Posts

@SocDev  
Indeed not. We can’t somehow magically cross-reference posters on 4chan with users here at derpibooru any better than anyone else could just by reading what they write and looking for similarities.

@SocDev
 
/mlp/ probably believes we love PT because we come down on people who’ve attacked her using transphobic slurs, but that’s only because we don’t like anyone attacking anyone with transphobic slurs, or racial slurs, or homophobic slurs, or anything else. Judgement of PT for her personal qualities is a different matter.
 
/mlp/ probably believes we love SJWs because we don’t like anyone attacking anyone with transphobic slurs, or racial slurs, or etc. and because when I’m active I’ve been pretty up front about thinking that social justice is an important thing (the fact that I believe the discussion is dominated by vocal reactionary extremists on both sides resulting in complete polarisation of opinion and I spent most of my effort trying to explain one side to the other in the hopes that more moderates might actually be able to understand the subject and have rational debate is probably lost on them).
 
But that doesn’t really have anything to do with this change.
 
At any rate, we experiment, we make changes, and we listen to feedback. On more than one occasion we’ve conducted site-wide polls to try and get feedback on what we’re doing and have taken action based on this feedback, even when it wasn’t what we personally had hoped for or wanted to do. We have been known to revert changes when they proved unpopular or didn’t have the effect we intended. Part of this change is an experiment to see whether or not it is effective at discouraging people from downvoting content they should be filtering (because as TSP observed, we do have a significantly sized group of users who mass-downvote content purely on the grounds that they hate a particular character or similar) - the intention of the voting system is that it is a measure of the quality of the content, not how many people hate a ship, and we want to see if this causes the system to be used in the way we had intended rather than in a way we consider an abuse of the design. We’ll get data and feedback and see if this actually works out or not.

@Dr Outback  

At present we do not intend to directly modify any user’s personal filters. Maintaining them is entirely the responsibility of the user that owns them. What we may be considering is filter inheritance or the ability to have multiple filters concurrently active - meaning that you could have a site-maintained spoiler filter, for instance, which just spoilered content from new episodes as appropriate, working at the same time as your regular personal filter. However, this is again a lot more development effort and time so even if we do decide we want to implement it I can’t make any estimate on when you might see something like it.

@RapidMapper  
It’s literally one more click whenever you want to do those things - rather than go to Settings, you go to Filters -> Edit whatever filter it is you use. I get that it’s slightly more effort but I really don’t see how it can be that much more frustrating and complicated than it used to be. Also, this means that you will no longer end up having your personal filter settings affected when we elect to change the site defaults, as happens sometimes. The system is a bit more fiddly, okay, but it’s also much more powerful and gives you more control over your settings; we will be working on improvements to the UI which will hopefully make this easier to use for you.

@Vree  
We had some issues with how we were creating the legacy filter from old userdata but we got them fixed and as of now the legacy filters created should accurately recreate the filtering settings you had on your account before the change. If that’s not the case then how are/were they incorrect?

@professor_of_hoers  

You can have a whole bunch of filters, you only use one at a time. Any filters that you have public are technically maintained by you but you’re not under any obligation to actually use them yourself and even then you can change them at will, you’re not stuck with the settings (whatever they are).

That was an oversight, we’re going to put in the button to delete filters as soon as Clover’s got a moment to sort it out.

@someguy111  

No, a filter is only publicly visible to other users if you specifically check the box to make it so when you create a new filter. The legacy filter constructed from your old settings is not visible to others, in case that was worrying you.

Eh, I just use instant.

The unfortunate fact is that though we’d like show/hide toggles working for every tag and simple tracking of filter settings even for unregistered users, things that sound simple to implement may not necessarily be so, and more relevantly no matter how simple they are they still take devtime, of which we don’t have a lot to go around. These are things we have queued up as features to add but we don’t have them yet and we can’t really accurately say when we will - we’re quite open about this malarkey being a stopgap measure, and once we’ve got a better implementation of filtering that lets us do these things, all the default settings are going to be reexamined.

