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.


 * October 26, 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 to 9 July, 2012
 * Vorticity runs a crawler to get all of the content of the TV Tropes wiki in source form.


 * 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 are opened.


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


 * 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.