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More support for the side I’m on! TV Tropes to the rescue!

@Dogman15  
Can confirm. That email is what we based the info in this article on: http://www.equestriadaily.com/2018/07/my-little-pony-season-8-part-2-returns.html

An Equestria Daily staff member (I can show mods proof) gave me permission to share this image of an e-mail he received from someone at Discovery Family:  

@Princess Luna  

Fair enough. But at the risk of being irritating about this, if it aired as part of a “Summer Surprises” promotional campaign that was also clearly not the official end to the hiatus, and the vast majority of (if not all) other sites refer to it as episode 18, and the majority of people coming here think of it as an early airing of episode 18, wouldn’t the sane thing be calling it that?
 
 
@soundtea  

I do. Although I tend to be a bit more pedantic than most people.

I’m also more for tagging it as 18 for the long run since nothing has stated Yakety Sax isn’t going to be aired when the actual 18th episode comes around. I just think it’s better to nip it in the bud and correct it now instead of having a whole section with misplaced episode numbers.
 
EDIT: Although at this point who cares. Might as well go along since the newest is “15” now.

@Princess Luna  
Except people have been expecting this one to be tagged Episode 18.  
And now we’re tagging episode 14 as 15.  
And episode 15 will be tagged 16.  
16 - 17  
and 17 tagged 18 until we’re back to numbering them properly. Not to mention the week where there’s a “Break” while they air this episode again in the proper time.

@Background Pony #290F  
Unusual, surprising, yes, but what order things aired in is what order things aired in and it’s important to make spoiler-filtering expectations sane.

@Princess Luna  

But isn’t this something of an unusual case? Maybe I missed something, but I thought the entire point was that it was an early airing of an episode from later in the season. Also, do they not still intend to air the episode according to the “official” schedule they originally had for it? I feel like if it was just a matter of them shuffling around when they had planned to show something, then they wouldn’t still have it in their upcoming lineup like that.

Stop referring to “air date” and “production order”. This episode aired out of both of them as a “surprise.”  
Actual scheduled Saturday airing as an actual non-meme airing hasn’t happened yet.

@TexasUberAlles  
I like your analogy.

@Dogman15  
Can we take an opinion poll?  
I do believe that poll has already been concluded, and the result was TSP singing “Well I’ve got the pistol, so I’ll keep the pesos… yeah, and that seems fair”. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Doesn’t matter if any of us agree with it or not, as long as we tag the images the way Derpi wants us to tag the images.
 
I still think there should be a note added to the tag descriptions to the effect of “We number episodes by airdate and not by production order, so don’t tag Yakity-Sax as spoiler:s08e18”.

@Zeb  
Because Season 1 was the last and only season in which airing order and production order were the same, and previous site policy seems to have consistently been to prioritize the former over the latter.

Can’t please everyone. I’m one of those not pleased. Ooh! Can we take an opinion poll?

@The Frowning Pony  
tl;dr for everyone, production order does not matter one iota (we have always used airing order); the only thing to be argued here is that we should be going off of a previous intended airing order instead of the actual airing order, which I think is folly. Sometimes networks change their minds.

@TexasUberAlles  
@Zeb
 
This is by far not the first time production and airing order don’t match.

THIS ONLY TRUE YAK GATE  

I hereby dub this miscarriage of justice Yak-gate.

@Mildgyth  
Yeah, I remember those. Was wondering why we did it then too.

@Zeb
 
I mean, i’m pretty sure we had similar cases of putting air order instead of production order before. although this one is different.

@The Frowning Pony  
I’m not sure if it was missed because I edited in at the last second, But what is the reason for us ignoring the official order and going by air order?  
It mostly just confuses people who view other sources and see it’s listed as a different number. And it then screws up the numbering of the episode it was swapped with. So anyone looking at the episode numbers is getting the wrong information on our site, different from everywhere else.
 
It just seems really arbitrary that we’re ignoring the official sources for this information. And making it more confusing for our users. Changing the episode number because we want it to be different, and not because the series is changing the episode numbers.

@The Frowning Pony  
Well, presumably he could say something along the lines of “Yeah, it’s supposed to be the 18th episode, here’s a script excerpt with ‘EP187’ clearly labeled, Discovery Networks didn’t ask us but we still got paid so whatevs” and maybe have it carry a little more weight than any of us on this side of the DHX security checkpoint could bring to bear.
 
I think you’re wrong here about Airdate v. Production Order, but it’s your site and not mine, so y’all are the ones who decide how stuff gets labeled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Mostly I just want there to be one consistent rule that gets applied to all uploads and is clearly explained where everyone can see it, because right now there are two camps and each one is agenda-tagging screencaps accordingly.

@TexasUberAlles  
Can Big Jim warp time? Because otherwise the question of “Was Yakity-Sax the 14th episode of MLP:FiM aired on DFC?” is still going to be “Yes”.

Is Big Jim not authoritative enough a source? He seems a bit more accessible.

@Zeb  
As I said, get Brian Goldner to email me about it. Otherwise, official airing order is the episode order, and Yakity-Sax is the 14th episode of season 8 officially aired on the home network for the show.

@The Frowning Pony  
“The people in charge of the product are wrong. We’re right.”  
I can make exaggerated comments too. =P  
[Said in jest]
 
But in seriousness. Do we have a reason for ignoring the official order? Why make it more confusing for the users who see a different number on all of the other sites?