1 hour ago, chainmax said:

Mlpf stands for My little pony forums, and I believe buffy is the mascot for the forums (Correct me if I'm wrong) 

Yep! Technically we try to brand it as MLP Forums, and it gets shortened to MLPF. Buffy the mascot that represents the forums, and we have a few other characters for our other sites.

Nothing wrong with the older generations! They had a whole different appeal and storytelling. Definitely fun to watch some of it, I grew up with VHS recordings of G1.

A belated happy birthday to our lovely forum! I'm really happy we've managed to keep everything (Poniverse included) going this long and hopefully for many years to come! I'll keep doing what I do to keep us rolling, and hopefully we'll all pick up more friends along the way! 

I know I'm late to the reply party but congrats @Cash In 

 

On 2024-09-26 at 3:04 AM, Samurai Equine said:

BTW, is it safe to say that your heart is as big as a planet?

Perhaps, I try at least!  

And thanks again everyone, I'll do my best to keep it up~ Always more work to be done everywhere of course! 

2 hours ago, Ice Princess Silky said:

I still adore this picture to this day, and I'm really thankful for the gift that is working with everyone here. I'm still so very happy that we've managed to keep this community going for so long and hopefully for many more years to come!
 

2 hours ago, Ice Princess Silky said:

Now here is a pony so dear to my heart -- she's shifted the SoTW to a day that corresponds to her name -- Wednesday! For Mercury!

This toooootally isn't because you want everyone to dogpile on me for "Hug a Mercury" day  right? That's alright if it is!

2 hours ago, Ice Princess Silky said:

Guys! Guys! Look!! I've stolen a rare golden feather from one of her floofy ears!!

Waiiiit my feddur, absconding with my floof is totally fine meaaaan  

But for real, you mayyyyy be onto something with that legend, who knows!~

1 hour ago, Sophie said:

Congratulations @Mercury!!! You’re awesome and you deserve it to be celebrated for it! Thank you so much for everything you do for us and the community 

 

This was incredible and unexpected, thank you so much for this! I've already mentioned that elsewhere but I can't say it enough really!

 

1 hour ago, Senior Butterscribbles said:

I bet, that floof is required to protect earsies from the wind on hi speed 

Totally not for petting, noooo

And lastly but not least to everyone else,
Thanks  

I'm honestly glad to see that we're still able to have such a wonderful community. As we come to a close of yet another generation of MLP it'll be interesting for us all to see what comes next and no matter what I hope we're all still here to enjoy it when that happens!

Batbrony

 It has been an age and a half since I've made a serious post on the forums, but it's good to be back  (You can blame @Ice Princess Silky  of course!). At any rate, I have been blessed with the honor of introducing this week's SOTW @Batbrony! 

Librarian and Loremaster:
Part of what makes Poniverse, including MLP Forums, Canterlot Avenue, Pony.fm and our other services special is our mascots. Batbrony is one of our longest standing ponies still on staff today and is practically our librarian as far as lore goes. It seems (and actually has been!) an eternity ago that we ran our last fanfic contest to add to our expansive Poniverse fanfics, but without the work done by Batbrony and those that came before we wouldn't be what we are today! I appreciate all he did to make the transitionary period when we took on both Ponyville Live! and Canterlot Avenue to help incorporate them into the existing body of work.

MLP Content Reviewer:
He's not just well versed in our lore though, and if you visit his profile some of his most prominent posts on the forums are his episode reviews of various MLP content and he offers insightful things for lots of legacy content!

Staffer Legends Time!
They say that he was born with the Batman suit. 

We sincerely thank him for helping us be who we are today, and while life has kept him busy as of late with his career as a teacher along with learning how to be a dad we'll never forget his contributions and hope he'll have time sometime to come see us more often.

Remember to always keep doing what you love man!

 

22 hours ago, Ganondorf8 said:

Well... That was quite a roundabout way of introducing a new member of staff.

I liked it.

I definitely like this energy!

It is likely that your browser is enforcing HTTPS or you have an expired session. The homepage of PVL does not support running under HTTPS as several of the stations never converted to SSL streaming. PVL itself is deprecated now unfortunately and most of what is here is just what is still running.

Test!

One of the new chicken sandwiches and probably some fries, but you've really gotta eat them before you get home. Once they're cold they're a no go. (Also testing to see if posts are working again in the new Database schema!)

We're finishing up a migration to a new server stack and the networking configuration is causing some traffic to get redirected incorrectly. This is causing the 503s because the forums trying to connect back to our fastcgi server gets a connection refused error. I am currently working on resolving this, and the situation should improve.

