Site History

All about the history of The Cave of Dragonflies.

How It Started

Way back in 2001 when I was becoming an avid Pokémon fan at the age of eleven (I got my Yellow version, my first Pokémon game, for Christmas 2000), I eventually ventured online to find Pokémon websites. First I just tried typing "pokemon.com" into the address bar and got the official site, back when it was a whole lot less corporate and even contained cheats like the Missingno. trick; later, I discovered search engines, looked up Pokémon and found a lot of the sorts of poor amateur fansites made by kids and teens that the early internet was full of. These sites tended to be full of blatantly fake cheats, gratuitous chatspeak and an abundance of advertisements; none of them kept me there for more than one visit. (The only one that ever really engraved itself in my memory was one with a section called "CLICK HERE IF U HATE PIKACHU" that contained badly edited official art of Pikachu being bloodily killed by various other Pokémon like Beedrill and Arbok, which was pretty disturbing to my child self.)

Then, one day, I came across a site called Mew's Hangout, at the time located at http://www.mypokekitty.homestead.com. It was another amateur fansite by a kid - but this one was love at first sight. It had all sorts of fun content, fake Pokémon, no advertisements; I wasted hours exploring all the pages and loving every minute of it. And the owner lived in Japan, which clearly made her cool and knowledgeable. This was the site that made me start dreaming of one day having my own Pokémon website. I started mentally making up sections to put on my website in my free time, word for word - but I can't say at the time I really expected I would actually make that website. There were many things I kind of wanted to do sometime, like the several books I wanted to write, without ever really doing anything about it; initially, it was just another one of those.

However, then, sometime in late 2001, my dad started teaching me HTML. He had taught my brother a little bit long before; I don't quite remember whether I asked him to teach me for the purpose of finally becoming able to make my Pokémon site or if he just started teaching me too for the heck of it. I made a little practice website in Icelandic about cats while at the same time secretly making that Pokémon site I dreamed of. The prototype of the front page, which never saw the light of the internet, looked something like this (a recreation from memory), which should show you approximately how much I knew at the time. The "Games" link took you to a page in the same format where you could pick "The Red and Blue versions", "The Yellow version" or "The Gold and Silver versions"; after I'd gotten Crystal for Christmas 2001 I remember adding "The Crystal version", too. Once you clicked one of those links you would get a list with, for example, "Crystal version cheats", "Crystal version truth" and "Crystal version walkthrough". The "Truth" thing, debunking common misconceptions and rumours, was already one of this site's most important principles; those were actually the first sections I decided to make, inspired by all those fake cheats on those early bad Pokémon websites that I visited.

In the end, my plans for this languished before I ever got around to writing the content, possibly partly because I vaguely realized that my clunky text-only navigation tree wasn't quite of the same caliber as something like Mew's Hangout at this point. Eventually, however, I decided I still wanted to do this, asked my dad how to make colors and a sidebar menu, and created my first table layout. I made some pages, all with different eye-hurting background colors (I had no idea how to include the menu on every page so I didn't), and finally the site was launched on November 2nd 2002, at the URL http://www.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree. As I had previously begun to use the alias "Butterfree" in the Mew's Hangout guestbook, I extremely originally titled it Butterfree's Pokémon Site.

I excitedly told everybody in the aforementioned guestbook about my new site (it had turned into more of a chatroom than a guestbook by that point; I'm still in contact with some of the people I got to know there), and they all loved it and became my first visitors. Then I continued adding sections to the site, updating my silly fanfic, etc., and to make a long story short, I'm still doing it to this day.

Noteworthy Changes, Additions and Dates

All the important stuff that's happened since then, organized by topic.

Sitely Features and Historical Events

Late January 2003: The site did not have a splash page when it started. That was added at this point, because everyone else had one and I thought that meant I must make one too, and featured a badly drawn animation of Charizard and Butterfree (who had before this not been actual site mascots, though they were my favorite Pokémon) talking about not letting humans into their secret hideout (the site). This remained the basic backstory behind the splashes.

