This is official notice that Ponibooru is shutting down.

This has been a long time coming, and is not due to any sort of external pressure, nor is it due to financial problems. The reasons are personal: I (Eco/Archive/&c) have simply reached the point where I can see no way to run the site that I can live with, nor do I have any person whom I trust to run the site in a way I can endorse.

Here's how this is going to go down:

Effective immediately, no new uploads or comments will be processed; the site is going read-only. At some point in the next 24 hours, humans (as opposed to spambots) who were banned will be unbanned, as, in a read-only site, they can no longer do any damage.
Eight torrents have been provided:
Every safe image
Every questionable image
Every explicit image
Every unrated image
Every high-scoring safe image
Every high-scoring questionable image
Every high-scoring explicit image
Every high-scoring unrated image
All above-average images (the same ones chosen for the four "cream of the crop" torrents) are being bulk-imported to Derpibooru, whose admin has assured me that the site will be able to take the load should you be seeking a new image repository to frequent.
There is now a "Bulk Download" feature (the bugs in which we have been fixing over the past week). Whenever you do a search, there will be a button at the bottom of the left-hand menu to download a ZIP of the first 100 images that matched the search, along with a "credits" file of the same type as in the torrents. The URL the button goes to can be edited to produce subsequent 100-image "pages".
Two months from now, on August 17th, 2012, Ponibooru will go dark. Hotlinked images may continue to work indefinitely, but I make no guarantees.

This affects none of my other projects; the thread locator especially isn't going away any time soon.

Thank you for using Ponibooru. I am glad that I was able to provide something of value to the community for the year and a half since its founding, and I regret that I was not up to the task of keeping it going forever.