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Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 1:23 am
by CosmogenicLily
Hey all, it's been a wild 10 years here on The Round Stable! From our earliest start as an offshoot of the Something Awful FiM thread, we've certainly come a long way, dabbling in everything from forum image contests to running a pony news and opinion site (cue the audience: "we had a front page?")

Of all the various things we've done though, the oldest and longest lived of these is the Bronibooru image boards, which I know many of you have enjoyed using for nearly 10 years now. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. As the internet and society has marched on (not to mention my own interests), many of you have noticed that it has become increasingly difficult to keep Bronibooru alive and well. While the rest of the mods and I have discussed several options for trying to preserve it in the past couple of months, the reality is that there is no realistic path to continuing to host Bronibooru in its current form given my continued absence and the myriad technical complications involved in transferring that site to someone else (unfortunately this is much harder than restoring the forums was).

:sweetielarm: As a result of all this, Bronibooru will be shutting down on its 10th anniversary: March 6, 2021. :sweetielarm:

My hope is that this advance notice will assist those of you who might wish to save specific images and tag libraries.

Please note that this does not mean that the images will be gone forever. I am currently exploring several options to ensure that the site and its images are preserved and accessible to the world in another form, and I will have more to say on that topic as we get closer to the shutdown date.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 1:30 am
by Dong Strongly
Goodnight sweet bronbooru, you contained several images I enjoyed. I will not mourn your loss but instead rejoice and sing of your life. I'll be upvoting images uploaded by the enigmatic tp in heaven now, or however that works.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 2:19 am
by Adiwan
Goodbye the last bastion of safe, wholesome, and decent pony images (including everything with the :gonk: tag).

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:03 am
by Orange Fluffy Sheep
I remember the days of flash downvote mobs with inscrutable agendas and arguing if the ponies maybe were too friendly, looking for arcane signs it's secretly *thunderclap* shipping.

What a trip.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 7:55 am
by Scuderia
<ArmchairHorseAdmin>

Is there anyway to get it all running on a desktop?

It’s just straight up MySQL right?
Dump the db and zip up all the images along with the copy of booru you were using, upload to archive.org and let God sort it all out. :chillin:
Just provide enough for Future Horse Archaeologists to go on.
</ArmchairHorseAdmin>

dollars to doughnuts there’s other image board admins who just stop paying for hosting and it’s GONE.

There’s probably a bunch of other stuff like moonstuck or other stuff from your favorite artists that could be archived and uploaded to Archive.org* as well. Tumblr, file upload services like mediafire, that shit’s all ephemeral
https://woonastuck.tumblr.com/

* Yes, I’m a monthly donor :sheepish:

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 10:29 am
by PonyHag714
Sad to hear. RIP Bronibooru.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 10:35 am
by Aramek
Thanks for everything Cosmo.

Wuv you and miss you.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 10:46 am
by Westy543
Alright I'M COMIN' OUTTA RETIREMENT-

ah shit, bronibooru's dyin', Cloud. I'm going back into retirement.

(the booru's been down every time I've tried to access it over the past year, TBH I thought it already was shut down...) Thank you to everyone who's maintained it over its decade of life, and especially those who helped me while I was admin of it for a few years. May the russian viagra bots that made the booru forum unusable to handle tag changes rest in piss.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:17 pm
by Durandal
does archive.org accept horse art? for historical preservation?

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:54 pm
by Dong Strongly
Durandal wrote:
Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:17 pm
does archive.org accept horse art? for historical preservation?
You can get pirated movies and YouTube poops on archive.org

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2021 3:51 pm
by ZizzyDizzyMC
Hello I had signed up here to say that if you were willing I would gladly re-host Bronibooru.

I already have experience hosting sites that are far larger and around the same levels of complexity.
As part of The Pony Archive / Z+ I offer free hosting / take over of any pony-related sites or projects. TPA already has Bronibooru archived, but I'm offering to keep it online as well - that way anything that may be linked doesn't go poof on the net.

Z+ handles everything from the hosting to any incurred costs (like domain name costs / transfer costs / bandwidth costs for migration)

Let me know if you'd be interested, I reach out to every site on behalf of TPA / Z+

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2021 3:54 pm
by Scuderia
Durandal wrote:
Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:17 pm
does archive.org accept horse art? for historical preservation?
It's as easy as signing up for an account an organizing the metadata for your upload. The attitude is Upload It All, add decent metadata, someone who cares enough will sort it out later.

Ah look's like Egophiliac has already uploaded her stuff. GG Ego.
https://archive.org/details/MoonstuckCo ... dition2014

Slice of Pony Life doesn't turn up anything, though.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=%2 ... %20Life%22
Dong Strongly wrote:
Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:54 pm
You can get pirated movies and YouTube poops on archive.org
Since Adobe/Macromedia Flash was end-of-lifed they've been ingesting .flv files and presenting them on an emulator*

So that Homestar Runner and Happy Tree Friends may never die.
https://archive.org/details/htf-snip-sn ... ep33_flash
:nnngh: :"There's nothing funny about any of this."


*
Written in Rust and compiled to Webassembly for your protection and pleasure. Running nearly as fast as native code yet still platform independent on everything from your windows PC to your Android Whatchamacallit, and without the overhead of a Java or .net managed language runtime
Go on, play some of the Behemoth's Alien Homonid in its original form https://ruffle.rs/demo/ :ponynet:
There's also https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2021 3:49 pm
by diribigal
Can we just set up a torrent for it? How big could it be?

