As an author, I've had an absolutely terrible time dealing with blog ponies. Possibly the worst of any author.

I had a story that got up on EqD with this for cover art:

This was during the period when there was a small and stupid, but vocal group of anti lesbian shipping white knights. The comments quickly had about six to ten of them, complaining about how an image of kissing was entirely inappropriate. (No, not even joking.)
And for some god damn reason, I guess ten people getting angry over something, no matter how asinine, is enough to make the blog ponies panic and cave. The blog ponies quickly changed the image of kissing (how vulgar!) to some nearly irrelevant piece of art that was really poorly drawn (no offense to that artist). It took about two hours for them to decide to reverse the change, but I'd already lost a lot of respect for how the site's run after that.

The second thing, is that there's no system in place for authors to send any email other than [Story Update] to the blog ponies. I've changed the cover art on two of my fics, and each time I had four ignored emails each time, before the new cover art was finally changed. Now the latest problem, is that I've completed a story--a system I thought they surely had better in place than changing cover art. I sent in an email with the subject [Story Update Complete], figuring they can't really miss it saying the story is complete, both in the title and as the third line of a three line email.

Nope, haha! Guess I'm just going to have to spam their inbox until they actually put it in queue to be posted!

If anyone from EqD is reading this, the only thing that works is [story update], and you seriously need to establish a [story art change] and [story update complete] so that these emails stop getting dropped. I've had around 20 emails dropped across 4 stories so far, and it's pretty damn ridiculous. Practically anything other than [story update] requires me to send several emails, waiting a couple days in between each one to see if they actually got it. Right now the people reading emails are skimming reading so fast that they are little more than poorly implemented bots, so maybe getting some actual bots, or hiring more help, would be a good idea.

1313855 Watch out, brah. Members from there will blame you for whatever reason instead of admitting to their problems.

1313855 When I was updating my first story to hit EqD, an eight-chapter fic, the blog ponies missed a number of my updates including my update complete. I didn't feel all that bad, since I was updating on a one-to-two-day cycle and I'd be spamming the story updates every day if they took them all. I was more upset about the update complete, though, because that's a big deal.

I don't remember exactly what happened, but I know I got a chance to talk to one of them or one of the pre-readers, and whoever it was told me that they get enough email traffic that yes, they do miss things, and that I shouldn't feel bad about nagging the blog ponies until my updates went through. So I don't. If they miss it one day, I just go back and send them the same email the next day, and eventually things get done. Honestly, I don't have a problem with that, but I know I'm more patient than some people. As long as I know it's okay to keep asking until something gets done, I'm fine with that.

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Practically anything other than [story update] requires me to send several emails, waiting a couple days in between each one to see if they actually got it. Right now the people reading emails are skimming reading so fast that they are little more than poorly implemented bots, so maybe getting some actual bots, or hiring more help, would be a good idea.

Pretty sure Seth's the one who does everything blogpost-editey. Correct me if I'm wrong, though. Back when I had your problem (wayyy back then), that was how it went. And hey, the man's but one man, so I took it and left it at that.

1313855 By any chance do you still have the link for these comments? I really want to see these in the flesh.
plz. ;_;

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Casca's correct here: anything beyond the decision of what is initially posted on the blog is up to "the blogponies", which is basically just Seth as far as fanfic goes. It's been a pretty consistent source of frustration for us for many reasons: partially because he historically hasn't let anyone else take over doing this stuff for him, and partially because he absolutely does do things like remove cover art for posts because a few people complained (all the time, actually). Speaking as both a pre-reader and an EqD-published author: we're no less annoyed by this kind of thing than SLP is.

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Once I spoke to some prereaders, they got someone to straighten out the cover art and delete the anti-shipping comments, so they're no longer there. The response once I spoke to them was great, but the kneejerk reaction to change the cover art prior to that was ridiculous.

Wow, so even if you get accepted to EqD, you mean to tell me that they are still entirely unprofessional? What a shocker.

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small and stupid, but vocal group of anti lesbian shipping white knights

THOSE MOTHER FUCKERS

Nothing irritates me more than the mere thought of those asswipes. They're the reason there's no star ratings on EQD anymore. They're the reason I quite possibly missed out on a 6-star rating. They're the reason I've lost a substantial amount of respect for this fandom. I hope they're happy with what they did. But I also wouldn't blame EQD itself for their presence, because it's not like there's anything that could have been done about them short of making a completely new website. But yeah.

And like Aqua said, even being a pre-reader doesn't help you with the blogponies when it comes to updating stuff. I took all my gdocs fics and changed them to be nothing but links to fimfiction after an attempt to get them all changed. I should try doing that again.

Am I the only person here who gets the fact that maybe some people, regardless of their stance on the subject in real life, don't exactly want to see cartoon ponies, from a family-oriented television show (that many adults today grew up with and adored as children, by the way), being portrayed as lesbian lovers raunchily making out with each other? And that maybe we should respect that?

I'm sorry, OP. But I agree with the White Knights here. That wasn't an appropriate image to display and I think the site administrators were right to take it down, regardless of either side's stance on the subject of homosexuality.

