Timeline / TV Tropes

A timeline of TV Tropes history.

See also the changelog, a log of technical changes.

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Timeline:

2004-2010: The Early Days and the Pre-Google Incident era

• April 2004: Out of the threads of Buffistas.org, the wiki dedicated to plot devices named TV Tropes is created following a derail thread about Angel and Firefly writer Tim Minear. The first trope made is Gilligan Cut. The first version◊ was called Television Tropes, Idioms, and Devices, before being finalized and published at Television Tropes Wiki at http://tvwiki.sytes.net.
• April 1, 2005: The tvtropes.org domain is registered by Gus, one of the original founding members of TV Tropes, prior to his death.
• 2005: Gus passes away.^note Note that his troper page was created on June 10th, 2010 as a memorial for him, as Gus was active during the time when troper pages didn't exist yet.
• May 27, 2005: The Home Page is created with the name of The Catalogue (a redirect which still exists).
• March 2007: Avatar and the Airbending Fellowship of Vampire Slayers is created.
• June 14, 2007: The earliest possible view history date. Pages may have been made before this (see Gilligan Cut), but page metadata was only recorded from then onwards. The full list of trope and work pages created before then can be seen at Time Immemorial Index, whose oldest archive also dates to June 14th.
• September 29-30, 2007: The oldest known forum thread available to this day is created. It is about Naruto. The TV Tropes forums were also founded within this period.
• October 9, 2007: Edit date of the earliest version of the old phpBB forums (or as they were known, "TV Tropes fora") which can be accessed through the Wayback Machine. ^note https://web.archive.org/web/20071009080450/https://tvtropes.org/phpbb3/index.php
• January 12, 2008: The Great Crash happens and a ton of stuff is lost. Great Crash Contributors work tirelessly to fix the issue.
• January 13, 2008: Useful Notes is created.
• February 6, 2008: Fetish Fuel is created.
• March 25, 2008: According to the Wayback Machine, the earliest date the Role Playing section of the forums can be attested to, as the thread containing the first iteration of the RP Forum rules has a singular post with that date, but the thread itself has since been lost.
• September 21, 2008: Edit date of the first iteration of the TV Tropes forums which can be viewed in the Wayback Machine ^note https://web.archive.org/web/20080921232351/https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/topics.php
• Late 2009: Troper accounts start having their date of creation recorded by the site. A side effect of that is that accounts that were made prior will have their date of creation listed as January 1, 2001 on their personal Profile pages.
• February 12, 2009: The On-Topic Conversations forum is created.
• February 14, 2009: Date of the earliest crowner accessible through the crowner index. It is about renaming the (former) trope Jonas Quinn (now Suspiciously Similar Substitute).
• March 2009: The Trope Repair Shop forum (then called Rename a Trope) is created in response to a crowner by Fast Eddie.
• April 19, 2009: Reviews are implemented, where they remain to this day.
• June 7, 2009: Trivia is created.
• December 14, 2009: The Image Pickin' forum is created, presumably in response to this thread.
• April 10, 2010: In the forums, the Visual Arts section of Media is created.
• May 15, 2010: The Edit Banned thread is created, and both suspended and non-suspended members can post in it. This version of the Edit Banned thread would last until December 21, 2011, when a thread reset would be performed.
• June 2010: Massive site overhaul. Article history was now stored in a dedicated file, discussions were converted from text-based format to threaded discussions, and old Ask the Tropers queries were moved to the new query.php system.
• October 8, 2010: Following a forum discussion, YMMV is turned into an index (now located at YMMV.Home Page) and serves as a replacement for Subjective Tropes (also known as Subjectives).
• October 25, 2010: The Complete Monster cleanup thread is established following complaints about the trope being misused, starting first by deciding once and for all what being a Complete Monster must entail for a villain to count. From this point forward, new Complete Monster entries can only be decided on by the thread.

