Comments

Those deleted comments referred to a dupe of this image that was posted, forgot to remove them before merging.

Trotsky: Getting upset when you see someone depict a character which does not conform to your racist stereotypes is absolutely racism, not just “xenophobia”.
 
Let’s make things clear: there’s nothing inherently wrong with depicting any given character as any given race. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a preferred racial assignment for characters, although your choices are probably based on stereotypes and some degree of racism. What is wrong is complaining that some racial assignments “don’t make sense” or are somehow “inaccurate” on the grounds that they do not conform to racial stereotypes that you hold, because “they don’t sound black”, “she dances like a white person”, “asians are studious”, and a myriad of other reasons.
 
So you think of Twilight as white because of the way she dances at her birthday party, or because she fits some “sheltered white girl” stereotype you have? That’s okay. It’s a quick association made because of racist stereotypes but you can acknowledge that it’s based on stereotypes and it doesn’t make you a bad person, because it’s an unfortunate part of the way the human brain works (actively treating people differently based on stereotypes does, though, and in general it’s good practice to try and stop making assumptions based on stereotypes, or force yourself to reevaluate them when you catch yourself making them). The problem arises when you come across material which does not fit your preferential assignment, and you decide that it is wrong, and you have to say so. You say Twilight can’t be black! Didn’t you see her dance? She doesn’t sound black! Fluttershy can’t be muslim, because, well, you don’t like muslims very much, and you’ve got some prejudices about muslims you assume are generally applicable but in reality only describe a subgroup of the religion. Or whatever. Having a preference is fine - but seeing others and declaring that they make no sense, they’re wrong, they’re not acceptable - that’s racist.
 
Race is not a cultural determinant. Being born black does not mean that one must have grown up in a stereotypical “black culture” (which isn’t even the same from country to country or region to region) and have developed into a stereotype (and even if you did grow up in such an environment you don’t have to conform). It’s not a requirement for being asian that you grow up with overly demanding parents and a talent for math. Some stereotypes exist because of racist fears and some stereotypes exist because of regional culture, and when you refuse to allow a race any deviance from the cultural stereotypes you associate with it, then you are being racist. When you complain about forced diversity, you’re being racist, because it’s an implication that characters don’t fit the races or roles they’re being “forced” into. Preferences are okay - but you have to stop flipping your shit when someone disagrees with them, and stop thinking that alternatives are just inherently bad and wrong somehow.
 
Of course, some of you are just plain old racists or bigots who hate the “niggers” or the “gooks” or the “trannies” or the “faggots” unashamedly, in which case I invite you to keep a lid on your bile or get the fuck out, because you are not welcome here. The rest of you guys need to keep your eyes open and bloody report it when bigoted derogatory comments are made, because we can’t effectively monitor every comment all day and I’m tired of discovering horrible shit people have said weeks or months ago that nobody ever challenged or reported. Upcoming site redesign will hopefully include an improved reporting system that allows for reporting specific comments (at present you just have to report the image and explain what you actually mean in the box) and selecting reasons and whatnot. (I’ve said it now Clover you must make it true)
 
tl;dr stop being racist and letting people be racist

For clarity, editing an image to alter the race of the characters isn’t inherently racist, although racist motivations are often involved. Editing ineptly isn’t a crime, either. We only delete images if they’re rule violations or at the request of the artists involved. So, for example, as a derivative work of her original art, if endergirl contacted us asking us to remove this image, we would. Same for any other artist and image in cases involving derivative works of their originals. We endeavour to confirm and comply with all legitimate takedown requests as quickly as possible.
 
Unfortunately we can’t really respond to requests made by third parties on the artist’s behalf unless we get pointed to clear evidence somewhere they stated “don’t post my stuff to derpibooru/anywhere”, but if you find yourself about to be the third party in such a situation you may want to try contacting the actual artist in case they would like to take some sort of action.

You were every “background pony” who’s posted a comment on this picture so far.
 
The anonymous posting feature exists for people who are used to anonymous contribution and who don’t feel a need to tie an identity to their comments - like myself. Most of the time when I comment on an image my identity and my status as an administrator has no relation to the content of my post and so I post anonymously. It’s not there so you can pretend to be other people and have conversations with yourself or sockpuppet about. Now you weren’t deliberately attempting to stir up shit so much as get attention to the image by comment volume, which is why we’re just telling you to knock it off instead of giving you a little cooldown ban. But this is said publically because it’s not only a warning to you but to everyone else who has done this sort of thing or is thinking of doing it - the number of people we have seen doing it is probably less than some people suspect but conversely more than many realise.
 
By all means we want you to keep using the site - I’m glad that you like it and it makes you feel better. Just behave well.

I’m really against the idea of you disparaging things by calling them “gay”. So stop it.

Yes you did.

This is the result of the deletion of large amounts of spam in the last couple of hours. Unfortunately due to a minor bug images that have been hidden (i.e. deleted) are still counted in the index but are not actually displayed on the page; if a large group of images is deleted then you notice stuff like this happening (if you’ve previously noticed that sometimes you look at a page and you see one or two less images than there ought to be displayed, hidden images is why; usually it’s stuff that’s been marked as dupes by the mods/uploaders).

No comment.

>One of the most active, responsible and adult moderator I have seen.
 
Just wait until you get a bottle of vodka down him.

That’s a shame, communism is awesome.

Duly noted. That could possibly be reworded. Previous points still stand, though.

