Mercury

I'd take a salted & buttered pretzel over some peanuts any day  

Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6 Siege  

This one's a bit hard, but every community has the chance to have bad parts in it. 4chan is the one that gets my vote, even though there is some good that comes out of it every now and again.

We can hide posts that might be embarrassing to prevent them from being searchable however.

That's just this sub, I don't believe any of us put you in the mod queue. This sub requires mod approval for replies to make sure that accurate replies are sent to answer questions.

 

Yep! It's not a problem, I was just clarifying since people often come to this sub for information and technical support. So if they were to read this and actually get to my message they'd find the answer. 

Thanks anyway for letting us know, but it would've been fine regardless since losing access to an account and being able to prove you owned it would make you eligible for another one. The rule is mainly to prevent people from running multiple accounts at the same time!

We had an issue with our backend storage server yesterday, it might've increased some of the load times, but overall IP.B itself is a fairly heavy app with so many users on it at once. It has to reside on the same server as another of our services (Canterlot Avenue) which is also another heavy php application. 

Hahahah, I love it. I'll just pretend to be evil in the meantime.

Indeed, if you'd like to request it and are an EU resident, we comply with it as required by law. There'll be a more automatic process in the future, but for now emailing your request to ops@poniverse.net with the email you registered with and confirming your information with our ops team we'll delete your account.

Yep, I understood and I was just trying to make the appeal to logic is all. No hard feelings on my end, don't worry too much about that. I just found it a little over the top, so I figured I'd make a strong appeal to logic so that you might be able to look at the situation if anything happens on the site in the future and have a better understanding of how we generally operate. 

I'm sorry that not all platforms try to openly communicate with their users, and I can see how it would make things seem a bit bleak if it seems stuff is repeating itself.

10 minutes ago, CHA0SXIII said:

Here's a question which is scarier? Being hit by a bullet 9 times in a row because someones after you? Or being hit by a bullet 9 times in a row because of coincidence? That's kind of what I'm going through right now.   

I personally think you've exaggerated the issue because you're frustrated with having to reset your password due to a bug. If we had any problems with you there are official ways of knowing. We issue warnings, send PMs and generally notify users before actions happen to their accounts, we're not really in the business of shadowbanning people here. 

I apologize that we weren't quite ready enough this upgrade, it's an unfortunate thing because IP.Board's upgrades aren't always sane so thorough checking still results in a few missed things here and there whenever they make sweeping changes under the hood. 

Just, please be aware in the future before making a post in a panic like this that you'd always be contacted first if we were issuing warnings. 

EDIT: seems that it wanted to eat the word upgrade.   This is an argument pointing towards logic, in case that's not clear. 

Just to be sure, you're clicking on the login with Poniverse button right and not trying to log in using the MLPF login section, there was a bug that made the old login page show up because it broke our login app, so make sure you're clicking log in with Poniverse.

I'll take a look into blocking the provider for the ads, this one looks like it's just a regular adsense ad, so it shouldn't be too hard to remove. Keep in mind that ads are a source of revenue for the site though, it's what helps pay the bills, and they're optional from the start here. You can enable and disable them through the user settings instead of using an adblocker.

Ads like this do crop up from time to time, people improperly labelling their ads, and then they get served here, it's not completely random, there's a pool of 'approved' adds and some on the unapproved list that are new that I have to go through from time to time. So simply reporting this or you clicking on the x in the corner would help.

I've removed a good chunk of the dating ads, please tag me here if you find more, (There was even an actual ad for dating actual horses floating around, go figure). Anyway, this can crop up again in the future if these publishers make new ad accounts and republish them so keep an eye out and be sure to let me know!

Yea it's being looked into since I couldn't find any of the domains that were listed in the adsense panel.

Odd. I don't see any of those ads from those domains in our adsense panel.

I'll take a look at our adsense and see if I can handle these.

2 minutes ago, Jeric said:

So, yes it was for the benefit of general clarity of the thread, as well as to remind everyone that the notion of one nation's law being the only binding arbiter, is a gross oversimplification. That is something I've heard far too often over the years here, from staff and users. I've addressed both civil and criminal culpability in this topic. Really, when it comes to this issue in general, both need to be considered. 

Alright I was just making sure, I can appreciate that and that's why I edited my post to include that, so thank you. If there's anything else left unclear by either of my statements feel free to bring it up. I'm still sorry if I seem a little snippy or anything like that as it is quite unintended because I'm still more used to more direct chat such as Discord or IRC over trying to make forum posts.

21 minutes ago, Jeric said:

Unless it's illegal in the case where the other person is from. I know that both the US and Canada have extraterritorial jurisdiction laws (by nature) to combat sexual predation against children. One is actually specific to business travel, which is something some fans overseas may want to keep in mind if they come to US cons to vend. And yes, extradition requests do happen over sexual predation of minors. 

If you read the second paragraph, you'll notice I said both parties in parenthesis. Not to try and sound snarky, but since you're making the comment it seems like you didn't read that I already understand this.

If you're clarifying for the rest of the thread I suppose that's understandable.

