All The Tropes:History

You see a conspicuous lack of nitty-gritty. > Add facts > "Our fork is of content from early June 2012. > Pages were collected between July 2 and July 9, 2012." > Done > Create article using facts ERROR. Human intervention required for article creation. > Print timeline Microsoft Printer Setup returned with exit code -237. > Say timeline "timeline" > Dammit why don't you work You don't know what words mean, do you. > List Timeline


 * "probably in 1978"
 * Author A. Bertram Chandler attends a match of the All Japan Women's Pro Wrestling league. If this hadn't happened, there would be no All The Tropes.


 * 10 March 1997
 * Joss Whedon brought us a little show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.


 * April 2004
 * The wiki that was to become TV Tropes got its first edit.


 * July 2004
 * Looney Toons reads a blog entry about TV Tropes and decides it might be a fun way to spend a slow afternoon.


 * 2004-2010
 * 60,000 tropers discover TV Tropes. TVT becomes a "must visit" site on the Web.


 * 26 October 2010
 * The Google Incident, aka The Situation. Google suddenly and without notice shuts off all advertising to TV Tropes, in response to a determination that TVT was not compliant with their AdSense guidelines.  TVT responds by implementing various low-impact methods such as requiring registration to see "non-compliant" pages (without ads).


 * April 2012
 * The Second Google Incident. Responding to another threat to TVT's advertising revenue due to Google being informed of "inappropriate" content, Fast Eddie responds with a previously-unseen alacrity.  Hundreds of pages addressing topics unsuitable for persons under the age of ten are culled and a censorship regime is imposed on the entire wiki.  The P5 is established and populated by a hand-picked team of bigots, prudes and Lickspittles, whose advice Fast Eddie ignores when it conflicts with his own prejudices.


 * 2 May 2012
 * Looney Toons posts an expression of disgust and disappointment about the censorship regime on his TVT user page, explaining why he cannot in good conscience remain a member of the wiki. Within 12 hours he is permanently banned from TVT and the page is blanked and locked.  In his wake other tropers also abandon TVT.


 * 2 to 9 July, 2012
 * Vorticity runs a crawler to get all of the content of the TV Tropes wiki in source form.


 * Some point between 8 July and 17 July 2012
 * TVT abruptly and without warning changes its licensing from the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.


 * Fall 2012 (?)
 * The Tropes Mirror Wiki is established at what was then Wikia and is now Fandom.com by GethN7.


 * August 2012 through October 2013
 * Vorticity starts a project with other programmers to write a custom wiki engine to host the forked data. Initial results are promising, but due to a number of circumstances -- the complexity of the task, the time constraints of the pro bono developers, some personal problems affecting same -- it ultimately goes nowhere, and after much discussion the decision is made to use MediaWiki instead.


 * Early November 2013
 * In response to increasingly annoying questions by wiki members about their copyrights, TVT administrator/moderator Fighteer inserts language into the "Welcome to TV Tropes" page explicitly and unilaterally seizing all copyrights from contributors without their consent, thinking in his adorable childish naïveté that this was both legal and an appropriate solution to uppity users who should know better than to question the wiki administration.


 * 1 November 2013
 * The first page of All The Tropes is imported to the Orain servers, Blaxploitation. The page was randomly selected by Perl's hash algorithm at some point in the conversion process.


 * 13 November 2013
 * The first version of The Forums opens.


 * 16 May 2014
 * All The Tropes gets its first media mention on Hacker News.


 * 19 May 2014
 * The Tropes Mirror Wiki is renamed to "All The Tropes Wiki".


 * 22 May 2014
 * All The Tropes' second version of The Forums is unveiled.


 * 9 June 2014
 * The first time we passed 200 edits in a single day to the Main namespace, thus filling up Recent Changes. (Excludes times where we were moving a bunch of pages, because it's easy to get 15 in one go there.)


 * 9 July 2014
 * Our first actual media mention, via a link from Salon.com about foreign language jokes in films.


 * 30 November 2014
 * A Kickstarter for the TV Tropes Revitalization Project is launched. TVT changes ownership, Fast Eddie is no longer in charge.


 * 30 December 2014
 * The TV Tropes Kickstarter succeeds, raising $105,187.


 * 3 January 2015
 * An Indiegogo page for the funding of Orain is set up.


 * 8 January 2015
 * The new design for TVT is unveiled.


 * 26 March 2015
 * The new owners of TVT actually consult a lawyer about the illegal rights seizure implemented by Fighteer, discover the legal hole they've been in for a year and a half, and reverse course on user copyrights so dramatically that they leave skidmarks.