February/March/April 2003: I got my first affiliate, which was my favorite website, Mew's Hangout. Naturally, I was ecstatic about it.

Late May 2003: I realized that "Butterfree's Pokémon Site" was a silly and unoriginal name for a website, so I decided I wanted to change it to something better. Because the splash had already established the site as being some sort of a place in which the mascot Charizard and Butterfree lived, I figured the new name could keep to that theme, and because I've had a strange thing for caves as fictional living spaces since I was little, calling it a cave of some sort was a natural next step in that train of thought. I also liked various bug and dragon Pokémon (note the noncapitalization: I mean Pokémon that look like bugs and dragons, not Bug and Dragon-type ones necessarily), Charizard and Butterfree among them, and dragonflies sort of embody a combination of both, so I settled on The Cave of Dragonflies, which I thought had a nice ring to it.

June 4th 2003: I created the first forums. I used Conforums because the Pokemonicons forums, which I'm fairly sure were the only forums I went to at the time, used Conforums. (Later I strongly regretted that decision, because Conforums was one of the most featureless free hosted forums out there - I just didn't know of any other ones.)

September 25th 2003: I revived a feature of the original site called the Poll of the Week, except that this time I called it the Almighty Random Poll and started changing it, well, randomly when I felt like it, instead of every week. The Almighty Random Poll is still around, though it doesn't change very often.

Late October 2003: I stopped simply deleting the older updates from the front page as I made more, finally giving me an archive of old updates for reference purposes. (This made this page a lot easier to do research for, among other things.)

December 17th 2003: The styleswitcher was created for the first time, allowing the user a choice between "Cave Style" (black and red), "Green Style", "Dark Blue Style" and "Red Style".

Late January 2004: I discovered to my horror that for some reason I couldn't upload updates to the London server. I continued updating the local copy of the site anyway, but for all visitors could tell, the site appeared to be suddenly dead.

March 7th 2004: After somebody had made a thread on my forums proclaiming the death of the main site, at which point I decided to think realistically and figured that everybody would come to that conclusion, I finally went ahead and bought the domain name that I had been toying with the idea of getting - www.dragonflycave.com. (www.caveofdragonflies.com was too long and annoying, and www.tcod.com was already taken, aside from not being an "official" abbreviation of the site's name yet.) This domain was pointed to my dad's computer, where the local, updated copy of the site was stored, finally allowing people access to it again. Unfortunately, this domain name has since caused a very irritating phenomenon of people thinking the site is called "Dragonflycave". Just to clear that up, the site is called The Cave of Dragonflies and not Dragonflycave, Dragonfly Cave, Dragonflies Cave, Dragonfly's Cave or anything in that direction. I picked the domain because "dragonflycave" implies a cave dragonflies are involved with, just as "The Cave of Dragonflies" does, but it is not the actual name of the site.

June 21st 2004: The Invisionfree forums were opened, having been created two days prior. The old forums were still kept up, but registrations were disabled; however, Conforums has since deleted all its old inactive forums, so the oldest forums are no longer around.

January 1st 2005: I wrote the first New Year's Thanks, which have become a yearly tradition since.

June 2nd 2006: In January I made a decision to buy myself forum software to install on my own server so I could modify it for additional features and such. I went for vBulletin, my favorite forum software, bought it and got my dad to help me install PHP and MySQL on the London server so I could get the forums up. After that I had to install (and make) a heap of hacks to get it just how I wanted it, create all the styles and make images for them all, a long and tedious process that took a few months, but in June the vBulletin forums were finally opened. Curiously, I only noticed after this that every incarnation of the forums has opened in June.

June 21st 2006: I made the splash page so that if you had a cookied style you would be redirected straight to the front page after this had been suggested to me. This made the site a great deal less annoying.

