The board's freezing and eventual deletion, the chaos of two halves trying desperately to rejoin one another again, scouring through multiple alt-chans, particularly endchan, until finally settling on here as our new bedrock.
A moderation, development, and administrative team that actively participate in the boards, alongside regular users. Although they're new, take longer than I'd like deliberating over site changes, and certainly have had teething issues, particularly with the rogue moderator in the early months of /mlpol/'s existence, seriously who the fuck even uses NNTP for discussion anymore, let alone NNTPchan, they've risen to the occasion with gusto. They all have experienced 4/mlp/ and 4/pol/'s moderation in all it's abhorrence, and to date, have shown themselves to be fully invested in not repeating those same mistakes.
The site's code is open-source, and in one of the most lassiez-fare software licenses out there, allowing me to scrape through the config.php file for all those flashy esoteric formatting options. Big thanks to Pineapple for starting it up, wherever you are now, and big thanks to Pupper for keeping it ship-shape, and being active on /qa/ about it.
We've been growing slowly but steadily in user count, certainly at least in lurkers, and have shown ourselves to take in fellow outcasts of our home boards, with /sg/ and Anonfilly being prime examples; /sg/ continues to be a font of information, bereft of the shills and fags that infest it's 4/pol/ counterpart, and Anonfilly has gone on to become one of the fastest boards on the site, absorbing most of it's 4/mlp/ userbase, and occasionally stepping out of their quaint abode to immerse themselves in what made /mlpol/ such a hit, back on April 1st.
For an older, more web 2.0 form of Internet discussion, we have done very well for ourselves. And as 4chan, 8ch, and even YouTube and other arenas exsanguinate users, we've shown ourselves to be apt at catching these individuals, so carelessly and spitefully thrown aside by those who don't know the first thing about their importance. Their loss, our gain.
But all this got me thinking: why do /pol/ and /mlp/ go so well, to begin with?
After all, it seems like such a stretch, to believe for one second that the unironic National Socialists, Anarcho-Capitalists, and ethnonationalists could form such a healthy symbiotic relationship with My Little Pony, light-hearted memelords, and literal horsefuckers.
But we've seen it work. I saw it work myself, back on April 1st, 2017: the cancers of both halves driven off by the good of both, coming together in a powerful, almost incomprehensible display of memetic chemotherapy.
But as the old adage goes, you must first know yourself, before you know your enemies.
Therefore, I would like to take you through our history, to the extent that I am capable of: what made our constituent halves good, what caused their stagnation and downfalls, and ultimately, why the fusion of the two, intended as a spiteful prank, backfired in an almost poetic fashion.
If you're still with me, then join me, as this >FUCKING LEAF from /mlp/ breaks things down, as an early anniversary present.
And thanks to our flawed but excellent mods and admins, for all that they do.
Seriously though, set up a fucking Mumble server for the staff, instead of Discord, IRC and all that other CIA shit you absolute faggots