Ask the mods anything

Princess♥Cadance

What’s the purpose behind the score system for images, aside from the “sort images by score” search option? There are a lot of images that get downvote bombed for subject matter rather than breaking any rules or for technical quality. Similarly, there are often hostile comments on these images. If it’s more general purpose, then what’s the problem with someone making a bot to auto-downvote every image with a certain tag they don’t like, compared to manually downvoting them?
 
The purpose of downvotes is to discourage low-effort or spam content. Personally I don’t understand why people think it’s for anything but that. The fact that people have abused the system to do that is sad. :(
 
Can you tell how many users are making use of the site’s API for things like customized image downloaders, or other ways of accessing the site’s content? Following that, how much of the userbase customizes their experiences like this?
 
Most of our traffic is via the main site, the API counts for a sizable but comparatively tiny fraction of traffic IIRC.
 
Do you ever make it a habit to mess with the user’s personal filters to mess with them, or is that an uncommon thing?
 
I’ve only ever used this power for manually adjusting filters of people who consistently complain about certain kinds of images, if it is the first time and they don’t deserve to be banned for $REASON, they’ll get a filter adjustment.
 
Wait, so you just jumped straight from “not a member of the community” to “in a position of authority over the members of this community that I was never a part of”? Don’t you think that that would pose a problem with being able to connect with the members or see things from their perspective, especially regarding community culture?
 
Most of the stuff I do is on the backend of Derpibooru, from a server administration standpoint. I really started moderating as much as I do in order to feel like I was doing at least something resembling something good because of crippling depression (still have it, not as much but days feel really long). Most of the things I help out with on Derpibooru are thankless, code reviewing and episodic triage support for when things break.
Princess♥Cadance

Is this an accurate depiction of what goes on behind the scenes when Derpibooru goes down for unplanned maintenance? (“unplanned” being the key word there)
 
Depends if any of us have seem the kind of problem the booru is having to be honest. A lot of server maintenance is reading log files and changing things so that the word “error” or “critical” shows up less often in them.
Ciaran
ラ・ゼッタ - For supporting the site
Silly Pony - Celebrated the 13th anniversary of MLP:FIM, and 40 years of MLP!
Shimmering Smile - Celebrated the 10th anniversary of Equestria Girls!
Lunar Guardian - Earned a place among the ranks of the most loyal New Lunar Republic soldiers (April Fools 2023).
Crystal Roseluck - Had their OC in the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Flower Trio - Helped others get their OC into the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
A Lovely Nightmare Night - Celebrated the 12th anniversary of MLP:FIM!
Princess of Love - Extra special version for those who participated in the Canterlot Wedding 10th anniversary event by contributing art.
Tree of Harmony - Drew someone's OC for the 2022 Community Collab
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab

Senior Moderator
友情は魔法だ
@ice1517  
Some people have been banned dozens of times, but they never do anything moon-able. They tend to end up with other indicators of behavior unbecoming, and forever get longer and longer and longer bans. Sometimes we try other things to help folks if they’re clearly having trouble getting along with others, like PMs, sometimes we chat with them in IRC, and in a couple cases I know that some of us have actually gotten to know the person outside of the booru and try to help when they’re getting upset on the site. Sadly, some do eventually end up mooned. But going from zero to mooned is very, very rare.
 
@Pacific Glow  
Only if they’re, like, a bot or a clickbait site or a spammer, or have a history of doing that every time their ban expires. Someone on staff doing a moon ban needs lots of supporting documentation to justify a moon ban - and moon bans get a lot of scrutiny. So, if someone gets moon banned, there was a quorum of staff voting “Moon”, and it almost certainly got a subsequent “So, what happened here?” just to double check that it was an appropriate ban.
 
Even a 12 hour ban gets reviewed and has to have justification. Mooning someone takes some serious evidence of shitcockery.
Zebasiz
Bronze Bit -
Friendly Griffon - For helping others attend the fifth anniversary party
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2017) - Celebrated Derpibooru's five year anniversary with friends.
A Perfectly Normal Pony - <Zeb> That's why yer female partner can use a trapon
Magnificent Metadata Maniac - #1 Assistant
Artist -

@ice1517  
Well, I don’t know all of the technical details. But essentially:  
One idiot had his account banned.  
Said idiot went to a Brony con[Might have even been Bronycon itself, can’t remember] and tried logging into his account.  
Some automatic stuff flagged the IP he was trying to log in from so he couldn’t try logging in from it.  
Since he was using the Con-internet. At that point everyone at the con who tried logging into Derpi was given the “banned” message.  
It only lasted a few minutes-hour at most. But it was amusing to watch~
 
[Though I’m pretty sure the Devs were reacting in much the way Jarkes’ pic above shows~]
 
The issue has since been fixed to keep conventions from being banned again~
byte[]
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Verified Pegasus - Show us your gorgeous wings!
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
An Artist Who Rocks - 100+ images under their artist tag
Artist -

Philomena Contributor
I see that this thread has gone downhill rapidly.
 
If anyone wants serious, detailed answers, reply to this post. Otherwise, ignore.
Anonshy
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Philomena - For helping others attend the 2021 community collab
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2020) - Took part in the 2020 Community Collab
Dream Come True! - Participated in the MLP 9th Anniversary Event
Toola Roola - For helping others attend the 2019 Community Collab
Wallet After Summer Sale -
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2019) - Celebrated Derpibooru's seventh year anniversary with friends.
A Tale For The Ages - Celebrated MLP's 35th Anniversary and FiM's 8th Anniversary

Busy - May not Respond
@byte[]  
In moments like these I’d like to be a mod, sometimes I feel a lot of curiosity to see what someone said…
 
Leaving random comment:
 
What does the button “destroy contents”? I mean, yes, the name says what it does but what I mean if it that makes a comment completely impossible to see again, for example.
Zebasiz
Bronze Bit -
Friendly Griffon - For helping others attend the fifth anniversary party
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2017) - Celebrated Derpibooru's five year anniversary with friends.
A Perfectly Normal Pony - <Zeb> That's why yer female partner can use a trapon
Magnificent Metadata Maniac - #1 Assistant
Artist -

@TheAnonShy  
I don’t know of any examples to show it off the top of my head. But: When you see “deleted” comments like Byte showed above. Users still see the person made a comment, and the red “deletion reason: etc”.
 
While “Destroyed” comments just show a thin bar that says “Comment removed”. No saying who made the comment or why it was even removed. It’s just gone~
byte[]
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Verified Pegasus - Show us your gorgeous wings!
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
An Artist Who Rocks - 100+ images under their artist tag
Artist -

Philomena Contributor
@TheAnonShy  
If they link us their PM threads, yes, we can read and even post in them.
 
From the site admin panel, however, we do not have access to a list of a user’s PMs.
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Ministry of Image - Fanfiction Printing

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