those who are fortunate.

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.

If I may offer a suggestion: I think the group should just be a one time donation of like $200+ or anyone who achieves over $200 (or whatever amount) over a period of time. Mostly because $100 a month is a rather steep requirement to keep a title. I mean up to this point we've only had one and that lasted all of a month. You're more or less asking people to pay $1,200 a year to keep the user title. That's a bit steep.

 

I think it would be more sensible to award it permanently to people who have donated over a certain amount because they have contributed so much to the site. Otherwise it's more or less a useless usergroup because few people could afford to hold onto it for very long.

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.

Hey @@Callback,

There's no complex reason behind the ability to remove tracks from playlists not being there - it was a human oversight. The good news is that it is being worked on and should be added soon!

Ok, so now it won't publish for some reason...

How about now?

That's definitely a bug - I'm on it!

@@C. Thunder Dash,

This has been fixed; Pony.fm should be a lot more accepting of whatever you try to upload in the future. The track is available in your account area now, ready to publish!

It looks like we're conflating a few concepts here: being royalty, being an alicorn, and being a head of state. They can overlap but based on what we've seen in the show so far, they're not mutually dependent (ie. you don't need to be all three or nothing).

How Equestria's royal family came to be

In the real world, one can be born into royalty, marry into it, or forcefully displace the ruling family. I suppose it would be possible for a monarch to appoint someone as royalty at their own whimsy, too, though I'm not aware of specific historical cases of this. In Equestria, however, we have two known cases of royal appointments (without a blood or marital relationship) in Twilight and Cadance.

The Journal of the Two Sisters tells us that the leaders of Equestria's three founding tribes - Star Swirl and Clover the Clever, Smart Cookie, and Private Pansy - appointed the two sisters to become their rulers. They were appointed and coronated as absolute diarchs, as far as I can tell, so they're the beginning of Equestria's royal family.

What does being an alicorn have to do with running the country?

Celestia and Luna were blank-flank alicorns at the time and the journal specifically refers to "the alicorns" as the race that raised and educated them. The journal doesn't go into more detail about where the rest of the alicorn race is, unfortunately, but this is very strong evidence that natural alicorns exist. Royal status was ascribed to Celestia and Luna by their tribal predecessors, and we are told that part of the reason they were selected to run Equestria is because they are a physiological combination of earth, pegasus, and unicorn ponies - this supposedly qualifies them to look out for and relate to every race's needs.

This leaves us with Equestria's heads of state being meritocratically appointed - Cadance and Twilight were later appointed by the current rulers. The heads of state being alicorns appears to be by convention moreso than necessity - my headcanon is that Celestia likes the founders' logic for having alicorns as leaders and at some point learned or created a spell to genetically modify a living pony into an alicorn and grow their missing appendages. Twilight didn't "naturally" ascend - Celestia chose her to - and genes are probably involved, too, as Cadance was not a natural alicorn but is now giving birth to one.

So, a few key conclusions:

• alicorns are a natural, if rare, pony race
• incumbent heads of state appoint new heads to join them
• one can join Equestria's royal family by being appointed a head of state (no marriage or blood relationship necessary!)
• Celestia likes the nation's uppermost leaders to be alicorns
• Celestia may secretly be a mad scientist who enjoys genetic experiments on sentient creatures

What about Prince Blueblood and Shining Armour?

Just because Equestria's royal rulers were appointed doesn't mean that one couldn't marry or be born into the royal family, either. They don't have to be mutually exclusive ways of becoming royalty. The "Prince" or "Princess" title appears to be ceremonial as Shining Armour and Blueblood are both princes but neither is known to have significant political power. The actual rulers are known by their names and the region they're responsible for (or cultural concept, in Twilight's case).

Shining Armour's case for becoming a prince is easy: he married his way in.

