Blossomforth 
The Flexible One
Over the past few weeks, Derpibooru has faced a level of stress and turmoil the likes of which we’ve never seen before. 2020 has been a bleak year, and things only seem to get worse as time progresses.
Last month, relevant political topics in the world started boiling over into the site and fandom. We tried to remain neutral at first, but allowed ourselves to be swayed into reacting. A lot of people reacted negatively to that. Then we allowed those negative reactions to sway us into another direction.
We have always had the best interests of our community at heart, but we failed to communicate with our community, and therefore only heard from the side that was currently angry. This skewed our perceptions of what the community wanted, and as a result we let you down. We made mistakes.
A few days ago, we made a change to our content policy. Immediately following this change, we received strongly negative feedback, and once again made the mistake of only hearing one side of the issue. This led us to believe that there was no support for this change, so we announced that we were retracting it earlier tonight.
In nearly nine years of running Derpibooru, this is our biggest failure with this site. The feedback we have received tonight has been overwhelming and illuminating.
We want to be clear – hateful content is not welcome on Derpibooru. We will be tightening our rules against promotion of discriminatory beliefs and hate speech.
We have failed our community, and we have damaged the trust our users have placed in us. We know we cannot just apologize and expect all to be forgiven. We understand we have lost everyone’s trust, so we will be striving to work with the community over the coming weeks to earn that trust back and have an open dialog with our users, as we always should have.
There is a lot for us to discuss on this topic, but one thing that has been clear is that we cannot make these decisions alone. From this point forward, any changes to the site’s policies will be announced in advance and communicated to our community very clearly, so that we can gather feedback from our entire community of users and fans.
From all of us at Derpibooru, we know we have failed you, and want to do all that we can to rectify this. We ask that you please share your thoughts with us on these issues as we all move forward.
—Updates—
There’s been a lot of responses to this, so I would just like to go over the questions that are coming up most frequently.
Q: Does this mean that <x> is now banned?
A: At the moment, our rules reflect what they were like at the start of June, but we will be enforcing our rules against racism, homophobia, hatred, bigotry, and so on more consistently and strictly. Any changes to the rules going forward will be announced and open to comments from the community before they are implemented.
We want to make clear in particular that content such as a pony insulting a racial group with a slur (even a ponified one) as a racist “mouthpiece” is not okay.
Q: When will this decision change again?
A: There’s a lot of work to be done. Any decisions made going forward will be made with full community involvement. We want to hear from our community about what our rules should be, to ensure that any decisions made ware the best for the community. These decisions will no longer be made by a small group of staff members.
Q: What is the current idea on making enforcement consistent?
A: “Content containing blatant hate speech, or promotion of or propaganda for prejudicial views” is the most up-to-date idea we are using to move forward. It is not final, and will certainly be improved as we gather feedback.
Last month, relevant political topics in the world started boiling over into the site and fandom. We tried to remain neutral at first, but allowed ourselves to be swayed into reacting. A lot of people reacted negatively to that. Then we allowed those negative reactions to sway us into another direction.
We have always had the best interests of our community at heart, but we failed to communicate with our community, and therefore only heard from the side that was currently angry. This skewed our perceptions of what the community wanted, and as a result we let you down. We made mistakes.
A few days ago, we made a change to our content policy. Immediately following this change, we received strongly negative feedback, and once again made the mistake of only hearing one side of the issue. This led us to believe that there was no support for this change, so we announced that we were retracting it earlier tonight.
In nearly nine years of running Derpibooru, this is our biggest failure with this site. The feedback we have received tonight has been overwhelming and illuminating.
We want to be clear – hateful content is not welcome on Derpibooru. We will be tightening our rules against promotion of discriminatory beliefs and hate speech.
We have failed our community, and we have damaged the trust our users have placed in us. We know we cannot just apologize and expect all to be forgiven. We understand we have lost everyone’s trust, so we will be striving to work with the community over the coming weeks to earn that trust back and have an open dialog with our users, as we always should have.
There is a lot for us to discuss on this topic, but one thing that has been clear is that we cannot make these decisions alone. From this point forward, any changes to the site’s policies will be announced in advance and communicated to our community very clearly, so that we can gather feedback from our entire community of users and fans.
From all of us at Derpibooru, we know we have failed you, and want to do all that we can to rectify this. We ask that you please share your thoughts with us on these issues as we all move forward.
—Updates—
There’s been a lot of responses to this, so I would just like to go over the questions that are coming up most frequently.
Q: Does this mean that <x> is now banned?
A: At the moment, our rules reflect what they were like at the start of June, but we will be enforcing our rules against racism, homophobia, hatred, bigotry, and so on more consistently and strictly. Any changes to the rules going forward will be announced and open to comments from the community before they are implemented.
We want to make clear in particular that content such as a pony insulting a racial group with a slur (even a ponified one) as a racist “mouthpiece” is not okay.
Q: When will this decision change again?
A: There’s a lot of work to be done. Any decisions made going forward will be made with full community involvement. We want to hear from our community about what our rules should be, to ensure that any decisions made ware the best for the community. These decisions will no longer be made by a small group of staff members.
Q: What is the current idea on making enforcement consistent?
A: “Content containing blatant hate speech, or promotion of or propaganda for prejudicial views” is the most up-to-date idea we are using to move forward. It is not final, and will certainly be improved as we gather feedback.
