Canterlot Avenue's 6th Anniversary

Hello, everypony! Today, Canterlot Avenue Development is proud to celebrate the site’s six year anniversary! From cons to dice, from hats to artificial intelligence, it’s been an exhilarating past 12 months full of change, new developments, and exciting plans upon which we’d like to reflect. As always, we wouldn’t have been able to stick around without you users. Whether you’re fresh or you’re one of the founding few, we can not thank you enough for being a part of our community. First and foremost, the administrative changes earlier in the year have allowed us in the development team to assume a greater leadership role alongside public relations and moderation. We, as well as fellow teams, have also adopted a new set of internal values focusing on creativity, adaptability, respect, engagement, and safety (CARES). This revamped staff structure has improved communication and collaboration across all teams and has fostered a more positive and productive staff culture. Moreover, these changes have laid the foundation for staff to help shape and guide the vision for Canterlot Avenue’s longevity and long term success. On the development side, we were able to roll out a plethora of updates at a rate never before seen in the site’s history. The year started with a huge overall site upgrade years in the making including, but not limited to, a revamped PM system, enhanced comment functionality with image and sticker support, and various stability improvements (yes, despite the several long hours of downtime that weekend). This was followed by more seamless character switching, an open preview for prospective users, more detailed Discord embed cards on various pages, a reorganization of the site’s main menu, and most popularly, a revamped dark mode theme. In an effort to promote writers, artists, and your amazing content, we enhanced our category tagging systems in various ways. For writers and readers, in addition to the “Lore” category for Friendship Letters, we added a direct link to all character lore pieces in the site’s main menu. For artists, art enthusiasts, and enjoyers of colorful equines, we added a more prominent display and directory of key art categories, such as artist original content, commission info, traditional art, etc. Plus, given the increased prominence of machine learning generated art on the internet, these tags assist to more easily identify art pieces as “AI Generated”. These changes lay the framework for further development to continue the site’s push towards fostering and hosting creativity. We’ll get to that in a bit. For roleplayers and lore writers, the most prominent addition to the site was new text editor in Friendship Letters and Forums. This way, writers don’t have to also be coders and remember a bunch of little formatting tags. For interactive roleplay, we added a dice roll bot thanks to the always amazing Snow Storm! To say we’re in a pretty good position to make roleplaying even easier next year is an understatement. The April Fool’s prank we pulled on everyone by breaking some pages was pretty amazing too. Thankfully, not even Discord could take us down! Special thanks to everyone on the PR team for helping out. Our public relations face made their second annual panel appearance at Harmonycon this year attracting new attention to the site. The reception there was great as well as the table at Everfree Northwest convention. We look forward to hanging out with our user base, and being more visibly active in the live audience. The next year on Canterlot Avenue will hopefully feature some more exciting new functionality that will solidify our spot as the #1 pony social and roleplaying site and position the site to be a premier hub for creativity for years to come. Planned projects include intuitive lore organization, expanded profile customization options, more concise art category tagging, and a dedicated advanced roleplaying interface (that might sound familiar to veteran MLP Forums users~). Special word from our Moderation team: Most importantly, Canterlot Avenue Development would like to thank everybody for sticking with us and with each other through thick and thin for 6 amazing years. We couldn’t have done all this without you. Next up is lucky number 7! Now where’s the cake? OH! And don't forget to comment down below to receive your 6th Anniversary Badge! Let us know what you thought was good this year~ (Lasts till the end of the year)