Blueblood I'm less sure about. I know he's thought to be a distant relative of Celestia's but if he's not a direct descendant of Celestia, I have a hard time imagining he's royal solely because of blood ties. Celestia and Luna were the only founding members of Equestria's royal family and we have no reason to believe either of them has ever married or had children. He hasn't been appointed as a head of state, so that leaves us with nobility as a possible explanation - in the sense that he runs a small-ish region of land in service of the crown and gets an official title for it. It could be that Equestria throws around "prince" and "princess" as titles for anyone in either the nobility or royalty. I'll have to do more thinking on this one.

Alicornhood doesn't seem to automatically come with the title, even if it turns out that it's possible for one to be born an alicorn. Blueblood isn't an alicorn because he probably inherited his title, and one popular theory mind you is that he's something like the descendant of Princess Platinum, or something along those lines. Shining Armor is a prince consort, and while he's definitely in a good position to earn alicornhood, given his good nature and leadership skills, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say he's not quite there yet, though the specific requirements are vague and such. Though, he doesn't exactly get a lot of screentime, and neither does Celestia, which is a shame IMO.

It's tangential to this thread but since you mention having previously made your point about whether we can call Equestria a matriarchy, do you happen to have a link to one of your prior posts on the matter? That can save you some writing and energy when the topic comes up elsewhere with a different group of users (and I'm interested in reading it, too).

"Before The Best Night Ever aired, Lauren Faust stated that Celestia's nephew had no name in the show and that he's the "great great great great great great great great great great great (and probably even more greats) nephew on Celestia's and Luna's mother's side, about 52 times removed, roughly speaking." "

- http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Prince_Blueblood

 

This is the closest information we have to insight on nobility and their relation to the Alicorn Princesses. If still true to canon, it would support the notion that nobility is related to bloodlines more so than a title obtained by anypony with enough bits. The recent confirmation of a royal baby proves that at the very least a pony who becomes an alicorn can have alicorn offspring, cementing the idea that alicorns themselves can procreate. It would then be clear that the nobility would have stemmed from direct lineage to alicorns.

That and that the quote above also recognises that Celestia and Luna were likely born as any other pony would be.

See the first part of my post for evidence that alicorns are a natural race. The issue here is that Celestia's and Luna's parents were not royalty, so it seems strange to consider a blood relationship through their parents or ancestors a reason to recognize someone as royalty a thousand years later. I don't have a great alternative explanation right now, however.

It looks like our billing system did something funky. I'm looking into it now! Sorry about that!

Update: Your subscriber status is now fixed, Emerald Bolt. Thanks for your support and for alerting us about this!

Thank you very much for this. I was expecting an admin or a Moderator not the actual site owner  . I feel honored by this. 

I generally support the hosting service so... that's why.

Hi @@Tel Locus,

From a support standpoint, our hosting functions as unmanaged shared hosting - meaning that we expect you to generally know what you're doing with setting up and operating your website. Our role is to provide you with a fast, reliable server to run your site(s) on. You get a cPanel account with SSH access.

That said, should you need help with something, I'll generally be able to at least provide some pointers, and support should be a comparatively personal experience since we have few enough hosting clients to personally remember you and your needs.

We don't have hard limits on CPU or RAM usage like larger hosts often do, and the number of sites you'll be sharing a server with is very small (low double-digits at most). That means your site won't be suspended during a traffic spike, and you can generally expect speedy performance from it. I realize performance is subjective but the main thing here is that we don't oversell resources and we have no motivation to cram thousands of sites into a single, underpowered box.

Hosting with Poniverse does not create an affiliation, partnership, or cross-promotion agreement with Poniverse, just to be clear. You can, however, request that we link to your site from the upcoming subscriber thank-you page on Poniverse.net as part of the perks at that level.

Finally, there's the warm and fuzzy feeling of financially supporting Poniverse while getting a useful service for yourself!

Feel free to PM me with details about your site's requirements - that'll be the best way to see if our service is a match for your project.

There is a song called Faithful Student II and it is just ear blasting white noise.

holy hell, found what you were talking about 0_0

 

I can't see a report button anywhere and i'm not sure who the admins for ponyfm are but i've pinged feld0 about this, should hopefully have it removed when he sees

Sorry for the late response, I tried searching it up but it won't play for me and won't pull up for me to do anything sbout it. Is it still there for you?

