Fhaolan

A little historical perspective. When I joined the MLPF staff many a year ago, there were still a lot of the 'original' staffers around. They had a very loud opinion about the 'Debate Pit' as it was called then. This was a place for them to sweep any crap into. Mods would refuse to touch the Pit, other than using it as a dumping ground for anything nobody wanted to deal with. As new staffers rose in the ranks and the old guard retired, there were attempts to clean up the Pit. Sectional Mods were created, and assigned specifically to the Pit to force someone to handle the mess that had been created. Rules were put in place, renaming it to the Debate Symposium, etc. But it was still the Pit to me. When I became an Administrator, I redrew all the forum Icons to make them match a similar appearance and fill in the ones that had been missing. The Debate Pit got a sketch of Tartarus as it was shown in MLP. That was my personal opinion of the place. Why it was made in the first place had tainted it irrevocably in my mind. I didn't want to assign any mod to it, because I felt that would be a punishment detail. Any staffer who was in the Pit I paid more attention to as I was worried about their mental health, dealing with that toxic cesspool constantly. It was a bad job from the beginning. No amount of dressing it up would make it work. If this forum actually needs anything that resembles a debate, that section needs to be completely torn down and rebuilt from square one with a completely different structure. And I personally don't think we need anything like that. If you can't have a polite discussion about a topic in public view, that 'debate' should be on a different forum.

No, because Discord stated that he was fully aware while petrified. It's probable that Celestia was unaware of this 'glitch' when she did it to Discord, but Twilight should be aware of it now and refuse to use it as a preservation method. Of course that might be because... well... Discord. But without un-petrifying Cozy, Tirek, and Chrysalis to confirm it, you have to assume this is the reason it's a penal process, not a preservation one.

What you should probably be more concerned about is Trademarks rather than Copyrights. Trademarks have different rules than copyrights. Copyrights is all about the profit motive and have bypassing rules about 'transformative works' and 'free use'. Trademarks are all about defending the public impression of a brand and don't have any those bypass rules. The names of the MLP characters are trademarked by Hasbro, and if you're using them in way that Hasbro may consider 'damaging' to their properties as you say, there is a possibility they might do something along the same lines as what they did to that 'Them Fighting Herds' video-game. It doesn't officially matter if you make a profit from it or not, it just matters if Hasbro thinks that you are diluting or damaging their brand. Now, chances are that you won't be noticed by Hasbro's lawyers unless you make enough money off of it, because that's how they determine if what you're doing is sufficiently popular to affect their brand. It's not what they will say when they send you the Cease and Desist, of course, but it will say something along the lines of 'use of registered Trademarks without license' as that's what other people have reporting when they got them.

Don't mind me... just doodling... Edit: Adding some shadows... Edit 2: Can't seem to leave this one alone. Adding details and highlights.

Yeah, there something strange going on with the opt-in ads, and it started happening with the v4 upgrade, as @Rikifive says. Since they seem to work when you're not logged in, but disappear when you do, I was originally thinking it had something to do with the permission setups. But I couldn't find any permission setup that would trigger that when I was an Admin. I'm left thinking there's something wonky in the page templates, where the code is supposed to check the opt-in flag and is pulling the wrong variable or something similar.