Twilight Sparkle ✨

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

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.

I fixed this. Thanks for the report.

I took a look at this and should have it fixed now. Tech details below, if you care:
 

 
The realtime notifications are a homegrown customization to IP.Board, involving an additional server-side process. We have a program in place that's supposed to keep the notifications process running, but for some reason, it didn't. It appears that it hadn't loaded up its configuration file correctly, so I restarted it - after which it promptly brought the notifications process online. To test that it was working as intended now, I manually killed the notifications process a few times, and it successfully came back in moments. Judging from this, it should continue working seamlessly now as long as the host server does.

Neither. It's a generic designation, not a specific position. No one's title is actually "Poniverse Staff"; rather, it just means their primary work for Poniverse (with the exception of the tech support team) is not actually for MLP Forums. There's more to Poniverse than one site!
 
The designation encompasses staff positions from lead designer to lore writer - you can't fit these into the forum hierarchy, because they're not usually part of it.

This should be fixed now.

I've been patching our servers this morning for the just-unearthed "Heartbleed" vulnerability. The process included a bit of downtime on our search engine as that was affected by the issue, but it is back online now.

On the thread index, look for the reply count:
 

 
Try clicking the "1 reply/X replies" part.

Hey Mitch - thanks for the heads-up! This has been fixed - the IP.Board theme properly displays opt-in ads now.

I'd like to say something. I love mobile apps as much as the next guy. Seriously, they're great, and I'd really love to have one available for MLP Forums. Please do not interpret the lack of an app as an expression of disinterest from our staff in having one. There are simply economical reasons that make it like trying to square a circle.
 
 
 
Please keep reading.
 
 
 
Finding staff is difficult enough. Finding developer staff is harder still. If it was that easy to get professional software engineers to take hundreds (if not thousands) of hours out of their lives to build stuff for free, it would be amazing, and Poniverse would have been running every software project in the world by now - but it's not that easy. The time of competent software developers is in extremely high demand by the software industry, and we cannot compete with that... read on...
 
 
 
The comparison to Equestria Daily is unfair. First off, being for-profit and having full-time staff, it's quite safe to assume Equestria Daily's revenues and especially profits are substantially higher than those of Poniverse & MLP Forums. The great thing about profit is that it's money you can choose how to spend - and it's entirely possible that EQD chose to contract a professional developer to build their app (in fact, this is highly probable as their business model is based on advertising, which goes hand-in-hand with content presentation - if your livelihood depends on people engaging with your content and ads, it makes sense to invest some cash into having it done well).
 
We are not in the position to provide a livelihood to someone in exchange for building and maintaining a mobile app for us. Our only option for getting one is to find a willing volunteer, which, as I explained above, is easier said than done. Last time this came up, I openly stated that I'm happy to talk to such a person, but no one volunteered to do it despite lots of support for the idea. The last public call we made for developers didn't turn up a qualified volunteer, either.
 
Which brings us to the last option, having it built by the developers we already have...
 
   
Making apps - especially good apps - calls for a significant investment of both time and money. We're bootstrapped, volunteer-run, and not-for-profit; our surplus resources of both are very slim. We don't have venture capital, we don't have a stash of R&D funds in the bank, and we don't have full-time developer staff. All of our developers are either in school or employed, so when we say we can only work on pony projects in our free time, we do mean it. And we're generally only going to be doing such development with hardware and software that we purchased with our personal funds for other purposes, and just so happen to be usable for Poniverse projects, too.
 
In a professional software development environment - one where developers make a living from their work - the developer staff are usually provided with the resources they need to do their job. We do have some degree of financial flexibility, but the necessary funding to do this for our own staff - let alone give them competitive financial compensation - is on another order of magnitude.
 
If you are willing to financially support a developer to acquire the necessary hardware and make their living from developing an MLP Forums app, please get in touch with me and we can make the necessary arrangements. That's the surefire way to make our app happen for the community.

The reason we don't employ site-wide SSL is mainly because it doesn't play nice with third-party ad networks, which are an important source of income for MLP Forums. If we're serving a secure page (ie. one where the URL starts with https://), we need to ensure all of the page's additional resources arrive through a secured connection as well, or browsers will complain with a "mixed content" warning. Exactly how this warning looks differs from browser to browser - in some browsers, it's much more obtrusive than others - but it intends to make the end-user feel less secure, and rightly so, as most Internet users equate the "green lock" in their browser to a "trustworthy page". You can read more about mixed content here if you're interested.
 
Point is, if we're going to serve any pages via SSL, we need to go all the way and have every piece of the pages served securely, too - even third-party pieces we don't control! If our ad providers do not allow their ads to be loaded securely, any of our pages that display them will trigger a mixed content warning. We do make use of SSL on several key pages that carry sensitive data, such as our login and registration forms, the checkout screen, and the client area, but these pages do not display ads. In contrast, you'll notice that Pony.fm and Poniverse.net, both ad-free, function exclusively over HTTPS/SSL.
 
If you are aware of and fully understand the implications of "mixed content" and opt in to ads, you're more than welcome to allow the ads through your browser, and use an extension like HTTPS Everywhere to "force" all parts of MLP Forums to load over SSL - it'll work.
 