...also, don't call them "blog ponies". That's weird, dude. (<-- facetiousness)

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If they didn't like it, all they had to do was ignore it.

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Let's break down this argument, shall we?

Disney's Robin Hood was a classic that children everywhere watched growing up. It featured talking animal characters and although they are more human than equestrian ponies, in which case there's always:

I'm not seeing too much of a difference with the original:

Unless you make out the difference to be the fact that it's two girls kissing in the first, because I've never heard of a simple (aka, non-making out) kiss being inappropriate for children. I guess you could also make the argument about kiss on the cheek vs lips on lips, but then again, tons of non animal disney movies have had lips-on-lips kisses (and one full fledged animal one, too):

1318101 Yeah I'm an idiot. Deleting comment, you'd be surprised how often I have a lapse.

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ah, well, I was still editing my comment, but glad to see it made sense anyways

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1318101

Alright, I don't have time for this, so fuck formalities. Yes, I'm talking about the fact that they are being portrayed as lesbians. It has nothing to do with the fact that they're humanized animals or even that they're kissing. So I'm fairly certain that pretty much invalidates every single example in your little "breakdown".

My point is that I think it's disrespectful, belittling, rude and just plain insensitive to take innocent characters from things like children's television shows and portray them as being engaged in such controversial affairs at this point in our society just because you want to use shock value to make a point or because, God forbid, you somehow find yourself attracted to the thought of an image such as this.

I said before that where anyone stands on this subject as a political issue is irrelevant. All I'm trying to say right now is that I think it's incredibly unprofessional and tasteless in this day and age to just post an image like this on a site like EqD and think that there is nothing wrong with the approach being taken.

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This seems like a personal problem.

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To address the point which you so succinctly shrugged off, if you don't like something, don't read it. If you don't read something, don't vote on it. Any time I find myself wanting to downvote a story here because it has a stupid premise, or features incest or foalcon or human on pony relationships -- things I hate and am rather vehemently opposed to -- I stop, think for a second about how much I hated it when people downvoted my stories based on its tags rather than its content, and then I ignore it. Lack of views is much more powerful a dissuasion, and if something you hate gets popular, well, there's nothing you can do about that, really. It's the story of this fandom, and nothing is gained by either party.

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>Any time I find myself wanting to downvote a story here because it has a stupid premise, or features incest

Whoa, man. Don't hate on Flitter/Cloudchaser like that.

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Fuck off, they aren't even related :V

Oh boy.

This "ad" is in this morning's nightly roundup on EqD:

"WANTED: BAD FANFICS

Content: I was thinking to myself the other day and thought "Hey, you know what the Brony community needs? More anger.". And I've decided to fulfill that role myself through a podcast/live radio show (haven't figured out which one yet). However, I still need to decide what exactly to be angry about. I know I'll mostly be reviewing fan-fictions, and while there is no small shortage of terrible Brony fanfics, I don't want to look through the back pages of FIMFiction and read each and every story. So I'm calling upon YOU, faithful reader to give ME bad MLP fanfics to read and review. I'll take almost anything, but I do have a few guidelines for what to not submit.

1) No Trollfics

These are stories that are meant to be bad, and because of that, me reviewing and getting angry about it is exactly what the author is looking for, so I'm not going to bother with it.

2) No "Non-Story" Clop

While I don't have any problem with clop or cloppers, I'm not going to review any stories that are clop for the sake of clop. The author didn't write it for the story, and the readers aren't reading it for the story, so I'm not going to review it. However, if it is a clop that actually wants to have a story (and fails), then I will read it. (And the same rule applies for "gore for the sake of gore" stories)

Other than that, you can submit any story you want and I will read it. Whether or not I'll review it is debatable, but I will read and consider each and every submission.

Please submit stories to disgruntledbrony"

Pretty sure he's already been told to come here by EqD supporters even though most aren't bad.

Sorry for the late reply.

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The difference is this: If you don't like something that has been posted on a place like FiMFiction, where you enter expecting to find stories of all kinds and accept that many that you'd rather not see are unavoidable, the "DL;DR" argument is perfectly valid, and for the record I want to point out here that I, like you, do not downvote or even bother to read stories that contain content that I do not like.

Simply put, however, in this particular situation it has to be understood that you can't just "not read" the big, provocative and brightly colored image pasted on the front page of a popular website.

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I swear to God, if you're implying I'm some sort of homophobe...

Regardless, I made it clear twice already that personal opinions on the real-world issue are irrelevant in this context. What I'm addressing is not praise nor condemnation of gay content on the website but rather how explicitly "in-your-face" and unavoidable this particular content is, and how it was poor judgment on the part of the administrators to throw it up without taking their audience into account, which considering how big EqD is, likely consists of fans with a large variety of differing beliefs on the matter presented.

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Downvoting a story for anything but its content is not excusable behavior.

Also, for the record, if you aren't actually some kind of homophobe, you definitely sound like one at the moment. For your consideration.