Of all comments made, a little less than a sixth are posted by either actually unregistered users or users posting as anonymous (with that proportion split fairly evenly between the two sides). Of all comments deleted, the majority (about three quarters) of them are from registered users posting anonymously. Only about an eighth of all the comments we’ve had to delete were posted by actually unregistered users (and a lot of those will probably have just been regular spam). Of course, that doesn’t say much for general post quality, but the point is that unregistered users contribute about a twelth of all posts and and an eighth of deleted posts, whereas registered users posting anonymously accounts for a similar twelth of all posts but a massive three quarters of all the posts we actually have to delete.
 
I don’t intend to draw any conclusions from that but I thought some rough statistics might be interesting for people debating that issue.

Perhaps we should also point out that in the settings page where the tag filters live there is an automatically generated list of which tags are hidden or spoilered by default along with descriptions so any new user who looks at their settings will see exactly what they may be missing out on. It’s not like we try and obscure the fact that the default view misses some content.

A large part of this problem is that we have been hoping to get around to the implementation of a better filtering system that doesn’t require logging in so that unregistered users can have filter settings stored in their cookies, a filtering system that’s easy to edit rather than the unwieldy thing it is now so adding or removing items from your filters is trivial, and even filter presets so that you can set up different filter configurations and swap between them easily as and when you feel the need, but unfortunately dev time is hilariously limited. This is a hacky, mid-term solution to a specific problem and it along with many other of our default filter settings would be unlikely to survive the intended improvements to that system (or at the very least it’d be trivial for you to click “nope, show me everything” whether you’re logged in or not).

We will be putting up a poll on this subject sometime this weekend, so expect to be yelling at us soon.

“Rape” doesn’t only mean that you punched a girl in the face and then fucked her while she fought you. This bizarre assumption that all rape is necessarily violent is part of the reason you don’t understand the problem. Yes, our culture has a problem with the glorification of violence, too, but a guy who decides to have sex with the girl who’s way too fucking drunk or high to be considered capable of informed consent doesn’t do it because he played a videogame where big burly men shot guns at each other. The person who quietly fingers a woman who’s passed out isn’t emulating Jack Bauer. There is a different aspect of our culture at work there.
 
The point is, rape is when someone who does not want to have sex or is not considered capable of reasonably consenting to sex has sex (irrespective of the exact legal definition of rape, which varies based on where you are, I’m sure we should all agree that if a person does not want to have sex, or they’re so out of it they’re not capable of remembering where they live, they should not have sex or be forced to have sex). This does not always have to involve violence or even overt coercion. It doesn’t have to involve the apparent rapist being an evil douche. Many aspects of our culture encourage this sort of behaviour or else excuse it after the fact. As previously described, the whole “hard to get” game trains men to believe that women who are saying no actually mean “maybe”, a problem which is exacerbated because sometimes they are playing this game and they do in fact mean “yes”. It’s a stupid game. We shouldn’t be playing it. It encourages men to be persistent and not take no for an answer and women not to be open about how they actually feel. The way that authority figures who discover they’ve got rapists on their hands will try and defend their rapists because they need them for the school sports team instead of shunning them because they’re fucking rapists while the actual rape victim gets pelted with abuse by her entire school should be good evidence that maybe our culture has a problem with rape. The way that the majority of rapes go unreported because victims are afraid they won’t be taken seriously should be good evidence we have a problem with rape. The way we casually laugh about people getting raped in prison should be good evidence we have a problem with rape. The way that we have such a hard time taking the idea of a woman raping a man seriously should be good evidence we have a problem with rape.
 
The rape culture is only one problem that plagues our society. It’s not the biggest problem. It’s a variable problem and in some places and parts of society it is far worse than others. It does indeed fall under the greater purview of “people being assholes”. It has some overlap with “people being violent”. But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored or that it doesn’t really exist, and that it is not worthwhile to target this problem specifically as well as trying to get people to be less assholey in general.

@barbeque  

 
I actually don’t think the load from people doing this would be that bad. There will always be ways that abusive users can attempt to DoS the site - efficient use of the API is easier than serving HTML and now that the image serving done from static files through nginx without involving the webapp even mass image downloading by large numbers of people shouldn’t cause that much load on the server.
 
