HRFWiki2:History

This is the history of the Homestar Runner Fanstuff Wiki 2.

The old wiki's closing
On the old Homestar Runner Wiki, there were both fanstuff and knowledge base articles. As the wiki grew, however, it became clear that the fanstuff needed its own space. And so, on November 24th, 2004, the original Homestar Runner Fanstuff Wiki was born. The old fanstuff wiki was very similar to this one, as users could create their own email shows, games, comics, and so on.

As the years passed, the quality in fanstuff began to decrease, mostly due to a lack of rules. Sysops decided to delete the wiki and start fresh, only preserving about 120 fanstuff pages. The wiki was removed from public view in August 2008, and finally reopened on January 31st, 2010, a year and a half later. This era was known as the purge, and due to its length, it left the wiki with less activity than before. The purge didn't seem to fix very much, as bad fanstuff kept appearing even after the purge.

Due to this decrease in quality, as well as a lack of interest in continued management, the wiki was closed permanently on June 1st, 2010 after a long discussion. While there were various locations to post Homestar Runner fan fiction, there were almost none specifically tailored to Homestar Runner.

The new wiki's opening
On April 7th, 2011 (almost a year after the original wiki's closing), (known at the time as Leilana Lappy) finally created a wiki on the wiki farm Referata. This wiki was known as... Celebi Mail! Wait, what? Mewcake originally created Celebi Mail for Pokémon fanstuff, but on June 27th, she decided to turn it into what it is today: the Homestar Runner Fanstuff Wiki 2! At the time, there were seven Celebi Mail transcripts, which were abandoned when she created Other Character Email Xing Town, the very first Homestar-related fanstuff on the wiki. The celebimail URL was changed to fanstuff2, but the old URL remained as a duplicate site, which meant all of the wiki's images were hosted on celebimail.referata.com.

Exactly three months after the wiki's creation, the first other user,, joined, followed by , , and a few months later. These were the first users on the wiki. Mewcake made them sysops on January 14th, 2012, when she announced on her userpage that she was leaving the wiki forever. (also known as Gfd) created the Wiki Stuff and most of the pages in it, as well as lots of useful templates. BubsHeadStand organized the fanstuff into portals, made the old logo, and created many important pages. They helped turn the wiki into what it is today.

The MediaWiki forum
On June 3rd, 2012, a user named created an account on this wiki. He was one of the most helpful users on the wiki; he created many important policy pages and templates, as well as a newer version of the userboxes and an IRC channel. On July 11th, 2012, he suggested the idea of a wiki forum. Gfd agreed, and a MediaWiki forum was created the same day. It was like a regular wiki, but using LiquidThreads, a specific talk page style that allowed users to communicate in a similar way to forum topics. The emoticons were templates&mdash; for example, typing would result in a smiley face emoticon. (For familiarity, the curvy brackets around emoticon names were kept for the second forum.) Gfd designed the smileys, while other users designed the character emoticons.

The ZetaBoards forum
The users later agreed that MediaWiki didn't make a good forum, so a new forum was created at ZetaBoards exactly a month after the old forum, on August 11th, 2012. The MediaWiki forum was deleted soon after. The forum became an integral part of the wiki community, just as active as the fanstuff wiki, if not more so.

The old forum's emoticons were imported to the ZetaBoards forum, and ZetaBoards's default blue smilies were deleted a few days later. On November 13th, 2012, Gfd suggested a few more smilies, and on the 23rd, BubsHeadStand suggested smaller, pixelated versions of the smilies. However, the forum's creator Tenerence wasn't active, and neither of them could figure out how to add emoticons. On March 24th, 2016, Gfd finally discovered how to add emoticons. He added BubsHeadStand's smaller smilies, as well as some new characters (Tiny-Handed Strong Bad, F-Sack, Nebulon, Cheatball, Atari Homestar, Vector Strong Bad, Onion Bubs, and Trogdor), and a Strong Bad emoticon in the style of a pixelated smiley. Inspired by the Strong Bad smiley, a new user,, created small pixelated versions of the existing character emoticons, and posted them on the forum on June 30th, 2016. On July 3rd, Gfd added most of them. SRMX12 named most of the files with two letters (hr, sb, etc.), so Gfd made the emoticons the same (, SB undefined , etc.) He also made some emoticons transparent and higher-quality.

