Ask the mods anything

Arcaire
Ten Seconds Flat - Zero to booru hero in under 24 hours.
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2018) - Celebrated Derpibooru's six year anniversary with friends.
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!
A Perfectly Normal Pony - :^)
Always Codes Drunk - In the Zone

Systems / Ops Alumni
@TheAnonShy  
We can, but only if we’re provided with a link to it by one of the participants. For instance, some users may have had PM conversations with mods where other mods have also contributed, which is possible because the first mod has shared the link.
 
We can’t just guess the link or something, and it’s not enumerable (look at the URL, it’s long and complex). Even if we could, we don’t care or want to.
 
Moderating the site is sort of like being a nurse; there’s a brief period at the start when the thought of seeing people’s privates might be vaguely titillating in a theoretical sense, but that sort of thing doesn’t last long when it’s up against the daily reality of urine, blood, and vomit.
 
Now that I think about it, moderating the site is exactly like being a nurse, only people die slightly less often.
Jarkes
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Wallet After Summer Sale -
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2018) - Celebrated Derpibooru's six year anniversary with friends.
Magical Inkwell - Wrote MLP fanfiction consisting of at least around 1.5k words, and has a verified link to the platform of their choice
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2017) - Celebrated Derpibooru's five year anniversary with friends.
Thread Starter - Transformers Thread

GOKAAAAI... SILVER!
Given how dynamic IPs work, how exactly does one make sure that someone who’s moonbanned stays moonbanned if they use a dynamic IP and their IP thus changes regularly?
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
@Jarkes  
We can’t. One of our biggest pains in the ass has been titanimal, who has forced us to manually add over 250 bans to the system to keep him away.
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
@Arcaire  
@byte[]
 
(I sent my last message in the exact moment that Arcaire answered me, thanks both).
 
Is nice to read that, one of the things that most I like of this site is the responsible security that exists.
 
Now other question: is it possible to delete the history of bans of a user? That’s something that personally I would like, I feel ashamed for one ban that I had (it was only a few minutes, something really silly what happened anyway).
Arcaire
Ten Seconds Flat - Zero to booru hero in under 24 hours.
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2018) - Celebrated Derpibooru's six year anniversary with friends.
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!
A Perfectly Normal Pony - :^)
Always Codes Drunk - In the Zone

Systems / Ops Alumni
@TheAnonShy  
We don’t delete ban history because we use it when weighing up whether or not to ban you longer for repetitive stupidity.
 
Edit: Also w/r/t security, I work in infosec as a day job, and byte[] has a pretty strong handle on it too. We’re the sysadmins so we force it on everyone else. :^)
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
@Arcaire
 
Then from what I’ve seen, both of you does a great job maintaining the security here!
 
I can understand anyway why you can’t delete the ban history (then I guess I have to deal with it until I change my account, what a shame).
 
These are my questions for now, thanks all for answering them faster than what I thought. I’ll return in other moment when I have again a bunch of questions in my mind.
Some Pacifier Pone
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2019) - Celebrated Derpibooru's seventh year anniversary with friends.
Thread Starter - Caption the Picture Above You
Equality - In our state, we do not stand out.
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2018) - Celebrated Derpibooru's six year anniversary with friends.
Artist -
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!
A Perfectly Normal Pony - <PacificGlow> DEEWKS NUTZ
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2017) - Celebrated Derpibooru's five year anniversary with friends.

um???? lmao???
@byte[]  
I’ve read the Titanimal Cringe Thread and saw just how much stupid shit Titanimal has done.
 
Also, there’s Kein and the academy record: a Flash Sentry hater with 475, if not more dupe accounts that were moonbanned.
dynamicv

@Joey  
Thanks, I only asked because it seems rule 0 doesn’t always get enforced when the subject of attack is IDW staff or someone who enjoys the comics.
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
Since we’re just talking amongst friends here, and letting everyone see the levers behind the curtains, if I was going to share with the world one and only one secret that I’ve learned volunteering for the site, it is this:
 
Everything you do as staff here is constantly being monitored and reviewed, and a lot of what we do as staff depends on being able to get consensus for the proposed action from the rest of staff before taking the action.
 
