Season two is over! If you haven’t watched the finale yet, you are missing out. It was amazing.

And it was PonyChat’s biggest day yet, too. We reached a new record number of clients on the network: 4,607. We hit that right before the episode began.

Because of the way we currently collect statistics, this graph is somewhat approximate, which is why it does not reflect the new record.

The drop-off right when the episode began does not seem to have been a technical problem on our end, if you were wondering: our IRC servers were operating well within their load capacity. It may have been due to BronyState’s web site intermittently losing service when it was placed under the DDOS-like high load created by so many users accessing the site at once — BronyState users know it is normal to Ctrl-F5 when the show is about to start, and that sudden influx of simultaneous hits is tough on servers. Our tiny web chat embed sure was hit hard!

If you enjoy graphs, here is another one: This is a graph of the network throughput on fluttershy.ponychat.net for the last 24 hours. Times are UTC-5.

If you’re unsure how to read that graph, I’ll put it simply: that’s a lot of text about a kid’s show. And this only comprises one sixth of the total network traffic since our client load is spread across six servers.

So who were all these people? If you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of graphs and statistics. In the past, I’ve generated graphs of BronyState’s channel activity during episodes, lists of the most commonly referenced ponies in my IRC logs, and even videos of connection maps.

As soon as I recovered from the post-episode excitement, I went and checked how many unique IP addresses had visited the IRC network and web site, today. Over 13,000! And that’s not including the hits resulting from the pre-episode streams the night before. On a normal week, we normally serve about 10,000 unique IPs from Sunday to Saturday, and we blew past that in a single day. This definitely called for some more investigation.

42% of the users we had were in the USA. The UK, Russia, Canada, and Germany filled the next slots, from 5 to 7% of our total hits.

Here are the top ten countries (by unique IP):

To see the full country graph, click here (note: it is a fairly large PNG). For SVG format, click here. For the raw data, click here.

As I said before, have created maps of user connections in the last. Equestria Daily once featured a map I created as a proof-of-concept for the YouTube video I eventually created. That map was so popular that I thought this would be a great opportunity to make another.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The points on this map are very approximate and are nowhere near exact locations of users. Map markers are not guaranteed to be accurate, but they will generally be in the correct city or state. Even then, because of the portability of IP addresses, that may not even be correct. Therefore, you cannot use this map to locate any user’s homes or even neighborhoods.

Also, this map is generated by your computer on load. There are thousands of unique map markers on here, so very old computers may run slowly or freeze while generating or viewing the map. Because of that, I have not embedded the map, but you may view it by clicking the link below.

Click here to open the map.

It’s April Fool’s Day!

April 1st is the day when the Internet becomes a little less usable. Web sites change their layouts, things get renamed, jokes are added here and there — everything acts a little different, and it is often pretty hilarious.

This was our first April Fool’s Day on PonyChat. Playing April 1st pranks on on-line communities is not a new thing for me, but I wanted to do something unique this time. IRC pranks are tough: some networks will broadcast announcements that they are merging with a rival network, sending users into a political panic; others will go so far as to grant channel operator power to all users in key channels, resulting in a hopeless battle for dominance.

We decided to do something a little different. Ever since my first April Fool’s Day as an IRC operator, I’ve wanted to cleverly modify user messages. And what better way to do that than replace random words with “pony” on a pony-related IRC network?

<aji> ;define forest
<Terminus-Bot> aji: forest (noun): large pony of land covered with trees

<ChanServ> [#BronyState] Welcome to the #bronystate main room, the number of messages you can send may be restricted to limit spam. Feel pony to pony unrestricted in one of the pony chats.

<brando753> It hasnt affected me I pony think,,,

<aji> "Kabaka: pony do you really pony to ask me?" <-- is pony what it says for anybody else??

The code required to pull this off was written two weeks in advance. It was roughly based on nenolod's message interception module for Charybdis which is able to snag PRIVMSGs as they are sent. I modified it, adding code to randomly replace words.

Since this is a fairly invasive prank, it was not left on for the entire duration of April 1st (in fact, it was still not yet April in some locations when it was removed).

The word replacement is simple: The server looks at each word in every message. If the word is 4 letters long, there is a 1 in 25 chance it will be replaced with "pony" before moving on. Each IRC server decides whether or not to replace words, so users connected to different servers may get different messages.

Unfortunately, a few users did need for private messages to be unmodified, something we probably should have foreseen. After receiving a few requests for this, I patched the modification to only tamper with channel messages.

After mentioning my abuse of nenolod's code for this purpose, he committed a better alternative that would have made this way easier to write. If you're looking to accomplish something similar, I recommend looking at that.

I hope everyone enjoyed the joke — I know I did! If not, don't worry: this was a one-time thing. We will likely do another prank next year, but it will be completely different.

I am Kabaka, one of the server administrators that keeps the PonyChat IRC Network running. One of my jobs is to help maintain our web chat interfaces, including the Iris interface. Recently, you may have noticed a long Iris outage. This was the result of a small oversight in one of my server management tools.

The host for the Iris server, Linode, informed me via email that the server that hosts our account needs to be taken off-line for maintenance, so our account was being moved to another server. In preparation for that outage, I ran a tool which automatically removes servers from the global and regional IRC pools. The Iris server happens to be on Rainbow Dash (rainbowdash.ponychat.net), which is the server that Linode plans to take off-line.

Until I had discovered the error in my tool, the de-pooling process simply removed all references to the target server from our DNS records. In other words, anything that pointed at the server (except the exact server name) was deleted. As part of that process, iris.ponychat.net was automatically removed. This seemed like a great idea when I wrote it.

I have repaired my tool — it will now correctly remove servers from only the irc.* host names.

In any event, I am very sorry about this downtime. Because the problem has been repaired, it should not be repeated. I have also created additional server monitoring tools which should almost immediately alert staff to any similar problems.

And because of the upcoming maintenance on Rainbow Dash, we have already (prior to this slip-up) begun working on bringing up a second Iris server so that, baring something incredibly unlikely, we always have at least one Iris node available (and my de-pooling tool’s action would have been correct).

Thank you for bearing with us through this downtime. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me or any of the other staff.

Had a record breaking turnout thanks to the guys running the show over at bronystate.net. Many piled in for the live streaming of the new Luna episode, the network didn’t even break a sweat. Thanks to everypony who participated!

Our terms of service is now live and can be viewed by clicking “Network Rules” from the navigation. You can also view our full up-to-date server information from the “Server Information” link. Finally, staff page should be up within the day. Hope everypony had a great OCD Twilight Sparkle day.

Here’s a warm welcome to the new PonyChat webpage from your resident pony webmaster. The obvious thing you’ll notice is that a lot of the navigation links don’t function at the moment. They will gradually crop up over time when I get around to finishing them and some empty spaces around the page will be used. I’ve also noted some slight compatibility issues with older browsers, I’ll look into that. Now I’m just a cog in this machine, but there’s an awesome team that made all this possible so kudos to everypony. For now, below is a quick summary of the hostnames you can connect to.

irc.ponychat.net
rainbowdash.ponychat.net
fluttershy.ponychat.net
applejack.ponychat.net
twilightsparkle.ponychat.net
rarity.ponychat.net

Ports: 6666-6670, 7000, 7001
SSL Ports: 6600, 6697, 6698

You can connect to the network using our Iris and LightIRC web clients respectively. You can also download a standalone client such as mIRC or xchat and connect using the hostnames listed above

Bear with us while everything gets situated. Servers and services are currently all online and functioning 100%. We are now in the final stages of ensuring everything is stable. A full website is in development as well and you can expect to see that in the future.