May 27th 2008: I added the update commenting feature, utilizing the guestbook script I'd made to make it possible to comment specifically on an update, with the added bonus that all recent update comments can be viewed in the guestbook itself. Prior to this, there had been no update commenting, though I had often asked for opinions on things to be posted in the guestbook.

June 16th 2008: The forums and guestbook suddenly stopped working, and my attempts to fix it led to all the data being permanently deleted, including forum styles, user accounts and so on. The forums were brought back on June 24th, but the forum styles have still not all been remade as of writing this. Note how yet again, a fresh start with the forums happens in June. I think I should try to make an effort to make at least twice as many backups in June than any other month.

December 16th 2012: I removed the splash page after realizing I couldn't even properly keep up the sentimental tradition I was still keeping it for (namely drawing something cute featuring the site mascots for hit milestones), since I was not in a position where I could easily draw things; at the time, I didn't have easy access to a scanner or a proper mouse. I may bring it back in some non-splash-page form later.

June 12th 2014: I created the Cave of Dragonflies Twitter account, which tweets when I make updates on the site.

November 2nd 2017: I created a Facebook page for the site, also for announcing updates where visitors can follow them.

March 7th 2020: I upgraded the forums to XenForo when a server-side PHP upgrade had caused the vBulletin forums to stop working properly, finally breaking the June curse.

November 2nd 2024: I added the ability to comment on most individual pages of the site, making it much easier for visitors to post questions or comments.

November 16th 2024: I created a Bluesky account for the site, another social media account announcing updates.

November 2nd 2025: I added four suggested pages to the bottom of most every page on the site after realizing, manually choosing suggestions for each existing page to be something that might be interesting to someone who liked this one. The idea was to make it easier for visitors who'd stumbled onto one page to see what else the site had to offer, without having to go through the entire very large menu.

Technology

November 2nd 2002: The site was made public for the first time at http://www.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree, hosted on IIS on my dad's personal computer. I worked on the site with a network drive directly connected to the live instance of the site, so any time I changed anything, it would be live immediately; things could break in between me saving one file and another.

August 27th 2003: I learned how to use SSI to include the menu on every page and give all the pages the same background and so on instead of having them all be different.

September 23rd 2003: I started using ASP.NET, for the funniest possible reason: to allow visitors to choose their background music, which I had previously just obnoxiously included whether you liked it or not.

September 25th 2003: The site was moved to a dedicated server (which I generally referred to as "the London server") that my dad was using for his company's website - which also meant that now I could play around with the site files on his computer as I wanted without anything changing on the live site. This server was also faster and capable of serving a larger number of requests at a time, which meant the site stopped going down every time too many people direct linked my sprites on the Pokémasters forums (where I had a sprite request thread).

December 29th 2003: I got an e-mail from a Firebird (now Firefox) user, informing me that the layout looked messed up in it. That was when I first realized that the site looking fine in Internet Explorer did not necessarily mean that it would look good in other browsers. I downloaded Firebird, Opera and Netscape and fixed some CSS errors and box model misusages to make the site finally cross-browser compatible after having been operated for over a year.

March 7th 2004: After a couple of months of being unable to update the London server for some technical reason I can't recall, I bought a domain name, www.dragonflycave.com, and pointed it back to a live copy of the site hosted on my dad's computer. This was originally intended as a temporary solution, but ultimately, even after the London server (which the www.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree URL was still pointed to) was back up, it stayed this way for a while - the more immediately-updated live copy at www.dragonflycave.com and a less frequently updated, more robust copy at www.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree.

March 2nd 2005: After converting the site menus into lists instead of a series of divs, I finally validated my HTML and CSS. They have remained so to this day, barring mistakes on individual pages.

June 18th 2005: I changed the hit counter counting the front page hits from the free Sparklit counter I'd been using to a homemade one.

January 15th 2006: I made a guestbook on my own server instead of the free guestbooks I'd had before, which were universally terrible, had ads, didn't properly filter spam and so on.

