I....don't understand how this is serious. My little pony...like the commercials? "My little pony, My little pony". And what is a brony...a guy who likes my little pony? And a brony-dom, what? Maybe I signed up for the wrong place.

Yes, they are male adult fans of a mediocre kids show. Weird, huh. Try staying away from this thread.

Hey, I'm not an adult!

Oh my.... I knew there were some pony fans on here but i didnt realize it was EVERYONE!... i stumbled across this when i saw the simpsons guy posting on a My Little Pony thread and though that looks strange and then I find 24 pages on my little pony O_o  why are there so many guys watching this... i have this eerie feeling that the FBI is gonna bust down my door for being on some pedophile site... Why does everyone like Ponies???... You better not try to get me to conform... i shall not drink your pony cultist kool-aid!!!...


This is what I think of your precious Ponies

You think a 24-page thread is a lot? Try this place: http://mlpforums.com/

Those are people.
They have so much fun in chat they bring it out into the rest of the forum expecting the same leniency because they're so funny in the chat.
They get 9001 likes and parade around like a boss on acid.

I think it's less about the chat existing and the topics which are discussed there, and more about the people who are using it and not receiving punishment for one reason or another.

It's a people problem at the end of the day when people can't use a chatroom responsibly. But, from my observations at MLP Forums - a much larger community than this one - chatrooms have a way of making people feel a bit too relaxed, sometimes bringing out the very worst in them. I don't think the solution lies in locking the chatroom up any further - all I see that leading to is increasing the feeling of exclusivity some people get by removing it even further from the general public than it already is.

Each and every single message in the chatroom is logged. Following some of the feedback presented in this topic, I'll make sure that the logs get reviewed so we can make an informed decision about the chatroom's future.

Solving these issues takes time. Even if it doesn't look like it, I'm aware of what's going on and am working behind the scenes to fix things up. Making threads about it in the meantime to vent about it isn't helping anyone, and certainly won't speed anything up. This is a privately owned website, not a democratic state, so please understand that the concept of a personal agenda is very much relevant here.

Feld0, i've noticed that it doesn't do the border in threads...

Clear your cache. The same CSS file is used for the entire site.

Looks badass! Just one problem, the same one that Auzzie mentioned in a status update, those yellow jaggies need a smoothening.

Sorry for missing this. Unfortunately, there isn't much I can do about that. The appearance of that yellow curve is entirely up to your browser's rendering engine, and some browsers just do a better job of anti-aliasing it than others (that area of the skin is done purely in CSS code, with no images, to ensure it scales nicely to different browser windows and keeping page load times down).

From what I've seen, it looks significantly better in Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 10 than Chrome 24. The former two browsers also didn't have trouble rendering the non-standard font I initially put the theme up with.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you've also reverted to the previous font.

The font is currently set to Helvetica. If you're still seeing Montserrat (the one that Chrome didn't like), clear your cache.

Probably not. Feld0 hosts this site using IP. Board, so I think we have to use the stock smileys.

IP.Board supports custom smileys, but someone will have to make them.

Of all the forum platforms out there, I'd go as far as to say IPB is actually the most customizable one. Also, I host on my own dedicated server...

Honestly, I wish the new theme went all the way down. It looks nice, but the abrupt stop kills it for me.

^ Yeah, that's what I've also said. It isn't flush, and both the checkered element and the banner element collide badly. Heck, even something as basic as a Wii U Blue border to give off the effect of a box art or something corny like that would break the elements nicely.

The feedback is appreciated.

I added a 6-pixel border to the bottom of the banner. You may need to do a hard refresh or clear your cache to see it. Does it look better?

The banner we have up top is mostly a placeholder - it's designed to be extremely easy to swap out, so I hope to get a new one put up there soon.

Putting a functional IP.Board theme together from Cerberus's and Keanu Riives's designs may look easy, but it came out to be a fairly challenging and quite time-consuming exercise in my CSS skills - the thing is, virtually nothing from the PSD's can be reused directly in the theme; everything has to be meticulously recreated in CSS.

This has been in the works more or less since Cerberus posted his first theme concept. Although there are still a few tweaks I'd like to make, I'm really glad to finally have a proper custom look for this place.