Around the time of the forum's creation, on August 13th, 2012, BubsHeadStand asked if the forum could be used for more than just discussions, and suggested games and polls. So "Forum Games" and "Weekly Polls" sections of the forum were created. The three active sysops (Gfd, BubsHeadStand, and Tenerence) rotated weeks of the polls. Over time, all except Gfd became inactive, so Gfd renamed the section "Random Polls", and opened it up to everyone. Near the end of 2017, an "Off-Topic" section was created as well.

The ProBoards forum
On August 23rd, 2018, the forum was taken over by Tapatalk. Several features, such as the Shoutbox and forum theme, were deleted permanently without warning. That day, Gfd created a forum topic with a vote to stay at the old forum, or make a new one. The new forum won the vote, 3-0. After some discussion on the URL and layout, the users regretfully started anew at Proboards on September 10th. Some of the topics from the old forum were brought over to the new one.

They wanted to customize it, so Gfd added a Field background and banner, with Homestar Runner-stripe section headers, and a colorful logo. SRMX12 (who was now a sysop) suggested File Folder Shaped Vitamins for the folder icons, and also wanted to change the banner image, since two Fields seemed redundant. He thought of changing it to the Strongs' basement stripe, so Gfd did that.

The sysops also discussed emoticons. Instead of keeping every emoticon from the old forum, they wanted to keep it one consistent style, and only kept the small, pixelated ones. But there were some emoticons that SRMX12 hadn't done yet, he made a few more, with help from Gfd. Instead of keeping the old bracket-style emoticon names ( SB undefined ), Gfd decided to use a more traditional style of emoticon naming, using colons (:sb). SRMX12 also thought two letters were too restrictive for emoticon names, so they expanded them to at most four letters.

The return of Mewcake
It was a time of desolation, chaos, and uncertainty... Tenerence was supposed to become a sysop on July 14th, 2012, but the sysops realized that only bureaucrats can change user rights. Since the only bureaucrat was the creator of the wiki, Mewcake (who left), they had a little problem. Luckily, there was an account on Referata (the host for our wiki), created the same day as this wiki, under the name "Celebi", so Tenerence Love (known on Referata as LoopyMan56) contacted her on her talk page. Hey Celebi! What's up? Can you do a quick favor please? At The Homestar Runner Fanstuff Wiki 2 all of the sysops are only sysops. Can you please change their privileges so they are bureaucrats to? Thanks, LoopyMan56 (Tenerence Love) 14:38, July 18, 2012 (EDT)
 * Done. --Celebi 17:23, July 18, 2012 (EDT)
 * Thank you! LoopyMan56 17:27, July 18, 2012 (EDT)

Mewcake returned to the wiki that day to promote the sysops to bureaucrats and promote Tenerence to a sysop. And for a brief time, she decided to not leave forever. This didn't last long, because she stopped editing again on September 1st, 2012. She briefly returned on May 25th, 2014, to make a few edits and change her username to Mewcake, and she hasn't edited since then.

The proposed Wikia merge
On August 22nd, 2012, Tenerence proposed the idea of merging with another fanstuff wiki, hosted on Wikia. The content from the Wikia wiki would have been imported onto this wiki, making both more popular. Most of the users here agreed (except for this wiki's creator, Mewcake), so Tenerence asked, a user of the Wikia wiki, about the merge. When MrMenCentral didn't respond, BubsHeadStand decided to ask the founder of the Wikia wiki, Starteen*. After looking through the Wikia's recent changes, BubsHeadStand found out that it was extremely inactive, and MrMenCentral was the only active user. Due to the Wikia wiki's inactivity, the lack of response, and the amount of work it would take to complete a wiki merge, it was ultimately decided against on September 3rd, 2012.