2010-2012: The Google Incident and its aftermath

• October 26, 2010: The Google Incident happens. A forum topic launched about it. Ad revenue is cut off for a while. Eventually, pages considered obscene are put under a wall which only people who answer "yes" to can see.
  • October 28, 2010: Anonymous editing is permanently disabled sitewide.
  • October 31, 2010: Not Safe For Google wall implemented. Mature content is separated by screen and no longer hosts Google ads.
  • November 9, 2010: The Google Incident ends. Ads are restored.
• October 30, 2010: 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.
• November 2010: A concern about very long pages and server crashes is raised, leading to the creation of Overly Long Pages and many article splits to smaller articles, along with the implementation of other compression methods.
• December 2010: A new policy concerning sockpuppets is implemented - namely, a user can have up to 10 sockpuppets. A sockpuppet checker was also created, along with the account deletion function.
• December 2, 2010: The oldest known Ask the Tropers query available to this day is created. It is about launching a page.
• January 7-11, 2011: The It Just Bugs Me forum is shut down.
• January 13, 2011: The Live Blogginations forum is shut down and replaced with the current day liveblog system.
• February 18, 2011: The Ptitle Replacement System is created, basically replacing the Punctuated Title system, also known as the Ptitle system, which was intended to replace titles with punctuation.
• March 15, 2011: The Old Folks Home board is created in the Just For Fun section to serve as a place for both casual and grown-up discussions in a non-zany atmosphere.
• April 19, 2011: The Overdosed Tropes index is launched, suggesting that some works use too many tropes, with some pages having wick counts even in the tens of thousands.
• June 2011: A discussion on Stock Phrases is started, eventually leading to the decision to allow No New Stock Phrases.
• August 12, 2011: Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel are both declared Persona Non Grata from TV Tropes. The former is cleaned and locked, while the latter is left as a Definition-Only Page.
• September 15, 2011: A database purge is enacted to free up memory.
• November 2011: No New Stock Phrases is implemented.
• December 21, 2011: The current iteration Edit Banned thread is launched by Fast Eddie after the previous Edit Banned thread is reset due to length and posting permission issues. The current thread is only post accessible to suspended users and mods, and gives the former a chance to appeal their suspensions.
• December 22, 2011: The forum Herald feature^note a feature that sends an automatic introductory personal message to a user when a user first posts on a subforum is implemented.

2012-2014: The Second Google Incident and aftermath

• April 2012: The Second Google Incident happens.
• April 14, 2012: The 5P are established in response to the Second Google Incident.
• July 1, 2012: The account deletion tool is disabled due to misuse.
• July 4, 2012: Films of the 2000s is split into Films of the 2000s – Franchises, Films of 2000–2004, Films of 2005–2009, with it being the first media-of-the-decade page to be split.
• November 2012: The "TV Tropes The TV Show" forum is archived and removed from view.
• March 24, 2013: TV Tropes comes under a DDoS attack. Service is restored a few hours later.^note https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13638970560A97087400
• April 2013: Following the DDoS attack, account creation now requires a verified email address, fully replacing the old system that only required a username and password to create an account.
• May 2013: Troper page editing by other users is disabled. The only users who can edit a given Troper's page are the moderators and the Troper in question themselves. ^note While some of the vandalism was considered "friendly", some of it was truly malicious. The Troper Wall namespace was set up to remedy this.

2014-2019: New Ownership

• November 2014: Fast Eddie retires as administrator and is considered to have left TV Tropes. Drew Schoentrup and Chris Richmond become the new administrators and launch The TV Tropes Revitalization Project, a Kickstarter campaign.
• December 2014: The Kickstarter finishes with $105,186 raised.
• February 2016: Launch of Homophobia Index and the Administrivia page for TV Tropes 2.0.
• February 8, 2016: TV Tropes receives a large update, and page creation in the Main/ namespace is locked down to all tropers save for moderators. Any future pages created in that namespace would need to go through Trope Launch Pad or TLP (Known as You Know That Thing Where? or YKTTW at the time.)
• May 2016: You know, that thing where... is renamed to Trope Launch Pad.
• November 6, 2016: All threads in the defunct "Tech Wishlist & Bug Reports" (replaced by Query Wishlist and Query Bugs) subforum have been closed by this day, making it fully archived. Interestingly, the URL after "topic=" consists only of zeroes, suggesting that the subforum that was closed was the first one established.
• November 2017: Decision against "Queerbaiting" being made the subject of its own trope page, in favor of the term being made a redirect for the Homophobia Index.
• April 2018: 400,000 articles reached.
• April 20, 2018: Estonian Media is the 50th national media index created, as part of an odd boom of such pages during the period.
• May 5, 2018: Due to constant misuse, similarly to Complete Monster, a cleanup thread for determining examples of Magnificent Bastard is created with similar rules.
• June 2018: A major site update codenamed 1.8 goes live.
• July 2018: A fix is made to rid the site of a double posting glitch. It has the side effect in particularly large threads of displacing some posts from their original URLs.
• April 2019: A new Video Examples feature is added. At first, only admins can add videos. A few days later, the feature becomes open to everyone, though videos still have to go through moderator approval.
• July 2019: 450,000 articles reached.
• November 7, 2019: Video Games of the 2010s is split into Video Games of 2010–2014 and Video Games of 2015–2019, with it being the fourth media-of-the-decade and first video-games-of-the-decade page to be split.^note Unlike the films page, the video games page was heavily compressed beforehand, with a format change and a split of some entries to Visual Novels of the 2010s (the franchise split that the films page has done was decided to be unneeded) as an attempt to make the page survive for a few more years, but alas, due to lots of new examples it got split barely over two months after compression.
• November 23, 2019: Wick's S-Scale is changed into the P-Scale to take more modern standards into account. The scale has since been rebalanced a few more times, but it should last a few more years.
• December 2019: Big Bad reaches 50,000 wicks, becoming the first trope to do so.