To those of you confused over why I allow swearing at MLP Forums and don't allow it here, first of all, being a brony has nothing to do with anything. I've written up a different ruleset for each of my two communities that I believe to suit each community's best interests, and don't believe in "one-size-fits-all" solutions. If both of my forums are supposed to have the exact same rules and policies just because I own them, I might as well merge them together into the same site. Would make management easier, right? It would actually be a disastrous scenario on multiple levels.

Believe it or not, the average member on MLP Forums is older than the average member here on TheWiiU.com. The members I have over there are generally less likely to take offense to swearing and don't actually do too much of it. The "CAPS LOCK PONY" topic Elric linked to is the exception rather than the norm, and if you look closely you'll see that it is in the site's equivalent of a "spam" section where not taking things seriously is virtually a rule (with that said, it is also an old topic and its author has since been chided for overdoing it as well). It's not exactly a good representative topic of the community over there.

We have a few users here who aren't even teenagers yet; and in my experience, debates over gaming tend to get very ugly very fast if people are allowed to swear. For this particular community, we can avoid a lot of potential issues by just not allowing profanity to begin with.

It isn't impossible. It's a pretty straight forward modification of the php files.

When I used IP, I had to manually edit the php all the time.
If you don't update often it's a great solution, but if you like to keep stuff up to date as you should, it's painful.

Forums and other websites get cracked and broken into all the time. By far one of the most common reasons I see for such incidents is that the site owners were using an old version of their software in the interest of preventing anything from breaking. Given, IP.Board is much more secure than most forum platforms, but each update includes many useful bug fixes and sometimes a security fix as well, so I tend to prioritize the installation of updates.

The third generation of the IPS framework has a hooks system designed to avoid the pain of manual code edits, but creating a hook to override the default functionality of the swear filter would require a developer who is familiar with the platform (that is, if it is even possible to hook into the swear filter). There are also performance considerations to take into account as well, considering that IPB is designed to cache posts in fully rendered, raw HTML. If each user could choose whether to see a filtered or non-filtered version of a post, this would either require the system to be modified to cache two different copies of the post or posts would need to be parsed and filtered on-demand.

These are just a few considerations to keep in mind before I start hacking away at raw PHP.

Can all be fixed by putting a swear filter to on my default but alow each user to toggle it off like n GAF or others. But I get your point. It's just really weird to read random pony references in the middle of a sentence. It makes me stop and reread what was posted and I have to fill in the blanks on what the author said loo.

A per-user toggle is impossible with IP.Board's current design, unfortunately. That would indeed be a better solution.

Honestly, though, I'd rather you refrain from trying to swear to begin with. Then you'll avoid ever triggering the filter and getting confusing replacements made in the first place.

Swearing is against TheWiiU.com's rules. You shouldn't be doing it anyway - and a pony-themed swear filter is all the more reason for you to not do it. ;P

(you might not actually believe this, but I implemented the pony-themed swear filter well over a year ago, long before I even knew about MLP:FiM)

IP.Board only allows the swear filter to be controlled globally. It is impossible to toggle it on a per-user basis, as your post is processed and filtered for swear words before being saved into the database.

I just removed nine posts arguing over 9/11 in a feedback thread regarding the swear filter.

Please take it to a personal conversation, guys. I think this thread has served its purpose, so I'm gonna lock it.

I added Keanu's icons today. Sorry for the delay, but special thanks to him for making the set.

Aww, come on. I designed Wii U Go's theme with the original teal colour. This small change suddenly made my site's entire design obsolete.

You can always change it again?, actully I would wait till E3 just in case lol.

True... I'll just have to find an hour or two to do it.

Don't forget that we're a Wii U forum first and foremost, not a Wii U chatroom. From a long-term point of view, it's better for the health and sustainability of the site to spend more time posting on the forums rather than pumping 40-character messages into the chatroom.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a new blue name joining our ranks.

 

That's right, Mournblade is our newly promoted community admin! Give him a nice handshake before he flees in horror from 14,500 pages of chat logs.