The first design change
On September 7th, 2012, Tenerence Love decided that the wiki was looking old, and announced the idea of making the wiki look nicer. The sysops discussed suggestions on the forum. On September 8th, BubsHeadStand remade the logo to look more like the Homestar Runner Wiki. Tenerence thought the plain light blue background was boring, so they decided to use the same background as the original fanstuff wiki. Gfd suggested that it should be the same color as the current background at the time, which was light blue. So in the end, the background was a light blue field, created by Tenerence Love. It was changed on September 9th, two days after the suggestion.

Exceeding image space
On May 7th, 2015, the user (known as CoachErinStrongSad at the time) uploaded  to the wiki. Because the wiki only has 100 MB of disk space to host files, users couldn't upload anything. No new images could be used from then on. It was a dark time for the fanstuff wiki. Over the years, four new improvements and developments have been discovered: The wiki could have recieved 20 GB of file space by paying $20 per month, but no one was willing to do that. The problem was finally solved when the wiki moved to Miraheze, giving the users near-unlimited image space.
 * On September 5th, 2017, Gfd came up with the solution to post images on the forum and link to them here.
 * On November 1st, 2017, Gfd found out that the wiki settings can be changed so that the actual image shows up, instead of a link, when you type the URL. But these external images can't be resized or used in galleries or thumbnails.
 * On January 10th, 2017, Gfd created the thumb template, which creates a captioned thumbnail for external images. It doesn't work as well as a regular thumbnail, and there are some glitches.
 * On June 5th, 2017, Gfd discovered that images could be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and used here in galleries and thumbnails, since Wikimedia Commons allows usage of its images on all Wikimedia wikis.

The second design change
Over time, the old sysops became inactive and stopped editing, except for, who was the only sysop left. One day, Gfd found the fanstuff Pixstar Runner, and invited its creator,, to join the wiki on February 6th, 2016. He created an account the next day. SRMX12 was extremely helpful, so Gfd promoted him to a sysop on September 10th, 2016.

On April 6th, 2016, Gfd proposed the idea of two new sections for the main page&mdash; Weekly Featured Fanstuff and Homestar Runner News. He made a draft of the new main page in his personal Sandbox on June 10th, 2016, and later moved it to the. Each section was in a white box with a colored border, spanning across the entire page, similar to the current main page at the time (which had only one section).

On March 4th, 2017, Gfd discovered MediaWiki:Common.css. He wanted to make the most out of it, so he stylized the links to different websites (using icons, similar to the Homestar Runner Wiki) and added Strong Bad Email blockquotes. He also discovered he could change the wiki's background, which he didn't know how to before. He had the idea to make text boxes for all twelve main characters, and use them for the main page sections. So he made images of each character against a different color gradient, and finally tested out his idea on March 7th, only using the Bubs image at first. It was successful, so he uploaded the rest on April 4th (as well as Halloween and Decemberween versions). On April 10th, he posted his main page idea in the. SRMX12 liked it, and brought it up on the forum. The other users liked it as well. Lots of edits were made to the main page draft until it was finally ready to be used.

When Gfd discovered he could change the background, he suggested on the forum that the background could be changed from the old field to the current field. Most users were neutral at first, including Gfd, but as time passed, they warmed up to the idea, so Gfd made an image of the modern field, the same color as the previous background (light blue). Later, when SRMX12 posted about Gfd's new main page idea, he suggested the idea of a new logo. He thought of maybe replacing it with a fan art Homestar to fit the theme of fanstuff. Like the background, users couldn't decide whether to change the logo, but Gfd decided to propose one anyway, and the users liked it. At the time, the favicon was identical to homestarrunner.com's, so Gfd suggested changing it to either a less pixelized H*R logo or a miniature version of the new fanstuff wiki logo. Users liked the second design better. With all these suggestions for changes, Gfd thought it would be best to change them all on the same day. An "Under Construction" notice with Sticklyman on it (designed by SRMX12) was added to the main page to alert users to the discussion and upcoming changes. When everything was finished, the date August 1st, 2017, was decided to change everything.

When August 1st came, the logo, main page, background, and favicon were updated. Gfd demoted the old sysops the same day, since they hadn't edited in years.