January 20th 2006: My dad's computer broke down and we pointed the www.dragonflycave.com domain back to the London server, which was back in working order.

January 22nd 2006: I made my own poll script, which meant the site no longer used any remotely hosted services save the forums (which would soon be moved to the server as well).

December 28th 2006: I started logging hit milestones to a file, making it much easier to keep track of when such and such milestone was reached.

January 4th 2007: I made custom 404 error pages for the first time.

February 22nd 2010: After a long period of wrestling with the London server and its poor performance in trying to handle both the site and forums, I realized that the simplest solution to all my troubles would be to move the forums to another server but keep the site where it was. Kat of Route 50 offered to be the new host for the forums, which were moved to the new server on this day and remained there until I was forced to relocate them in 2020. The same day, I also finished revalidating all my HTML.

March 16th 2011: While trying to update the site with the fifth-generation Zodiac, I accidentally broke everything. While I managed to get most of the site fixed in a frantic panic afterwards, this was a bit of a duct-tape solution, slower than the previous way things worked, and necessitated temporarily changing the Featured Section on the menu to being static rather than randomized (as it had been before).

February 11th 2012: I finally made the featured section work like it was supposed to again.

January 26th 2016: I started the process of converting the site from what was now a lumbering mutant legacy ASP.NET monster to a Flask application written in Python. This necessitated porting all of the actual code used on the site, converting the hundreds of .aspx files to Jinja2 templates (most of them, thankfully, were completely static and could be converted with an automated script), and rigging up a system to make sure every old URL would still work and redirect to its new location, as while I was at it I also organized the site's URL structure better.

August 8th 2016: I finally finished the Python port of the site that I'd started in January and officially transferred the domain to the new server.

November 11th, 2016: Thanks to Let's Encrypt, The Cave of Dragonflies finally became available over encrypted HTTPS connections. For most of the internet's lifetime, obtaining SSL certificates to facilitate secure connections had been a complicated and expensive affair, requiring you to pay certificate authorities out the nose and submit manually-reviewed forms with information about your 'business'; Let's Encrypt singlehandedly changed all that by making the process free and verification of domain ownership automatic, allowing any website to use secure connections, and changed the internet in a remarkably short time.

July 17th, 2018: The site began to redirect all traffic to HTTPS.

March 5th 2020: All posts and profiles on the forums were suddenly blanked out. When I investigated, it turned out to be because Kat's shared hosting had upgraded everyone to PHP 7.2, which vBulletin 3.8 did not support. As it was extremely out-of-date software anyway, and I had already moved the site itself to a new server of my own, I decided to shell out for newer forum software, XenForo, and move the forums back to my own server, where they've remained since.

May 25th 2024: I added an RSS feed for the site, allowing users to subscribe to site updates with any RSS feed reader.

November 20th 2025: The site was updated to run on Python 3 instead of 2.7, which it'd been using since the original Python migration in 2016.

December 9th 2025: I made it so that all URLs on the site end in either a filename or a slash - a more standard way of doing URLs than what I'd been doing before, where a page like the FAQ was at just www.dragonflycave.com/faq. All the previous URLs were made to redirect to their new locations, and in the process, nearly a decade after the Python migration that had originally created the site's current URL structure, I also updated all the internal links to other pages on the site to use the proper new URLs rather than the legacy .aspx URLs.

Noteworthy Content

April 2003: I found Mewtwofan's Pokémon Page and was introduced to Anti-Anti-Pokémon, which I got quite obsessive about for a couple of years afterwards. I had an extremely lengthy page of counters to Anti-Anti-Pokémon arguments by the time I decided this was all kind of extreme and immature. Thankfully the current AAP sections are more sensible.