 

The recent issues with inconsistent staffing called for some changes, and Mournblade has proven himself more than capable of managing a community at a higher level than merely cleaning up after the messes as a moderator. As an administrator, he'll now work alongside me in appointing new staff, adapting the forums' layout to the needs of the community, maintaining rulesets, and simpler things like changing up the banner from time to time, in addition to his previous duties.

 

With new forces in TheWiiU.com's administration, we're now in a good position to roll out a number of changes we've been planning for a while to make this community a better place for everyone.

Your warning points are supposed to be between you and the staff only. Please do not openly discuss and compare how many you have.

As the OP's question has been answered, I'm going to lock this.

But in the end it always comes back, nothing is lost.

And if their server doesn't have proper DDOS protection yet, then it's best that they find a new one.

And while I know that it's technically impossible to be 100% protected from DDOS attacks. There are plenty of measures that can be taken to prevent them from happening. A popular method is iptables.

One does not simply get a server with "proper" DDOS protection. To be frank, "properly" DDOS-protected servers are well beyond my budget, and there's a good reason most hosting companies don't offer any such protection - the necessary hardware to implement it properly is extremely expensive (the idea is that you want to mitigate the attack before it reaches the server it is targeted at).

In the end the point is that it's always smart to take precautions.

P.S. I doubt the botnet that attacked MLP forms is the size of the botnet that was needed to take down a government site.

Here I found some stuff for you guys to look over. Maybe it will help.

http://www.unixsurge...-from-ddos.html

http://deflate.medialayer.com/

http://seclists.org/...cs/2012/Feb/131

Of course, Most options will hinge on how far you are willing to go. So I suggest taking some time to think about if it's worth it, and if the attackers are likely to strike again.

I've set up Deflate, and CSF's anti-DDOS measures are already configured. The botnet that attacked MLP Forums was, at any rate, large enough to create a 1 Gbps UDP flood.

Of course, that's a given. I'm just saying that if the MLP forums can still be taken down even with enough security measures... The Equestria Daily and Ponychan sites probably have better security than MLP forums as they are larger targets and I almost have never heard of them being down.

Equestria Daily is hosted on Blogger, so asking someone to DDOS it is pretty much asking them to DDOS Google. As for Ponychan, they've fallen prey to DDOS attacks in the past.

The attacks do seem to have subsided, at any rate. Combined with the awesome new dedicated server I moved everything to, things should be running faster and smoother than ever before.

There's a little "Report" button on every single post that exists precisely for this purpose. I suggest using it if you come across spam or any other content that really doesn't need to be there.

Im pretty sure this is a topic that's been adresses before. We used to be able to do it for a short while, but Feld0 scratched the system because it was riddled with bugs. We won't get them back.

On the subject of the like system, I have no problems with it. I prefer by to see a post with 70 likes than see a thread derailed by "this/+1/took it right out of my mouth" posts. It's happened before.

Also, saying it's the system's fault that some people abuse it is one of the stupidest things I've read in a while. It's equivalent to saying that matches should be banned because some people have started fires.

Edit: Lol, fail at not noticing Nollog basically said the same thing with one sentence.

Pretty much this. ^

IP.Board's implementation of status updates is rather spartan, and implementing likes on them properly is much more trouble than it's worth.

This is why you should always include a source link when posting stuff you found on other sites.

The screenshots were published with this article: http://www.cinemable...CARS-41448.html

And the Nintendo logo in them is meaningless:

Slightly Mad has denied responsibility for the Nintendo livery (but not the Wii U release), with Vittorio Rapa saying, "these are fan-produced liveries, they doesn't come officially from our game (and so the logos applied to them)."

Sorry to dash your dreams, everyone, but it looks like we'll have to keep waiting to get some actual Wii U shots.

Considering that this is a Wii U forum first and foremost, and not so much a chatroom, I left out the red badge on the Chat link in the new theme so as not to draw any more attention to the chatroom than to any other area of the site.

The chatroom is an area of the site that doesn't produce any publicly visible or searchable content. While I acknowledge that it's a beloved community hotspot, focusing too much activity and attention there will ultimately detract from the amount of publicly available content that gets created on the forums, which is indexed by search engines and found by guests, who subsequently join to contribute to it. The chatroom regulars can always click into the chatroom to see who's there.