Fanstuff of the Month
Back in the olden days (January 17th, 2012, to be exact), had an idea to make a Weekly Featured Fanstuff section on the Main Page, similar to the Homestar Runner Wiki's (now discontinued) featured articles. On January 26th, 2012, before anything was featured, Gfd changed his mind and decided not to make any featured fanstuff. When Tenerence Love joined the wiki, he volunteered to start it on June 30th, 2012. On July 27th, 2012, after four fanstuff pages were featured, Tenerence took a break, and it was discontinued for several years after he left the wiki.

Gfd later decided to return Weekly Featured Fanstuff in his first new main page suggestion in 2016. He later changed it to Fanstuff of the Month, so it wouldn't have to be updated as often. Like the main page, a Fanstuff of the Month selection page was created in the. Other Character Email Xing Town was nominated to be the first Fanstuff of the Month, because it was the first Homestar Runner fanstuff on the wiki. It was finally added to the main page on August 1st, 2017, the same day everything else was updated. Fanstuff of the Month is now actively updated every month and visible on the main page.

New Years' updates
On November 9th, 2017, Gfd brought up the Homestar Runner Updates main page box, and discussed how it was rarely updated and redundant. He suggested putting the Announcements box there instead, but the user suggested putting an embedded timeline for the @StrongBadActual and @homestarrunner Twitter accounts, and possibly @strongbadactual Instagram posts as well. Since @homestarrunner was unofficial, and Instagram posts couldn't be put in a Twitter timeline, they decided to only put @StrongBadActual Tweets there. On November 13th, Gfd made a draft in the Sandbox, and many users approved.

The previous day, Gfd discussed the idea of replacing the IRC channel with a Discord server (since the fanstuff Broternal Order Of Different Helmets made a Discord server on October 8th, 2017, and Gfd liked it). SRMX12 also considered the idea of linking to the Homestar Runner Wiki from the main page, and Gfd suggested adding an "External links" section to the sidebar. He also brought up an old idea from October 15th, 2016&mdash; a Homestar Runner Fanon Wiki, where users could make up facts about the Homestar Runner universe, based on his abandoned fanstuff Homestarpedia.

Most of these new suggestions were met with positive response, so on January 1st, 2018, Gfd implemented all of these changes. The Homestar Runner Updates box was replaced with Tweets, a Discord server and fanon wiki were created, and the sidebar was changed.

The hacking of Referata
Around April 27th, 2019, the wiki had started to experience some technical difficulties. This was nothing out of the ordinary. The wiki would often go down temporarily, then come back up a few hours later. But this one was a few days longer than usual. It finally came back up around May 2nd. Then, another warning sign. All of the logo files were deleted, including those on the HRFWiki2:Holiday Wiki Changes page. Gfd simply reuploaded the main wiki logo (since the file was still on his computer), but most of the holiday logos were lost forever. It wasn't a huge loss, so all continued as normal. That is, until around May 4th, when the wiki went down again &mdash; except this time, the text said it was hacked. Again, this lasted a couple days. The hacker seemed to be trying to get the attention of Referata, telling them to upgrade their version of MediaWiki so it'll become less easy to hack. According to MediaWiki developer and founder of Referata Yaron Koren, the hacker was exploiting a security bug in the SiteSettings extension, which has since been resolved.

Gfd started a forum thread on May 6th to discuss what the next course of action should be, and whether they would ever be able to access the wiki again, and what to do if they couldn't. It was decided that if the wiki returned to normal, a backup would be created on a new hosting site, in case they ever lost the wiki permanently. And if it didn't return to normal, they would find a new wiki and start fresh, like they had done with their forum just over half a year earlier. Either way, a new wiki would have to be created.