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2021 6:55 pm
by Dong Strongly
How many floppy disks do we need

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:42 pm
by Westy543
Are we talkin' the good floppies or the bad floppies?

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:26 am
by Dong Strongly
Westy543 wrote:
Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:42 pm
Are we talkin' the good floppies or the bad floppies?
Sloppy disk. HD

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:05 am
by Scuderia
It’d be interesting if a generative AI toy like https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ could be created from the booru’s collection

Explainer
https://nearcyan.com/this-anime-does-not-exist/

Warning: Cursed, punishment from God. :-I

No, I don’t have time for this myself.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:05 pm
by Durandal
Scuderia wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:05 am
It’d be interesting if a generative AI toy like https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ could be created from the booru’s collection

Explainer
https://nearcyan.com/this-anime-does-not-exist/

Warning: Cursed, punishment from God. :-I

No, I don’t have time for this myself.
Of course, the internet has already done this: https://thisponydoesnotexist.net/

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:20 am
by diribigal
:sillypony: BRB, posting all of these to bronibooru before it shuts down

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:16 am
by Fizzbuzz
Durandal wrote:
Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:05 pm
Of course, the internet has already done this: https://thisponydoesnotexist.net/
And it's not even the first such project! https://twitter.com/AerialDraws

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:53 pm
by Durandal
Image

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 7:33 pm
by Westy543
holy shit this horse is high as HELL

Click for Fullsize

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 11:37 pm
by Scuderia
diribigal wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:20 am
:sillypony: BRB, posting all of these to bronibooru before it shuts down
nooo don't do that

Click for Fullsize

Durandal wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:53 pm

Click for Fullsize
looks like the training set they used is a bit samey (then again ponies are by definition samey) but now and again you come across some real monsters
ImageImage

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:00 am
by Dong Strongly
Image

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 2:37 am
by Dong Strongly
http://bronibooru.com/users/3

Rip to the soon to be perma'd 3rd person to register for the One Good Booru™ Behind the master admin account and cosmogenic lily.

It was an honor to fill it up with my nonsense

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 3:22 pm
by londonarbuckle
TIL that I'm a moderator on bronibooru, a thing I had zero memory of ever being. Truly there's nothing like the satisfaction of a iob well done

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 5:01 pm
by diribigal
londonarbuckle wrote:
Sat Mar 06, 2021 3:22 pm
TIL that I'm a moderator on bronibooru, a thing I had zero memory of ever being. Truly there's nothing like the satisfaction of a iob well done
As a fellow moderator, I never got around to the massive tag cleanup project I'd wanted to do, and it looks like it all worked out in the end.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 5:36 pm
by diribigal
What were everyone's favorite tags? I kinda like the out of date "may or may not contain higgs boson particles".

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 5:46 pm
by Squeaky_Belle
Approve my image dammit :smirk:

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 6:33 pm
by Dong Strongly
Image

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 7:41 pm
by Westy543
Goodnight sweet Russian viagra bots o7

Goodnight dead drama

Goodnight sweet server errors when trying to do tag operations

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2021 11:33 pm
by CosmogenicLily
Alas, the time has come. I have made some plans to ensure that Bronibooru is properly archived, but this will require some work to accomplish while the site is offline. Stay tuned, as I will have more to share in the next few days.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:17 am
by gnotsyndrome
Thanks so much for all the work you've done to keep it running this last decade! It was greatly appreciated. Goodnight BB

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:47 am
by Dong Strongly
Who had the last comment/upload/flag?

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 2:03 pm
by CosmogenicLily
You left the last comment on this image of all things:

Image

You also made the last upload:

Image

You were by far the biggest user of the site in the past 4 years in terms of liking/disliking images, so neither comes as a surprise.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:51 pm
by Dong Strongly
:-P

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 9:09 pm
by Fizzbuzz
To the Bronibooru user tp, if you're reading this, I'd like to thank you for all the uploading you did over the years. While you and I talked once or twice, I know that overall you were happy to quietly bring in new art to share. Whoever you were, you definitely kept the booru's front page fresh.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2021 6:12 pm
by Dong Strongly
It was probably kilobears or minusx in disguise

Whoever they were and I'll probably recognize them if they go by something else, but I really appreciated and enjoyed seeing new art and artists. Thank you tp, I can cash app you $5 if you want

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2021 8:04 pm
by CosmogenicLily
An update on archival efforts:

I'm currently preparing a torrent for downloading the entire Bronibooru image archive for those who are curious enough to download 100GB of pony images in various resolutions. This will take a few more days to do, as it's going to take a while to send that over to a seed box. This torrent will include an SQL dump of the final state of the Bronibooru database with passwords, e-mails, and certain other PII (e.g. edit history, pms and forums) thoroughly scrubbed from it, while leaving useful data alone (pools, posts, tags, notes, wiki pages, artist info, and comments).

I've also been working with the folks over at The Pony Archive to get them a copy as well, as they are interested in potentially rehosting the archive themselves in a more user-friendly way (a 100GB tarball is not the easiest thing to work with!).

When I have more to talk about on these subjects, I'll update this thread.

Re: Bronibooru Shutting Down on March 6

Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2021 1:55 am
by Adiwan
I prefer that the published database should NOT contain the passwords (even when hashed) and the emails