He didn’t claim anywhere that the majority of fluffy pony stuff is light-hearted or that the grimdark lovers should go away. What he did point out is that THIS IMAGE is not grim or dark at all, and comments about how much you want to do horrible unspeakable things to them is kind of hugely out of place. There’s plenty of actual abuse images on the site for people to talk about how much they should all die if you want. Letting that vitriol spill over onto the cute and apparently innocent images is not okay.

I’m going to credit Scottish Scootaloo for fixing the thumbnailing problem.

Dude, we don’t have any problem with photos from pony-related conventions and stuff going up. Generally speaking, at least. I don’t discount the possibility you could contrive to upload something we’d have to delete for some reason.

Appears to be an updated version (the muffin is obviously different), not a dupe. We only merge distinct versions at artist request.

It doesn’t matter if it’s your personal interpretation that the damn thing is being taken to whatever passes for a loving home in your imagination, what it IS is a picture of a crying child being forcibly separated from its mother while they beg and plead to be kept together. So that’s pretty grim. Deal with it. If you’re genuinely interested in this stuff it’s not like you don’t have fpgd unfiltered already.

Someone reported this picture to say “Ponies don’t wear clothes.”
 
I just figured you guys would like to know

The image is not broken. However, one of adblock’s default filters is that it will block any image with “advertisement” or similar in the URL; as this image (for a while) had a tag to that effect, and tags are included in the image filename, your adblocks were preventing the image from loading. Well done, you guys.

All that said, the standard of discussion I normally see on derpibooru is still leagues better than what I remember of the crap that went on on ponibooru, so don’t think that I hate you all or anything. It’s an improvement for which I’m grateful and I can honestly say I’ve had far less to do regarding policing racist commentary than I expected to when the ponibooru group first migrated here, and seen more people get called out for saying racist things than I thought I would either. So that’s an improvement - but we can still keep improving and I think that’s a worthy objective to strive towards.
 
I don’t hate you guys and I apologise if my tone comes off as hostile, but it’s difficult not to get angry when this is something you care about deeply. Really I just think a lot of the fandom is somewhat misguided and just needs to stop and think critically about this sort of stuff for a while.

Fine, then. They’re called out often by people who are promptly dismissed as anti-brony hate fanatics and their criticisms ignored. Everyone else is either saying the stupid shit or ignoring the people who say it, and while the former is worse than the latter we’d still be better off if more of the crowd stood up to say things like “stop asking “why is Twilight a nigger”, you arsehole”.
 
The definition of prejudice isn’t vague - certainly not when I’m using it. You just get upset because you don’t think of yourself as prejudiced and you don’t like to be called prejudiced - amusingly enough, you’re attacking my complaint instead of addressing the issue it put forward, focusing on my word choice instead of the actual argument (if it bothers you so much, in this instance you can pretty much read “racism” for “prejudice”). “Communicating a worldview different to mine” isn’t called prejudice by anyone with sense unless, surprise surprise, that worldview is prejudiced. You are perfectly entitled to your own opinion, but that does not mean it is a good or correct opinion - and if we were to argue about acceptable behaviour then I would say that within this fandom it often seems more acceptable to do and say racist things than it is to get angry about people being racist.
 
If you lot do not want us to be perceived that way by people on the outside and you genuinely do not approve of racism and all that jazz, then you and everyone else need to stop getting all defensive when people say we do racist shit and start telling the “few assholes” who you believe are the ones doing the racist shit to knock it the fuck off, publically, frequently and with fervour. “Don’t tar us all with the same brush” is all well and good but unless you make credible effort to discourage and distinguish from the unnacceptable behaviour it’s going to look like what is hopefully just a visible minority is in fact a considerable majority.
 
If I weren’t going to bed right now (and search actually worked) I’d do some stats and compare the scores of humanized images segregated by race, because I have a strong expectation that you’ll find black characterisations have significantly worse scores on average than other versions of characters, but I don’t want to actually say that is definitely the case without running the numbers. Maybe someone with some free time to spare would enjoy doing it (I use “enjoy” in a very loose sense).

I don’t know about the guy who authors the bronyetiquette stuff or anything, but it is true that there’s an awful lot of prejudiced behaviours and attitudes on display in the fandom and they don’t get called out nearly often enough - and even when they are, it’s rare for anyone to actually listen. People have a tendency to get defensive when they get called out and rationalise their behaviour or attack the complainant instead of thinking about it critically, and when this happens publically they’re usually backed up by a lot of other people doing the same thing, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to say the fandom perpetuates prejudice when its response to accusations of prejudice is to ignore or attack the complaint, and only inflammatory by virtue of the fact that the fandom responds inappropriately when such issues are raised.

It was removed, you’re right. I have no idea what he’s talking about then. Oh well, I guess? I AM NOT GOOD AT DERPIBOORU

Chill the heck out alla you
 
Also I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the Grid View.

Also all three of those comments are obvious attempts at trolling, by the same person. So don’t fall for them. That would just be sad.

Like Clover says in our most recent newspost, the pagination system is the major cause of performance issues with the site. Basically, the thing is that mongodb cannot do counts efficiently - and the pagination system we were using requires the system to check the number of images in a given collection to work out how many page numbers to show and where the “last page” button should be pointing. Every time someone looked at any gallery page on the site, the system went and one-by-one counted basically every image in the database the met the filtering/search restrictions for that user to work out where the last page would be.
 
When we disabled that system, our average response times for web requests fell from almost two seconds to less than half a second, as can be seen in the following graph:
 

 
This isn’t a permanent thing and we recognise it’s not the epitome of usability at the moment. We either need to come up with a more efficient way of doing what it used to do, or find a database system that has efficient counting using indexes.