July 17th 2003: I put up a gallery of my sprites. This is noteworthy because at this time, Pokémon spriting was pretty much only just starting; there was one massively popular request thread for recolors at the Pokémasters forums, and the idea that you could take the game's sprites and change their colors was blowing everyone's mind. I hijacked a couple of requests in that thread and later opened a thread of my own (after somebody else had thought up splicing two different Pokémon using sprites, which was also just mind-boggling at the time), where I took requests for what we today call recolors, splices, revamps (original idea taken from Pokémon Forever's Pokémon Recolor Project) and edits. This was where most of the sprites that ended up in my sprite gallery were requested. After this, a lot of people told me they got into spriting because of my gallery, although of course by now it's only a drop in the ocean of Pokémon spriting.

September 2003: I made the original Marquee of Doom, which at the time was completely original, believe it or not. At the time it was called "Do Not Click Here", which was not completely original.

November 2nd 2003: I decided I wanted to make something big for the site's first birthday, so I manually made a huge database of Pokémon information that then became a rather poor Pokédex. I finished it on time despite some problems (such as accidentally deleting all the data for the Hoenn Pokémon after finishing it and having to retype all the information), but I have since realized that I was wasting my time; there have always been much better Pokédexes out there that I couldn't possibly have begun to compete with, and eventually the Pokédex just got taken down. Don't make my mistake.

September 24th 2004: Sometime in 2004 - I'm not sure when exactly - I realized fleetingly that there were exactly 365 non-legendary Pokémon as of the third generation; I had counted the legendary Pokémon (there were 21), and then I happened to subtract that from 386 to find that convenient number that seemed to be just screaming to have one Pokémon assigned to each day of the year. This eventually became the original Zodiac, which has been a distinguishing feature of the site ever since in the form of the unique date displayed at the top of every page.

November 14th 2004: I put up my first and only walkthrough, the FR/LG one, which I had been working on ever since getting the game. After doing it, I swore never to make a walkthrough again. I have kept that promise.

February 18th 2005: I put up the Fun Facts section, whose facts have been copy-pasted all over the place ever since.

February 2006: I made the first Irregular Crossword, then called the "Monthly Crossword". I'm not very good at keeping things scheduled.

September 28th 2006: On the release date of Diamond and Pearl in Japan, I put up a news-based minipage called The Cave of Speculative Theories. I updated it reasonably diligently at first, but after missing almost the entirety of the fifth-generation coverage out of laziness, I finally put it out of its misery on February 14th 2011. News reporting was never my area and it was mostly a chore to maintain, without adding much of interest to the general discussion.

December 24th 2006: I made the Clue Game, the next ludicrously difficult game on the site.

November 2nd 2007: A new Zodiac including the fourth-generation Pokémon was put up on the site's fifth birthday.

December 2007: I added a tool to the Zodiac that would generate images showing the Zodiac Pokémon for one's birthday, with code provided to show them off elsewhere. I hoped it'd become similarly popular as my What Pokémon Are You? quiz, but it never did quite take off in that way.

October 13th 2008: Magikarp: the Gathering was put up (on the Day of Magikarp and Gyarados, no less) as the latest impossibly difficult game on the site.

August 17th 2009: I put up the first of my Pokémon movie reviews, a series of reviews aiming to critically analyze the Pokémon movies in depth.

February 24th 2011: I took my first steps into analyzing the assembly code of the Pokémon games by completing a_magical_me's analysis of the R/B/Y capture algorithm. At the time this was completely new information, not found anywhere else on the internet to my knowledge. Much later, in 2014, the article was posted to Hacker News and picked up by physical magazine Hacker Monthly (sadly now discontinued), even inspiring a Pokémon-themed cover for the issue.

March 18th 2011: The fifth-generation Zodiac was put up.

June 8th 2012: After having some adventures with trying to shark an encounter with a level 52 Blissey and get Crystal to divide by zero, I put up an analysis of the second-generation capture formula. Again, it contained completely new information that had never before seen the light of the internet: while the formula had been around on some sites in a vague form, the implications had never been analyzed, and some bits of information had been missing altogether.

January 26th 2014: The Zodiac was updated for the sixth generation.