Generally speaking, when someone from staff shows up in a thread as staff, or sends you a PM, or bans you, it was the result of a report, which someone on staff volunteered to handle, which starts with identifying if a rule was broken and proposing a response, followed by a discussion with a bunch of other people on staff about whether the rule applies and whether the the response is appropriate, followed by a vote, or revisions, and more votes, and finally consensus on what to do about the report.
 
Maybe we end up doing what was proposed. Sometimes we do something either harsher or less harsh depending on histories. Sometimes we just close the report because we can’t reach consensus or the vote is that no rules were broken.
 
Those discussions may take a couple minutes, or they can go on for hours or even days. Sometimes we even create new forum threads to discuss the options and to track the votes for or against each proposed solution for that single report.
 
And when a consensus is reached, either the person who volunteered to handle the report goes into the thread and does what the staff voted to do, or we split up the pieces of it to spread the load.
 
So, you might get response in the thread from one person, while someone else is handling the ban, and another person is closing the report, while a fourth person is documenting what happened for any future reviews that might happen.
 
Not everything goes through a vote, for sure. But even something as simple as “Is this image Rule #3 or not?” usually results in some sort of discussion before a “Delete it” or “It’s fine” consensus is reached.
 
The behavior of the staff here really is a team effort: it takes all of us to do it once. And whenever you see someone publicly acting as staff on the site, they have at least three pairs of eyes looking over their shoulder while they do it.
NounVerb

@Princess♥Cadance  
[bq=”Princess♥Cadance”] @NounVerb
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.
What are the most common API-made customizations, for lack of better phrasing, that are made? I imagine that mass-downloaders would be too much of a drain on bandwidth, and would probably get deleted or banned. Is it something like changing the site’s display such that every image is displayed as a certain resolution, with a descriptive filename rather than “medium_1”, or whatever the default image display’s filename is?
Are there any further tinkerings and streamlinings that you imagine for the site, if you had infinite time, and didn’t need to worry about the complexity of the code upkeep? Just straight-up extra features or changes in how images are displayed, like Sankaku Complex’s autopaging feature, for example.
Given that new bugs are always cropping up for one reason or another, can you give an example of a typical bug that you find, isolate, and fix? I’m trying to get an idea of how tricky general site maintenance is, and how much more of a pain in the neck it is when it’s the same basic site that serves a lot of content to a lot of different users.
Arcaire
Ten Seconds Flat - Zero to booru hero in under 24 hours.
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2018) - Celebrated Derpibooru's six year anniversary with friends.
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!
A Perfectly Normal Pony - :^)
Always Codes Drunk - In the Zone

Systems / Ops Alumni
What are the most common API-made customizations, for lack of better phrasing, that are made?
 
The front-end of the site and personal downloaders are the most common use of the API I’m aware of. The API doesn’t get much love beyond that, really. We had a mobile app or two but they’re unmaintained now.
 
Are there any further tinkerings and streamlinings that you imagine for the site, if you had infinite time, and didn’t need to worry about the complexity of the code upkeep?
 
WEBM support, literature, bulk-action tools, and plenty more. Mostly we work on streamlining internal processes and generally improving site efficiency. They’ve been mentioned before but with a site of this size we’re perpetually yak shaving.
 
Given that new bugs are always cropping up for one reason or another, can you give an example of a typical bug that you find, isolate, and fix?
 
Given how much the time of the devs/sysadmins is basically a rarity now, it generally starts with a report. We’ll try to reproduce it, then work with our logs to discern exactly what part of the site is breaking. The patch gets made, pushed to GitHub (if it’s a complex fix the code gets branch instead of being pushed direct to mainline), reviewed, then deployed to a testing environment. If the bug is resolved there, it’s pushed to production (here).
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