17 hours ago, PiratePony said:

One problem I have with this is in regards to turning a blind eye to those in countries where this is allowed. Basically you're saying to let it slide if they hush hush about it. The problem is now the older person, who would be slapped into a sex offender database in my country, can be free to stay on the site...and potentially target another child here.  

Except now they've been tipped off how to get away with it.

Once again, the same generation is not the issue, but the older adults who prey on children. And this statement does little to quell my fears about child safety here.

It took weeks after me starting this thread, plus toonkritics criminal activity to hit the news for a statement to be made. 

Telling them to take it off of our site is perfectly legitimate. Punishing people for something that is legal and acceptable where they're from isn't what I'm here to do. I just don't want it happening on our website. They can go do whatever legal things they're allowed to do in their country while in their country and on whatever other services that allow it. I will just ask them not to take it here because we don't want it.

It's not a very fun subject to be on and I understand the concern. I do as careful of an investigation as I possibly can when looking into these reports, and I will make it quite clear that it's not OK to come here to prey on younger users. I was more referring to people who're in a relationship that started outside of this site and live in other countries where it's not wrong to be in a relationship with that sort of age gap (Both parties that is). That's the difference, and that's why I stated that case in the first place. If they're grooming people on this site, I don't want them on this site. But I want it to make it clear that if it's a relationship that's developed outside of the site and was here before before they got here they wouldn't be booted if they're not doing it on this site. I would just ask that they definitely keep any interactions involving their relationship off of our website.

 

1 minute ago, Thuja said:

I didn't know this forum was Canadian!!  The more you know, right?  Anyways, I heard that Bell Canada was trying to go through backdoors and alter net neutrality for here too but of course there hasn't been much news wise of it lately.  Apparently, they've been trying to do so for years now... 

Yea, but it's regulated a bit different here anyway than in America. We'll see how that ends up but in response to America ditching theirs there was a news report some time ago that it was being considered that Canada should strengthen their NN rules? If I can find the source on that I'll post it, but either way we should be fairly alright as far as it goes, we're through OVH, and hopefully they're smart enough to figure out their own stuff (Since they're getting into the business of being a last mile ISP nowadays too).

2 hours ago, Denim&Venom said:

Net Neutrality isn't saving the internet's future. It's keeping it stuck in the past. 

I can agree. But there's some stuff that should've been done first by the government before stripping NN. Now we just hope that the situation can get solved by electing new people that won't vote for the companies or investigations are started to start breaking up the larger companies to allow some competition. 

NN definitely gets in the way of capitalism, but having regional monopolies controlling everything isn't...the best either. Just keep that in mind when making your judgments on people. Neither side of this fence is a good place to be right now, but one looks better in the short term. 

18 hours ago, ChB said:

@Jeric @PathfinderCS @LadyMercury @Fhaolan @Yellow Diamond

Do you know how the end of Net Neutrality will affect this forum?

It won't really, we're Canadian. We're hosted in Canada and operate the company itself in Canada. The only thing that it might effect is our US users that might have their internet packages changed. 

Alright. I'm back at a computer for a little while so I might as well type this up while I'm here.

As I made it clear earlier we do take issues like this seriously, and I do my best to handle them on a case by case basis and gather enough information each time to make an educated decision and sometimes it's hard because it's not always what you'd expect from the people you've known or at least thought you knew well. 

The barest minimum that I'm going to have enforced is Canadian law. That's the jurisdiction that we fall under, and without any other information given (Say it's refused when someone on staff investigates) that is what will be enforced here, because without that other information we can't outright assume otherwise. Canadian law says 16, that's the lower limit here without taking into account close-in-age groups.

That's not really the interesting part, but it gives a good baseline of what to look out for. The law regarding the close age groups states that a relationship can be held by someone under the age of 16 (14-15) with someone less than 5 years older than themselves. The logical way of looking at this (by myself) is that if you could've been in high school together it's not really outside your age group. I do usually take into account making sure that the parties haven't been doing anything questionable and look out for predatory practices, but the bare minimum is the law. 

On top of this, if information is provided from the users upon questioning and they are from countries that allow somewhat large variances in age groups that people are allowed to have relationships in I will take this into consideration and probably not enact punitive measures onsite, however I will ask that they take discussion of their relationship elsewhere and keep it in a private setting as it wouldn't do them any good to continue talking about it in the public eye. 

I'm doing my best to abstract my own personal opinions from this and make sure there's an understanding of what we have to follow. If you do see something suspicious it doesn't hurt to report it and get it looked at, as long as you're not spamming the report system with them. 

I wanna point out that I have seen this post and intend to write up a response to it, but I've not been at home and am on mobile so I'm not exactly comfortable writing up a long winded response on the subject quite yet. I will be providing one as a clarification on Poniverse's policies as a whole once I make the clarification here. A short answer for now: We do take these sorts of issues seriously and I usually personally review them and make the decision on reporting people to the proper authorities based on the information that we have available.

I'll hopefully be able to have time tomorrow or Tuesday to give a better answer before my trip, if not I will have something up when I get the chance.

I'm intending to look at this issue again when I have a PC, it's not forgotten about I promise. I'm just moving so a few things are on hold while I'm stuck on mobile.