April 27th 2014: I put up the R/B/Y stat modification page, explaining the gloriously buggy way that stat modifiers work in the first-generation games. This, too, was the first such complete analysis of R/B/Y's stat modification behaviour, to the best of my knowledge.

August 16th 2014: I put up the Favorite Pokémon Picker, a tool to let the user find their favorite Pokémon through a process of elimination. I sort of just threw it up because people had been asking me about it (I'd originally linked it from my Tumblr in September 2013 when I created it on a whim without putting it up on the site proper), but from there it blew up, becoming one of the site's most-linked pages.

January 26th 2017: The seventh-generation Zodiac was put up.

April 1st 2020: I put up the full version of Sutoraiku High, my in-browser visual novel Scyther dating sim, after a year earlier I had created a demo for an April Fools' Day joke.

December 9th 2020: I put up a new in-depth game mechanics analysis page, on the R/B/Y random number generator, following new reporting on capture RNG bias in the games.

April 1st 2022: I put up Sutoraiku Legends, a Pokémon Legends: Arceus-themed sequel to Sutoraiku High. It never got as popular as its predecessor, but I had fun with it.

April 1st 2024: I put up an article analyzing the R/S/E roulette minigame, whose inner workings are fascinating. I had been working on this article on and off for more than a year as its scope grew massively and it ended up including multiple calculators and a full-on simulation of the roulette physics.

September 16th 2024: I put up an essay about the glitched Jolteon I had on my Yellow version back in 2001-2003, after I'd managed over two decades later to work out precisely how he was glitched and how its odd effects worked.

March 11th 2025: I put up a long-form essay about the Mew trick, the glitch best known for allowing you to catch Mew in Red, Blue and Yellow, exploring its history and inner workings while musing on the context of its wide spread in 2003, driven by two GameFAQs users named TheScythe and Jolt135. Both TheScythe and Jolt135 ended up finding, reading and commenting on the article, which really made my week.

Layouts

Butterfree's Pokémon Site (November 2002-May 2003)

In its first online incarnation, the site looked like this: bright blue background, black text with links that were not supposed to be distinguishable from normal text until hovered over, huge yellow Comic Sans title... bad, in other words. It also had horrid browser support, because at the time I didn't have the faintest idea that something other than Internet Explorer that could also access the same internet existed. (I might also note that for the heck of it, I later made an Oldie style which will make the current site look almost exactly like the site looked back then in all of its eye-hurting, unreadable glory, though with better browser support.)

The Cave of Dragonflies Original (May 2003-December 2003)

Soon after the title change to The Cave of Dragonflies, the site looked like [WARNING: contains background music that can't be turned off!] this, although those updates have been stuck on there from a later archived copy of the front page since the saved version didn't have any updates. With the name change, I decided that to fit with the "Cave" part, the site would have to have a black background, so it was black with a red Comic Sans title and light yellow links. The browser support was still poor, I had these little "New Update" icons for the menu that I no longer use, and as seen from the warning above, I'd gotten the brilliant idea of including background music.

Styleswitcher Div Layout (November 2003-January 2004)

Shortly before I first made the styleswitcher, I remade the layout using divs instead of tables, since somebody had told me at some point that you weren't supposed to use tables for layouts. It was lucky I did, because without that, I couldn't have made the styleswitcher. Cave Style then looked like this, black with ugly gray menus and finally a smaller update font (which had admittedly come about in October), but still looking quite similar to the previous version. This version is from before I made it properly cross-browser compatible, though, so a lot of it is still kind of messed up in browsers today. I also unfortunately have no versions of the other styles saved, but they were Red Style, Green Style, Dark Blue Style and (a bit later) Snow Style.

HTML Guide Layout (January 2004-February 2004)

In January 2004 I started making an HTML guide and made a sample layout for it. To my frustration, I realized that this layout looked better than the layout I was using for the site itself. So I actually switched, leaving Cave Style to look like this. The bad thing was that it was a table layout, so in a way it was a step backwards after I had been using divs for a while before.