That's when a user named messaged Gfd on the forum after discovering that the other URL (celebimail) was still up and running. Gfd informed the users on the forum Shoutbox: Gfdgsgxgzgdrc: Okay, something super weird has been going on with the wiki, but the celebimail URL still works fine for now, so maybe use that instead. May 6, 2019 at 3:40pm SRMX12: Not even that is working for me. It looks like some jerk with nothing better to do has hacked Referata. First Tapatalk and now this. May 6, 2019 at 5:27pm Branderson: We should probably back up as much as possible on the Internet Archive if/when the site starts working again. In the meantime, we should probably start looking for alternatives to Referata. May 6, 2019 at 5:34pm Gfdgsgxgzgdrc: Well, celebimail's back up. May 6, 2019 at 8:35pm With the wiki back up, Gfd took this opportunity to export the entire contents of the wiki onto his computer, so they had a permanent backup. They discussed where to make the backup wiki, considering options such as MediaWiki (although they needed to find their own domain name) and ShoutWiki (although the content couldn't be imported). On May 7th, the user posted a message on the forum Shoutbox suggesting Miraheze as a potential site. Gfd looked into it and found that it was a worthy successor to Referata, with a nearly identical interface. Branderson: I think I've found a good candidate for a replacement for Referata, Miraheze. It's completely free, it's on the latest version, so we don't have to worry about the kind of hackers we're dealing with, and we'd be able to use the .XML file Gfd made. May 7, 2019 at 6:12pm Branderson: Here's the link. meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Miraheze May 7, 2019 at 6:12pm Gfdgsgxgzgdrc: Thanks! I requested a wiki so we can see if it's a worthy alternative. May 7, 2019 at 9:44pm They still weren't sure if this new wiki was going to be a permanent replacement or merely a backup for emergencies, so they decided to wait a little longer before creating it, to see whether the hacking would cease or not.

The results of the hacking varied drastically from hour to hour. One moment, the wiki was offline, and the next, the URL redirected the user to a different website, and the next, it forced you to download a file. Branderson: Now the wiki is beyond broken. All it does is download a .zip file. May 11, 2019 at 11:04am Gfdgsgxgzgdrc: Yep. We can wait and see if all this weird stuff ends, and if not, we can just move somewhere else. May 11, 2019 at 12:24pm This continued until things went more-or-less back to normal. Except there were two major problems. One, Gfd couldn't access the main page. The fanstuff2 URL redirected him somewhere else, while the celebimail URL made him download a file. Two, the logo couldn't be re-uploaded, because for unknown reasons, it was now included as part of the 100 MB of disk space (which had been surpassed in 2015). These two new problems, combined with older problems like the constant technical difficulties and the image restrictions, caused Gfd to consider moving to a new wiki on May 19th. Gfd still wasn't entirely sure this was the right decision &mdash; it was a drastic change, but on the other hand, Miraheze was much better than Referata. He eventually decided moving was the right choice, as did Branderson and SRMX12. SRMX12 suggested that they use the URL hrfwiki2 to remain consistent with the forum's URL, which was also hrfwiki2. After a 3-0 consensus, Operation HRFWiki3 officially began. The rest is history.

The dawn of Miraheze
On June 1st, Gfd requested the wiki at hrfwiki2.miraheze.org. It was created less than ten minutes later later by Miraheze administrator Reception123. Gfd once again exported the nearly 5 MB XML file onto his computer, and imported all 1,229 pages onto the Miraheze wiki. Unfortunately, page histories couldn't be imported due to legal reasons, but they can still be viewed on the Referata wiki. To inform users of the move, Gfd added to the top of the Referata site. A was added to the top of the Miraheze site.

Many of the active users registered for an account on the new wiki (like Gfd himself, RennuR ratsemoH, SRMX12, Branderson,, and ). However, most Referata users were inactive and didn't register on the new wiki, so their former userpages didn't technically belong to a specific existing user. For this reason, Gfd created the ReferataUser template and put it on each userpage to alert new users that the user is not on this wiki. Because interwiki links couldn't be added independently, he then contacted Miraheze to add the former interwiki links from Referata (such as hsr: and forum:). They were promptly added by interwiki administrator Hispano76. After that, Gfd cleaned up the wiki to make the move complete, including changing most Referata links to Miraheze links, updating outdated information, and uploading every file from the old wiki. Many tasks still aren't complete, and there are still some bugs that must be addressed.