 * 17 July 2015
 * An Indiegogo page for Miraheze, a new wiki farm, is set up.


 * 16 September 2015
 * Orain got compromised and its database completely wiped.


 * 25 September 2015
 * All The Tropes migrates to Miraheze and restored its database.


 * 26 December 2015
 * All The Tropes moves to its own domain.


 * 8 February 2016
 * The second new design for TVT is implemented.


 * 1 June 2016
 * The Forums are converted from LiquidThreads to Flow.


 * 19 July 2016
 * Vorticity changes his username to Labster.


 * 7 July 2017
 * The forum host of the Drunkard's Walk Discussion Board (where discussion about All The Tropes is hosted) changes from Yuku to Tapatalk.


 * 29 July 2017
 * All The Tropes celebrates its 1000th user to register with a few emoji: 🎉🎊🎆


 * 3 August 2017
 * Looney Tunes, with the help of Ankhani and Labster, begins moving the Drunkard's Walk Discussion Board from Tapatalk to his own website.


 * 15 September 2017
 * The moving of the Drunkard's Walk Discussion Board is finished.


 * 14 May 2018
 * All The Tropes's third version of The Forums is unveiled.


 * 26 June 2018
 * The third new design for TVT is unveiled.
 * The "Grammar and Wiki Editor Improvement Center" subforum is created.


 * Late August 2018
 * Our benevolent overlords at Miraheze implement a limited version of Matomo Analytics, allowing us for the first time to see a crude representation of inbound links to the wiki. The "Weirdest Inbound Link of the Day" page is re-established.


 * 16 October 2019
 * In response to increasingly toxic behavior on the parts of single-issue editors (and, unfortunately, a wiki admin), the trope Complete Monster is locked and subjected to an Example Sectionectomy, then converted to a Useful Note. The discussion was heated, to the point that Part 4 of The Troper's Code was ignored all around - not one of the wiki's finer moments. The admin in question leaves the wiki in a huff and, with the blessing of the other members of the admin staff, starts his own wiki.


 * 13 December 2020
 * In response to anonymous users flooding the wiki with low-quality edits over the previous several weeks, a policy change was proposed, debated and implemented on the Literary Criticism page acknowledging that anonymous editing of the wiki was a privilege and not a right, and could be disabled on a temporary or permanent basis if the situation warranted it.


 * 19 January 2020
 * After the anonymous users continued inserting low-quality edits despite repeated tempbans and repeated attempts by admins to communicate with them (and in one case despite extensive communications with admins), the new clause on the Literary Criticism page was invoked, and anonymous editing was suspended for a period of one month.


 * 23 February 2020
 * After no objections were voiced by any staff or users, the moratorium on anonymous editing was extended for another month. It will continue to be debated monthly until such time as the majority of participants in those debates favor re-opening the wiki to anonymous users.


 * 1 May 2020
 * After several more months of no objections to extending the moratorium on anonymous editing, the interval of review for the moratorium is increased to three months.


 * 31 August 2020
 * After well-reasoned discussion in the forums, anonymous editing is re-enabled.


 * 1 September 2020
 * After receiving as much spam in one day as the wiki received in the preceding month, all from anonymous sources, anonymous editing is re-disabled.


 * 11 September 2020
 * GethN7 takes an action that he felt was necessary to protect the wiki, locking a not-yet-existent page. Subsequent discussion on Looney Toons's forums between GethN7, Labster, Looney Toons, and Robkelk – the four bureaucrats of the All The Tropes Moderation Staff at the time the action was taken – revealed that this was a controversial decision that had a perceived conflict with the wiki's stance on academic freedom. GethN7 chooses to step down from the Moderation Staff. (He continues to serve as moderator on the Wikia fork of ATT.)


 * 4 October 2020
 * After discovering that the forum thread with the arguments for and against restricting anonymous editing had been vandalized while other forum threads were left alone, the moderation team accepts that even discussing the topic causes issues on the wiki, and decides to leave anonymous editing disabled indefinitely.


 * Early December 2020
 * All The Tropes becomes the target of a massive spam flood, with spammers registering accounts at a rate of one every minute or so at its worst, and spam pages being created every ten to fifteen minutes. As a result the staff activate the Moderation extension, forcing all contributions by unapproved users to be reviewed by staff before they can actually be added to the wiki.  Slowly, all existing contributors of quality material are added to the group of "approved" users.


 * Late January 2021
 * The spam flood finally abates, but the staff leaves the Moderation extension active.