But don’t quote me on all that. I’d let Clover weigh in before taking my words as absolute fact.

Seriously, that was an obvious troll and it was depressing how many people fell for it. Even if it weren’t, in the vanishingly small chance that they actually believed what they said, they are exactly the sort of person who needs to be ignored as the reactionary extremist they are instead of engaging with them.
 
For reference - that was probably Carrot Top posting. Now let us move on.

@Efrath  
I believe there’s a bit more of a burden of consent than that - it’s not enough to say “well they didn’t say no” but it should be the case that they explicitly said yes. Getting people to be more open and informed about sex, including teaching people to actually make sure that everyone involved really wants to do the sex, can only improve the situation. It promotes more respectful relationships and gives people more confidence to say no when they really don’t want to.
 
You’re right that there are a lot of grey areas when it comes to how you’d actually define rape, but in most cases if you have to start arguing about whether something is technically rape or not it’s most certainly still really scummy behaviour and should be discouraged culturally, if not legally. Badgering a person until they finally give in to your sexual demands may not fulfill some definitions of rape but it’s still something you really ought not to do (this circumstance is especially dodgy because depending on the situation it can often be the case that a person feels physically or otherwise intimidated by the other and the consent given is, effectively, coerced, even if the demander is not overtly threatening). Sex isn’t really something that should be done reluctantly. We also consider deliberately plying people with alcohol or other drugs in order to get them to consent to be a kind of rape - people sufficiently intoxicated or under whatever influence are considered not able to give informed consent by diminished capacity and if you take advantage of a person in that state in order to get sex, a lot of places consider that rape and even if you consider the technicality debatable it’s still something that you really ought not to be doing.
 
I do fully agree that when it comes to the victims of rape we tend to have a kind of negative feedback loop reinforcement going, which I feel is especially dangerous in cases of child abuse. When everything tells you and everyone around you acts like you’ve just experienced the worst thing ever and that you should be scarred for life, you’re going to end up conforming to those expectations and suffering for it. I don’t mean to belittle the trauma that any victim has gone through - certainly many people are susceptible enough or simply had an experience so harrowing that they don’t need any outside help to suffer in the way that they have. But likewise, I find it very likely that there are many cases out there where the stigma and and extreme response to cases of rape have hindered the recovery of victims and indeed made them feel much worse than they might otherwise have done about the whole ordeal.
 
Generally speaking, of course, many of these issues would be alleviating by removing our ridiculous cultural stigma against women actually having sex. If we no longer have this ritualised game of “playing hard to get” which many women participate in and men are trained to expect to have to overcome, the murkiness in the waters of informed consent is considerably cleared up. No should mean no - training people to expect that no actually means yes, eventually, or saying no because of some stupid cultural expectation that you should even if you actually want to say yes, is a significant problem in this area of our culture, and is undoubtedly responsible for many sexual assaults and rapes. It can be difficult to get someone to understand that you actually mean no if they’ve been trained to believe that when you say no you’re just being “hard to get”, especially if they’re somewhat drunk or something, and especially if they’re intimidating in a way that makes you fear protesting too much (which doesn’t have to be deliberate at all - a big drunk guy can feel plenty threatening to people who have to deal with him even if he doesn’t mean to be or realise he is). And guess what - this whole issue is a part of what people consider to be rape culture (explicitly, our culture around this issue is conducive to and results in rapes and sexual assaults). It’s not all about bad jokes and yelling names at people.

@Number1pegasus  
Essentially. The problem with a lot of social justice movements is that they get immediately indignantly angry and directly attack people who aren’t unequivocally on their side, thus antagonising them and basically ensuring that they go immediately to the opposite side and stay there. Nobody likes to be presented with an “us-or-them” situation and pelted with insults - they’ll tend to stick to the side that isn’t already calling them names over it.
 
It is understandable to be angry over important issues and probably unavoidable for many people, but when your objective is to go up to people and try and convince them that you are correct and something needs to be done about a situation, especially when you’re in the minority, anger doesn’t help. If you want to actually change people’s minds, insulting them directly isn’t the way to do it. You have to stay calm and try and win them over.
 
