August 2011.

Thanks.

Added that and the creation of the Visual Arts and Old Folks' boards.

Anyone remember when Analysis was added? Or the separation of YMMV?

Hey, does anyone know the exact date the wiki was started?

We should throw it a birthday party.

YMMV happened sometime between the end of August and The Google Incident. Probably in September or the beginning of October.

Ask the Fast One. He's one of the founders (and currently the only one active on the site), so if anyone here knows, it would be him.

@Lock

Holy crap, that's a lot.

Eddie says he doesn't remember either.

... Wait, maybe the host servers have the date when the site was first registered in their records?

I don't know if that would work either, due to the Great Purge and the subsequent server migration.

Then we shall just have to choose a date.

Suggestions? What's an important enough debate to celebrate the wiki's birthday? The date of our restoration after the great purge? The date that we started the forums?

FYI, I coincidentally came across the separation of YMMV. September 2010.

Wow, that's not long after I joined.

Huh, the old logo is still in use on obscure corners of the site. (If Eddie reads this: Please don't remove it, it's nostalgic. )

When was the logo changed?

Let's make this a song, like the Brawl In The Family song.

"This is the History of TV Tropes, site full of nerds, outcasts and just plain dopes"

edited 10th Oct '12 10:17:38 AM by Smasher

Thanks, Lu.

Don't forget the creeps!

@Lu: Every time I see stuff like that, it makes me realize just how much longer I've actually used this site than I like to think. I know I was here long before that, I think. I'm not sure. The mods all have a tool that lets them see how old an account is, correct?

EDIT: I'm curious, has anyone in recent times ever tried logging in via the old "foamy" account? I wonder if that'd bring up a certain message.

edited 12th Oct '12 12:02:51 PM by 0dd1

Foamy?

For what it's worth, the domain name "tvtropes.org" was registered by Gus on 01-Apr-2005 12:36:06 UTC.

TV Tropes was originally an April Fools prank that got away from it's perpetrators.

0dd1: Yes, we do. Sort of. Your account, for example is 1113 days old. The "sort of" is there because there is a date beyond which the account-creation-date-finder widget can't count.

All accounts that were made before that date get numbers in the 4000+ days range, which is in the 11+ years range, which is longer than the site has been in existence. For instance, my account shows an age of 4302 days. Which would be 11.78 years. Which would mean that I made the account sometime around January of 2001. Which is not accurate, because 1) see above for date the domain was first registered, and B) I know for a fact when I first registered: August 22 of 2008. My first post is on page 9 of the New Troper's Introduction thread. And I registered that same day.

That Human: for a long time there was a default/publicly-known password for things like the image uploader and a few other widgets that tropers needed to use. It was "foamy". I think that it was also the default password for new account creation; your account password was "foamy" until you changed it yourself.

edited 12th Oct '12 12:40:03 PM by Madrugada

Seriously? We were born on April Fools?

That's the day the domain was registered. It may or may not be the day the site actually went up. Probably isn't.

The big april fools day stuff we do every year is how the mods celebrate our birthday

Anyone think there would be merit in making a dedicating article in Administrivia for a summarized history of TV Tropes since its inception?

Yup, and others agree (including more people who posted in the ATT query but not the forum thread). You could try bumping that thread to see if some of the really old hands would be willing to sketch a full history.

This is a timeline from a page or so back in the thread.

Parable: When I first joined there were still just few enough trope pages for Sailor Nothing to be on every other one.

Zyxzy: Ah, those halcyon days...

The Timeline Of TV Tropes

2004

April 1 - The domain name "tvtropes.org" was registered by Gus on 01-Apr-2005 12:36:06 UTC. TV Tropes is born after being conceived in a derail thread about Angel and Firefly writer Tim Minear. The first trope recorded is Gilligan Cut.

2005

2006

2007

March - Avatar And The Airbending Fellowship Of Vampire Slayers is established. Not entirely sure what this was but it was everywhere in the wiki's early days.

September 30 - TV Tropes Forums first founded offsite using phpbb. "This is to help deal with the devolution we were getting in places like Wild Mass Guessing and It Just Bugs Me." Go figure.

2008

January 12 - The Great Crash. Catastrophic hardware failure strikes the Wiki, resetting all articles back to mid-October of '07. There was great lamenting and scrambling by editors to save articles from Google's and Yahoo's caches.

2010

April 10 - Visual Arts board is born for all the artists and art appreciators.

September - Tropes that are purely subjective opinions without base in the work itself are declared to be YMMV Tropes and are put on a separate page from a work's main page.

October 26 - The Google Incident. Google disabled ad serving, cutting off ad revenue after discovering TV Tropes hosts "mature and adult content", in violation of their agreement. Wiki is suddenly in serious financial crisis. Panic ensues.

October 28 - The Situation page is created as a clearinghouse for official information. Fast Eddie is keeping the mods up-to-date, the mods are trying to keep everyone else up to date. Panicking begins to die down.

October 30 The Page Blank Incident. Due to bugs in new code implemented to separate mature pages from the rest of the site, pages blanked whenever they were edited. The problem was resolved quickly, but still managed to cause panic among uninformed tropers.

October 31 - Not Safe For Google wall implemented. Mature content is separated by screen and no longer hosts Google ads.

November 1 - Appeal submitted to Google. Fingernail-chewing commences in earnest.

November 9 - The Google Incident is resolved. Ads are restored.

2011

January 11 - The Nuking of IJBM. The IJBM board is destroyed. Sort of. The sub-forum goes all Rasputin on us and refuses to go down without a fight, defying attempts to lock its threads, delete its content, and even survives temporarily in "Ghost Threads" in some weird limbo outside the main forum. After much hair ripping by the staff and the endless amusement of the general Tropers, IJBM is destroyed.

March 15 - Old Folks' Home board is born for both casual and grown-up discussions in a non-zany atmosphere.

August - After an attempted overhaul that proved fruitless, Troper Tales are deleted.

2012

April 5 - The Second Google Incident. Google pulls ads again due to complaints against certain pages on site.

April 20 - Content Violation Discussions board founded to deal with judging works that may or may not be allowed to have pages on the wiki.

More as I remember it.

Edited by Parable on May 31st 2022 at 1:57:39 AM

Wow, what a dig.

We already have Timeline.TV Tropes. Though if anything isn't there it can be added.

Edited by Amonimus on May 31st 2022 at 12:14:49 PM