I removed it the other day but didn't get the chance to post back here - thanks for bringing it to our attention!

And Aurelleah - you'll be getting proper moderation tools soon. ^^

Hey @Elemental Moon, this is a thread you've got to be in.

This is amazing. In honour of @Elemental Moon:

If funding is really an issue, I don't see much of a point in making ads optional. They don't take up much space on the page, and I have no trouble with loading time on my smartphone. I think that you should check to see how much of a difference it will make for your budget, and if it's significant enough, open it up to discussion and see what the community as a whole thinks.

Admittedly, this was a while ago, but I found opt-in ads to be more effective than forced ads. It seems counterintuitive but my own theory is that ad blockers are so incredibly prevalent nowadays that some users won't even know that a site has ads unless it's somehow pointed out to them. The option to opt into ads here makes their existence crystal clear and serves as a reminder to disable any ad blockers.

I haven't been on much lately, so I haven't noticed the downtime. Interesting info, nonetheless.

 

I was very surprised when you say you had to move 3 terabytes of data to the new servers. I don't know if that includes the OS and server software, or if it's just the forum data. Either way, that's a lot.

Some of the bigger chunks of data in that package:

• every image and attachment ever posted on MLP Forums
• Pony.fm's library of over 20,000 tracks, including the entire MLP Music Archive
• all of PoniArcade's game servers, including >100 GB of Minecraft data
• various archives and backups of everything

All this poni adds up over time.

@@Feld0, out of curiosity, are your servers Linux/Unix based?

 

~ Miles 

Linux. Most of our servers run Ubuntu but we have some CentOS and Debian boxes as well.

One note of caution: the way you treat the subject signals to others how they should react to it. If/when it comes up, expect to get different reactions by treating it nonchalantly:

Quote

Yeah, it's a great community with lots of creative people in it. Myself, I do first-aid for my local pony convention and love being part of it.

vs dramatically:

Quote

The pony fandom is the incarnation of all that is good about humanity, with none of the bad, and it's zomgamazing. Seriously, everyone out there is wrong; whatever you know about it is wrong; [insert rant about how much better it is than whatever they were thinking of]. The cartoon is the best thing ever and my life revolves around it.

I'll be there! I've been to every BronyCAN and it has been an awesome experience every time with great staff and lots of fun things to do.

@@FullMetalParagon, what will your panel be about?

is flying in for the con as well and we're thinking of running a panel either about Poniverse, the technical work that goes into building and running pony fan sites, or both. A few other Poniverse staff are thinking of going, too.

It would be cool to have some kind of Poniverse meetup there. At BronyCAN 2013, something like 20-25 MLPF users took over the nearby Boston Pizza.

No No I've encountered this problem constantly as well and I have a premeume account from Mojang, but its not the same, it just doesnt let me in. and I've tried everything:

-restarting the wi-fi router

-restarting the game

-restarting the WHOLE game by redownloading it on another account

-trying on another computer

-trying on another internet router

EVERYTHING! I hope I get a this resolved soon, but if any of you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

I think the entire server is down for maintenance... tried to log in at 6:45pm 1/22/2016..

We were moving all of Poniverse to new servers (and some bits are still in progress). But PoniArcade Minecraft is now up and running on the fancy new hardware - you can connect again!

I'm confused, I keep putting in the IP adress and it connect. Idk if it's the server or what because I've tried it on my laptop and computer. Help! Dx

Just letting you know that we're up and running on our new hardware now! Things should be smoother now.

Status update on this so far: MLP Forums, Equestria.tv, Pony.fm, Poniverse.net, and Poniverse's databases are all up and running on the new servers now!

What's next:

• PoniArcade
• Poniverse's giant NFS server
• our partners' websites, including Ponyville Live! radio station homepages

Thanks for bearing with us through this process, and a special thanks as well to our new subscribers, too. :grin2: Uptime can only get better from here!