I personally get very angry about a number of issues, but when it comes to the time to try and sway people to my point of view, I don’t let that anger dictate how I behave and I try to debate and reason rationally. I could probably be much more popular with the vocal parts of the causes I argue for if I did go on angry rants and yell at people a lot, but while that might be great for my ego, it’s absolutely detrimental to the actual cause itself.
 
@cb5  
A big part of what the common idea of rape culture is is that we shame the victims of rape and focus our efforts on telling them not to get raped in various ways rather than targeting the people committing the crimes in the first place. Explicitly telling people not to rape rather than focusing all your efforts on telling people not to be raped is the sort of change that most activists opposing the rape culture want to see, and generally they’re trying to make changes that stop society shaming the victims and make society more overtly against people committing rape. Sometimes their efforts are misguided and they rail against the wrong targets but in general that’s what they’re trying to do.

@cb5  
Here’s a simple answer.
 
Let’s say for instance that you work in a place that has really poor safety standards and as a result employees keep getting injured in accidents. Every time an employee gets injured, you can pay their medical bills, and that’s great for them. But they’ve have been better off if they’d never been injured at all, and paying their bills doesn’t do anything to prevent the future accidents that will most likely happen in this environment where they are prevalent. When there is a systematic problem, treating the symptoms as they occur can keep them under control, but in the long term it’s far more desirable (and efficient) to fix the problem that causes these symptoms in the first place - you petition (or demand or whatever) that the workplace improve its safety record and establish better working practices to prevent these accidents. From many ethical standpoints it’s arguable that this is even more important than helping the existing victims since in the long run it’ll prevent more harm, but let’s not get into that.
 
What “rape culture” effectively describes is an environment which is set up such that it is more conducive to rape and sexual assault than it should or could otherwise be. If you believe that this is the state of affairs, it makes perfect and logical sense that you should set about trying to change things to make the situation different, to try and achieve an environment where these things are less likely to happen. If you believe X causes Y, then you help reduce Y by also reducing X, rather than just dealing with Y as and when it happens (especially when you can’t really exert any influence over Y itself but you can more easily have an impact on X).
 
A lot of the people who set out to try and fight against the rape culture are unfortunately misguided, go after the wrong targets, use terrible strategies to try and achieve their goals and otherwise make a mess of it. The inherent idea of trying to change culture in order to reduce the likelihood of harm being caused (and mitigate the extent of the damage in many cases), however, is entirely legitimate. Please don’t attack on those grounds - the argument should be about whether or not the effort is necessary in this instance or aimed at the right targets. Also remember that you get to see only the tiniest snapshot of a person’s life in these arguments and you don’t really have any idea what else they do or don’t do to combat the problem at hand, and in any event that extra information doesn’t have any bearing on the validity of what they’re trying to do in that moment. An effort to improve something shouldn’t be ignored simply on the grounds that it’s the easiest option available to a person.

@Altereggo  

 
They have been. They don’t get to stay for very long seeing as how they depict the rape of a character representative of a real person because she tried to take a stand against rape, however misguided it may have been. Don’t post them. They are not content we want here.

Favourite order in your gallery is in sequential ID order (newest images first, oldest images last), like the main gallery pages. They are not stored in order of your date of favouriting, which your post implies you believe they should be. That metadata is not currently recorded and we don’t have plans to track it or introduce ordering based on it. Sorry.

@Battle GT  
The big welcome banner thing only displays a limited number of times (I think it’s 3 pageloads) and then disappears, it is only intended for the edification of new users.
 
@soundtea  
Because of the overwhelming number of meta “discussion” images that get posted basically as an invitation to debate in the comments, we’re trying to make the forums more visible in order to get that kind of content into a section where it belongs and not all over the images section, which is why the forum section is so prominent.
 
But at any rate we’re going to be taking feedback and we’re already looking at how to redesign the page to be more appealing and useful.

@Yorec  
Added your server, but it would be nice to know IP address rather than going through server browser.

Their derpibooru name is Defender of 5 and they are one of our content moderators, as of a few days ago, so that probably means they’re a cool dude.
 
Would anyone be interested in a Terraria server?