2020+: The COVID-19 Days and Current State

• February 1, 2020: This very page cataloguing TV Tropes history is created, so we've come full circle.
• June 16, 2020: YMMV/ reaches 50,000 pages, becoming the first namespace to do so after the deflation of Main/.
• July 7, 2020: TV Tropes becomes unavailable for 16 hours, due to a bug in the server's hard drives causing six of them (out of eight total) to simultaneously and catastrophically fail, which was the closest thing to a repeat of The Great Crash the site had ever seen since 2008. After restoring access, the wiki remained uneditable and edit histories were missing for several hours further. Due to the crash happening just before the wiki's scheduled backups, approximately one day of contributions were lost, as well as any edit history following July 4th. The admins worked fast and fixed almost everything by the next day.
• August 6, 2020: 500,000 articles reached, leading to the first milestone thread of this type.
• August 10, 2020: A moderator resigns. Despite staff previously establishing that hiring new full-fledged mods isn't a priority, discussion reignites regarding adding an engineer position to be filled by tropers who would specialize in managing specific parts of the site^note such as certain parts of the forums or the Trope Launch Pad, rather than having access to every mod tool, and there are a few willing candidates. Around the same time, another mod who was inactive for quite a while returns to help with the workload.
• August 19-20, 2020: In the aftermath of the July 7 crash, TV Tropes is moved to an upgraded server setup with greater redundancy and better protection against drive failure, requiring the wiki to go into read-only mode overnight.
• September 23, 2020: "The Mark All as Read" button is removed from the forums to prevent server troubles cause an update to more than 50,000 threads to note the last post read by the troper if the button was pressed even once. Investigation into methods of optimizing the function begin with an eye toward its restoration.
• October 30, 2020: Fanfics of the 2010s is split into Fanfics of 2010–2014 and Fanfics of 2015–2019, with it being the fifth media-of-the-decade and first fanfics-of-the-decade page to be split.^note This required a month of work at a sandbox to re-sort the page into yearly folders, with each folder based on the year the fic or its first chapter was first published in.
• November 27, 2020: Some small fixes were pushed live, including one to the much maligned bug that rendered links to articles or other websites on discussion pages unusable due to inserting slashes.
• December 31, 2020: The Trope Report newsletter is relaunched.
• January 21, 2021: A new moderator is recruited.
• February 3, 2021: Recap/ overthrows YMMV/ as the most populated namespace.
• March 1, 2021: The Complete Monster cleanup thread reaches 10,000 pages.
• March 11, 2021: The Believer, an arts and culture magazine, publishes an article about the history of the website, including interviews with Fast Eddie and a site moderator.
• April 6, 2021: TV Tropes migrates its CDN from Cloudflare to AWS' Cloudfront CDN. Some issues reported during the move include some problems with hosted image quality, and some people being temporarily unable to post in the forums, Ask the Tropers and affiliates, and Trope Launch Pad afterwards due to IP handling issues.
• April 22, 2021: Due to a bug potentially related to the CDN migrations, certain images are replaced with wrong ones that'd otherwise share the name, with the most humorous instance being the change from Ultron to The Boss Baby on Monster.Marvel Animation. It has been suggested that people should use more unique methods for filenames, by including things like the day and the month (so "pike224.jpg" rather than "pike.JPG"), or other unique ways, to prevent such errors from happening in the future.
• May 2021: The Trope Repair Shop and Image Pickin' have the number of threads that can be active at the same time capped at 50 threads and 60 threads, respectively.
• June 1-2, 2021: Two fixes are made live that fix both the cut reason bug and ghost locks.
• June 10, 2021: The history section for Trope Launch Pad drafts is updated to be more in line with History pages for articles on the site proper, along with an overhaul for the TLP history of individual tropers.
• June 18, 2021: The forum new posts, posts by user, wiki edit list by user, and discussion page by user lists are updated with pagination, allowing users to find posts up to September 15, 2011, the time of the last database purge.
• June 20, 2021: 550,000 articles reached.
• July 7, 2021: A fix is pushed to deal with a glitch that prevents the links in issue notifer/helper PMs from working properly, while also updating them to link directly to the problem edit in question.
• July 30, 2021: Add Post pages on the forum are updated to include a button for uploading images, streamlining the upload process.
• September 22, 2021: The ability to permanently delete a troper account is reinstated.
• September 23, 2021: Recap/ reaches 60,000 pages, becoming the first namespace to do so after the deflation of Main/.
• November 4, 2021: Big Bad reaches 60,000 wicks, becoming the first trope to do so.
• November 11, 2021: Crowners are revamped to fix the Bibble Bobble bug and more closely aesthetically match the rest of the site.
• November 29, 2021: Four new moderators are recruited.