When I ran the troubleshooter last night it disabled most of our plugins. That's all. I was trying to remedy the issue where the reply box and images were not loading and this was just a temporary side-effect. Many apologies.

It's just down ever since some of our DDoS proections we put into place the other day. I'll have tinker look into this some more.

So I wanna preface this with this: I'm thankful that everyone was caring and offered lots of help and showed a lot of concern for the site. 

We weren't hacked, DDoSed or anything like that really. We just experienced a symptom of old age it turns out! To get into a bit of technical stuff, we actually lost both of the main hard drives (SSDs) in the main web hosting server on the same day. To put this succinctly: This kills the server. After spending a day diagnosing the issue, the ops team and I were ready to submit the case to our hosting provider OVH and let them start replacing the parts. 

This is a great time for us to revisit our policies so that we're very sure that something like this wouldn't be a huge loss in the future. We already take daily backups of all of our services and put them offsite as well so that losing a host server like this isn't the end of the world. However due to this extended outage we're going to take our time and verify a few things to make sure that all of the processes we have in place are working as intended just in case something like this happens again in the near future (We just got new hardware, so fingers crossed it doesn't!). This has also given us a lot of insight in the lifetime of our servers and when we actually need to schedule this kind of maintenance with our hosting provider so that in the future we can plan for this and only end up with a few hours of downtime rather than two whole days.

Really though. I want to thank everyone here, new and old for being here and giving the site life. This was a difficult time but a sign that we've been going long enough to wear out the hardware the site was running on and that to me is something to celebrate! Thanks again everyone and if you have any concerns or questions feel free to inbox me or post them here!

Iceborne can't come to PC soon enough

Happy hunting to all of the console players that get to experience it first!

We're on it. The latest forum update undid several of our fixes unfortunately as IPS hasn't fixed the bugs yet in their mainline release.

All of our custom plugins that drive the economy and class systems.

While I've already responded on Discord, I will go ahead and mirror that here for the users on the site who don't visit the Discord. This server is not being updated past 1.12.2 because currently I'm the only staff working on it and I'm still in the process of getting us ready for 1.13. The newest updates are off the table entirely right now until the main developer has the time to update the custom plugins our server uses.

I should be going, either with Jeric's group or with AppleDash's.

The site's search engine will be a lot less useful for a little while (It's limited to just one day's posts in its search results), since the latest update broke how it handles searching the db. We're working on a potential solution, but it's gotta stay like this until we have the solution ready!

In the meantime, you can still search our site using Google/Your Favorite search engine.

Stuff that's known and being looked into currently: 

- Status updates being blank on initial edit, but edits showing up (We know what's happening but not why)
- FAQ and similar answer posts are dead
 

I moderately agree with this one, this is your only post, so no history would be lost. Have a nice day, this will likely be the last notification you get from here.

First off, I'd like to apologize for having the site unavailable for so long. We encountered an issue with the database locking up last night during one of our nightly backups and were forced to restart one of our host nodes as the process had gone into a non-interruptible state. While I did make an attempt to do a graceful shutdown of all of our services before this (Aside from the process that couldn't be exited) unfortunately I forgot to sync the disks when I did so so we lost our cache configuration for about 10 hours.

In the process, the mail server also failed to start back up properly so notifications and other email services from Poniverse were also down for that period of time, and it went unnoticed as our monitoring software saw that the SMTP port was listening properly. And MLPF itself was up and running from a glance, so we left it like that while Tinker went to work and I slept.

Now that everything has been fixed, with the email issue not being discovered until about 14 hours after the outage occurred I figured I'd address this and let people know what happened and that we'll do our best to check everything more thoroughly in the future now that we know this is a potential problem that crops up.

@tinker @Twilight Sparkle ✨ (Wow Feld pls) and I ended up spending a couple of hours troubleshooting these issues and Feld came up with a few ways to re optimize the forums for our new setup since we hadn't really done that since we moved servers a few years back. Hopefully you will all notice performance improvements as we've moved some of the critical cache operations off of our network attached HDDs and into RAM as well as taken some of the load from our MySQL database and put that to redis and PHP's opcache. From my own testing it's gotten load times down from about 8-10s per page down to 1-2s which should be a lot more manageable. As usual though, I hope everyone keeps an eye out for issues and brings them to our attention!

Yes, everything's fine. We just had a mishap regarding an outage on another part of the node that required a server restart. When it came back up, a couple of important files got caught up in the mess. Everything should be back to normal now, though we're looking at how to minimize various problems in the future and a possible solution to prevent what happened to cause the outage earlier from happening again.