The Flexible One

Hello everyone!A lot has happened recently, so we wanted to take a moment to discuss everything that has been going on. There is a decent amount to discuss, but if you just want to know the key points, they are:→ We have no plans of going anywhere, and will keep the site running for the foreseeable future.→ As Gen 4 of MLP draws to a conclusion, we will be welcoming content related to Gen 5.→ Article 13 has passed, but we have tools in place already to help us comply with it.→ The site's source code will eventually be released as open source software.Season 9 of MLP:FiM will be the final season of the show. It is expected that MLP’s next generation, Gen5, will start in 2020 or 2021. Derpibooru has always been a multi-generational site, and will gladly accept Gen5 related content. There will likely be changes to how tagging works to accommodate both Gen4 and Gen5 co-existing as major content sources.The European Union has recently passed its controversial copyright directive, commonly known as "Article 13" (now Article 17). We already utilize tools to help us comply with this law, including automatically blocking images by artists on our do-not-post list, and using hash matching to prevent deleted images from being reposted. While the exact implementation of the directive that will apply to us is unknown, we don’t expect any major problems.The site's development team has decided that we would like to start working towards releasing the site's software, booru-on-rails, publicly under an open source license. However, it will take some time to get to such a point where we would feel comfortable publishing it. To help expedite getting there, our lead developer, byte[], has created a Patreon to allow him to dedicate more time into a public release.Furthermore, we are looking to add a few more developers to our team to help prepare the code for an open source release. If you are interested in helping out, please contact byte[] for more information.Neither the site nor the fandom are going to disappear anytime soon. Keep celebrating the show, keep having fun, keep creating and sharing content, and pony on.Cheers!—The Derpibooru Staff