Hey @@BlueBrony,

The Pony.fm forum is a great place to post issues and feedback for Pony.fm! Thanks for the report.

I have good news - your playlist is intact but the tracks are not showing up due to a glitch. I'll dig into this and fix it soon!

I've fixed the bug! Your playlist now works again, @@BlueBrony.

We've had an unfortunate string of outages here at awkward times in recent memory. You trust us to provide a place to pony it up 24/7 and we've been failing to deliver on that. Sorry.

I'll get to a technical explanation of why these outages happened in a moment but for tl;dr's sake, I wanted to let you all know that we were trying a little too hard to keep our hosting costs down and ended up with what we paid for when we duct-taped four boxes together and called it infrastructure.
 
So what are we doing about it? This week, we got two fancy new servers - Mount Everhoof and Sweetie Shores (that's Pixel Wavelength's hometown, for those of you following our mascots' canon) - that won't suffer from the issue that kept bringing down our current setup. Work is already underway to move our everything over to them, which involves around ~3 TB of data and over 20 virtual servers.
 
We're doing what we can to minimize downtime during this process but some maintenance windows will be unavoidable. Following @Poniverse on Twitter is the best way to keep up with these.
 
The downside to this, and the reason it was put off as a last resort, is that this move significantly increases our hosting costs. Along with Ponyville Live!'s bills, paying for more reliability means there's less to spend on other cool stuff like giveaways, contests, advertising, and convention presences. We're also interested in exploring redundant infrastructure across more servers now that we have a proper LAN, but that's not financially feasible right now.

The upgraded subscriber perks came at a good time as subscriptions are a reliable, recurring revenue stream we can count on every month when budgeting. Because it recurs, even a modest subscription goes a long way when making decisions about how much to invest into the servers that keep Poniverse online. Whether or not perks are your thing, we'd appreciate if you consider subscribing so we can keep things awesome for everyone. 

We feel like Buffy here when the servers are on fire.

 
A special thanks to our donors, everyone who has opted into ads here, our commission artists and their customers, and especially our 14 current subscribers - you're making this migration possible, for the benefit of thousands of users.
 
I'll update you all again once everything is settled into its new home.
 
 
Technical details, for those who like such things

Hi CinnamomPop,

You can pay for commissions via credit/debit card directly (which runs through Stripe) - there is an option for this on the checkout page in the shops.

If you don't have access to a payment card, we can also process money orders - you can get these with cash. PM me to arrange this!

Hi all!

Are you technically inclined? Do you enjoy coding, beating servers into submission, and making computers do your bidding?

I'm recruiting developers for Poniverse - the organization behind MLP Forums! We have positions open for web developers, Minecraft modders, DevOps specialists/sysadmins, and mobile app devs. The application form includes full descriptions of each of these roles.

Poniverse is a group of over 80 of us bringing thousands of fans together through various services:

• Pony.fm - the pony music hosting and streaming site, with over 20,000 tracks and counting
• Poniverse.net - our OAuth provider and the core of Poniverse's API's
• Equestria.tv - real-time video sharing and chat, à la Synchtube
• Ponyville Live! - hosting and syndication of all the pony radios, all in one place
• PoniArcade - a collection of pony-themed game servers, including 6 Spigot-based Minecraft servers
• MLP Forums - the ponynet's largest forum community
• PonyRoleplay - a brand new site that will deliver an awesome roleplaying experience

There's a ton to do in building new features for all of these projects, operating the servers behind it all, and building the API's that link these communities with each other.

If that sounds like your kind of fun, join the team and we'll build something awesome together!

Link to the application form!

Awesome, @@Feld0!

 

One last question, though. I notice that quotation marks are not mentioned in the list of disallowed characters in the settings:

 

 

Can this be changed?

I checked and it turns out that quotes actually are allowed in MLPF display names, but it's a separate issue. I'll follow up with you via PM - it looks like a one-off problem.