• February 2, 2022: An upgrade is pushed to Trope Launch Pad history that allows the ability to see a user's past activity by category.
• February 23, 2022: The profile dropdown menu is revamped to include a Queries page for queries made in Ask the Tropers and related pages and a direct link to the forum thread following page without having to click on Forums. An option is also added to the Queries and Message pages to allow a troper to be e-mailed if someone responds to their message.
• March 9, 2022: Aardvark Trunks is launched, surpassing Abandoned Area as the first trope in alphabetical order (outside of numbers, which are not alphabetized automatically).
• April 1, 2022: The revived Trope Report surpasses the old run in terms of producing more issues.
• April 11, 2022: The Isolated Pages list (Showing pages that are deemed "advertisement unfriendly" by Google AdSense) is made visible to logged-in users, and a Project is established to check for false positives and the like.
• May 3, 2022: A rebooted version of Trope-tan is introduced.
• May 19, 2022: 600,000 articles reached.
• July 22, 2022: Due to lack of 5P members, it was decided after a discussion to replace 5P reviews with a thread system, allowing anyone to evaluate The Content Policy-flagged works.
• August 9, 2022: The Wiki/ namespace has been deprecated, as it's not distinct from Website/ and because of its low page count, many pages of which didn't meet quality standards as well.
• August 10, 2022: The Light Novel namespace has been deprecated following concerns of Light Novels not being distinct enough from Literature as a whole to warrant its own namespace. Nine days later, a follow up crowner decided that any Light Novel example that is covered by both the original source material and the adaptations can go in either the Anime & Manga folder or the Literature folder, while adaptation-exclusive examples go into their respective medium folders (Literature for Light Novels).
• September 9, 2022: An update is pushed so that making a Content Violation report from the wiki will now automatically start a new (locked) thread in the Content Violation Discussions subforum that must be unlocked via the moderation. Conversely, the opposite happens in Image Pickin', where new threads no longer auto-lock upon updating.
• October 7, 2022: After a long history of problems within the Magnificent Bastard and Complete Monster threads, a new thread is created to combat these issues while the old threads are locked.
• November 1, 2022: An update is pushed to fix a glitch on the wiki that prevents paragraphs from spacing properly without the use of forced line breaks.
• December 9, 2022: New Magnificent Bastard and Complete Monster cleanup threads are created.
• December 17, 2022: A new moderator is recruited.
• January 10, 2023: A code of conduct is written for the mod team. The full text was on the sticky post for the Wiki and Forum Policy thread but has since been moved to the Know the Staff page.
• January 16, 2023: New Magnificent Bastard and Complete Monster proposal threads are created.
• January 20, 2023: Recap/ reaches 70,000 pages, becoming the first namespace to do so after the deflation of Main/.
• February 9, 2023: 100,000 pages in the work page type reached.
• March 2023: A new programmer, Kory Richmond, joins the dev team.
• April 13, 2023: An update is pushed that makes it so non-mods can no longer launch drafts that don't have 5 net hats (more hats than bombs), and prevents edit banned tropers from launching TLP drafts.
• April 14, 2023: An update is pushed that makes all links to disambiguation pages green instead of the usual blue.
• April 28, 2023: An update is pushed that allows a user's troper page to be accessed from the dropdown menu, improving accessibility.
• June 27, 2023: Three new moderators are recruited.
• September 8, 2023: A moderator resigns.
• September 12, 2023: A new moderator is recruited, along with two engineers for the newly made engineer position.
• September 16, 2023: A moderator resigns.
• November 20, 2023: Three new engineers are recruited.
• December 5–6, 2023: An update is pushed that upgrades the internal server database to UTF-8. The site is turned read-only for more than 11 hours while the server is updated.
• December 14, 2023: The first Common Edit Reasons are added to Edit Page on the wiki.
• December 21, 2023: An update is pushed that paginates the History pages of articles.
• December 24, 2023: Following a discussion and subsequent vote regarding the scope of Useful Notes pages, the Platform and Media Notes namespaces are created for media platforms and information about them respectively.
• January 8, 2024: Three new engineers are recruited.
• March 14-15, 2024: The new Visual Editor goes live.
• March 19, 2024: The Wishlist section of the site is renamed to Tech Wishlist (as it was named in the first place before leaving the forums) to make it more clear that it's for tech requests and curb misuse for requests that belong on other sections of the site.
• March 20, 2024: You Know That Show is renamed to Media Finder to clarify that section's purpose.
• March 21, 2024: Due to concerns regarding the clarity and/or usefulness of some of the predefined thread reasons for the Trope Repair Shop and Image Pickin', the lists of thread reasons for both are adjusted to remove ones that were determined to be unclear or unnecessary, while new ones are added to better account for the needs of thread creators.
• April 15, 2024: The new forum search goes live.

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