 
By the way, regarding ads, AdSense recently launched HTTPS support, but we serve ads from PulsePoint as well, which did not support it last time I checked. I'll look into this again in the coming days to see if the situation has changed, because if we're able to run everything via secure connections without killing our ads, I'm all down for it.

This is now fixed! Thanks for pointing it out.

Please email tech@mlpforums.com for assistance if you haven't already. When doing so, it would be helpful if you include the URL's to any affected content. We are receiving a lot of requests so I kindly ask your patience when waiting for a response, but all content posted prior to December 23 should be recoverable.

The song is available under the "Show Songs" menu in the track editor. It isn't displaying right now as a filter option because no tracks have been tagged with it yet.
 

Hey Khaos,
 
Pony.fm only accepts FLAC, AIFF, and WAV files for track uploads. Even at 320 Kbps, MP3's are still "lossy" and do not faithfully reproduce the source audio. Since Pony.fm aims to be a full-quality archive, getting lossless source files from artists is important - the site will automatically generate downloads from it in MP3 and various other formats.
 
Fixing this is easy - just re-export your track from your DAW in one of the above supported formats and upload that!

A lot of people actually know about MLP Forums. Just about everyone I talked to at BronyCon knew about this site's existence, and I've run into some people elsewhere who've heard of it as well. The figure on the front page is merely our number of registered users; we have a whole lot more traffic than that number lets on, from unregistered guests. Last time I checked that number, it was in the ballpark of about 300,000 monthly uniques.
 
As far as brony forum communities go, we're the largest one by far, and are fairly well established as the go-to brony forum. The real "issue" that keeps more of our visitors from actually registering accounts is that forum-based discussion is inherently a very niche interest. Being involved in a forum requires a more active commitment to coming up with stuff to talk about or tell people about; more consumer-oriented activities such as listening to music, reading fan fiction, or watching YouTube videos - basically anything of a relatively passive nature - carry much more mass-market appeal, and are interests you'll see a much larger chunk of the fandom partake in.
 
Most of the aforementioned people I mentioned are familiar with MLP Forums cited that they're "not a forum person". Make of that what you will; but based on what I've found out from talking to them, it simply means that the idea of registering an account on a site to discuss a TV show carries extremely little appeal. You'll find a similar story with any other large fandoms or interest groups out there that have Internet forums dedicated to them: a miniscule portion of the people in the group are actually interested at all in long-form discussion about their interest, which is what forums are designed for.
 
All things considered, we're doing pretty damn strong for a forum community, considering how few people on the planet really want to be part of one in the first place.

Check out Ponyville Live! They will be streaming events and panels from BronyCAN as they happen.

There was a glitch on our end that prevented access to some parts of the site, which affected several newer users. This is fixed. Thanks for the heads-up, Steven!
 
 
 
A Poniverse account is, for all intents and purposes, a Pony.fm account.

Coming from a classical background myself, I know what you mean: what is typically referred to as "classical" music is a pretty diverse classification of music. But Pony.fm isn't trying to become a compendium of all the world's music; only the brony fandom's. So the available genre choices are based not on trying to encompass any possible type of music, but rather the music that brony musicians actually produce. The site won't be particularly useful to anyone if it has four hundred genres to choose from and one or no songs in each one, which is what makes umbrella terms like "Orchestral" preferable.
 
Quite a few piano pieces have gone up on Pony.fm under the Orchestral genre. Rather than looking at it as a taxonomy for orchestral music, think of it as a classification for music that primarily uses orchestral instruments, even if it's just a lone piano.

That's a simple and easy "fix". Consider it done, and thanks for the suggestion!
 
 
 
 
Download the desktop version of Skype from Skype.com. It works great on Windows 8; Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use the Windows Store version.

They don't happen terribly often, partly because this isn't really a community geared around buying and selling things (most members don't hop on MLP Forums every day expecting to spend money), and partly because forum threads are a somewhat awkward format to run an auction in.
 
They're definitely a special-occasion thing right now, but, if there's significant interest in making an MLP auction house or something akin that happen someday, it's certainly something we can look into. The main issue I see is, like I said, that most people don't hop on MLP Forums in the morning expecting to pull their credit card out. So, a full-blown marketplace might be better-suited to a new Poniverse project.

@@Loveradke,
 
Hi Loveradke,
 
Thanks for your interest in Pony.fm! It's designed to be a place where artists can upload, share, and show off all their pony tunes.
 
To sign into Pony.fm, just enter your MLP Forums username and password into Pony.fm's login form. Accounts on both sites are linked together, and there's no way to have an account on one without the other.

I discussed the addition of an ambient genre with Moonsy over dinner last night, and we decided to add it in as its own genre. Enjoy!
 
Man, Everfree Northwest is a blast...

It's been added now! Sorry for the delay.

Hi Glaceon,
 
It looks like the ticket you opened, #2537, was unintentionally closed rather than put on hold (which was the likely intention at the time). I've reopened it and put it on hold properly this time, so it'll be much harder to "die" this time.
 
Thanks!