Second Styleswitcher Layout (February 2004-February 2005)

Somebody e-mailed me to tell me I should really, really use divs to lay out my page, and I made this layout, though this copy is from a bit later, after I had changed the colors of Cave Style - originally it had the same colors as it always did, but this general layout.

List Menu Layout (February 2005-October 2005)

After learning a bit more about conventions in layout-making, I made the menu into a list in the HTML, instead of the old series of way too many unnecessary divs, and used CSS to make the links in the menu change background color when hovering over them, additionally making the links reach all the way from one edge to the other (the link used to end with the linked word before that). The site afterwards looked like this in Cave Style - not very different in looks from before, but I changed the font in the menu links from Comic Sans to Verdana, did the aforementioned hover background color trick and randomly changed how the Older Updates link was presented.

The New Layout (October 2005-April 2015)

In September 2005, I decided my site had ugly, messy HTML and I should redo it. Therefore, I began a conversion of all active pages of the site on October fifth, which unfortunately was not finished until February 8th 2006. This cleaned up the HTML a lot, but since the HTML structure changed, it meant the old styles no longer worked with the new pages, and I started over with a new set - initially I think it was Minimal Dewgong style, Axe-Murderer style, Scyther Slash style, Shiny Umbreon style and Shiny Ninetales style, with more added as I went along throughout 2006, 2007 and 2008.

The Partial Modernization (April 2015-November 2022)

For April Fools' Day 2015, I made a new style for the first time in several years - for a gag satirizing modern corporate-owned websites. The landscape of the internet had drastically changed since I'd last made styles; in particular, the rise of mobile phone browsing had happened in the interim, and my styles from 2006-2008 did not account for mobile browsing whatsoever, instead being rendered on phones with the awkwardish accommodations phones had for showing older websites designed for desktop. The new style, sterile as it was, was genuinely designed for both desktop and mobile, and because this was a legitimate improvement upon my actual styles, I adapted it slightly into Modern style, the site's first mobile-compatible style, and made that the default so that mobile users could have the best available experience. Subsequently, I created a new, mobile-friendly version of the popular Voice of the Forest style for the site's fifteenth anniversary in 2017, the mobile-friendly three-column Butterfree style a year later for the sixteenth anniversary, and a revamped mobile-friendly version of Roar of Time style for the nineteenth anniversary in 2021. But there was still an awkward gap between these new, modernized mobile-friendly styles and the old late 2000s styles; I didn't want to remove the old styles, which worked fine and were still pretty nostalgic for me and many other visitors, but using them was a decidedly worse experience than the new ones.

The Full Modernization (November 2022-present)

For the site's twentieth anniversary on November 2nd 2022, I decided to revamp all the old styles, making them mobile-friendly, increasing the tiny font sizes (every time I looked at the old styles the font was smaller than I remembered) and adding more spacing and padding where appropriate, while fully retaining the style's original aesthetic. This finally ensured every style was usable again and kept all those good old nostalgic vibes to them - one of my stated goals was for visitors who used to frequent the site in 2007 to be able to switch to the old styles and think, "Just like I remember it," even though the style had been tweaked.

Hit Milestones

The hit counter counts front page hits, unlike most other sorts of hit counters, which either count all pageviews or "unique visits", where the same visitor browsing around during a single session only counts as one visit. Thus, it's not very comparable to any other sort of website hit counter, only to itself for the very particular thing it measures, as something of a curiosity.

1. 50,000 front page hits: August 28th 2003
2. 100,000 front page hits: January 28th 2004
3. 150,000 front page hits: May 28th 2004
4. 200,000 front page hits: August 2004
5. 300,000 front page hits: December 10th 2004
6. 400,000 front page hits: April 8th 2005
7. 500,000 front page hits: August 12th 2005
8. 600,000 front page hits: February 19th 2006
9. 700,000 front page hits: July 1st 2006
10. 800,000 front page hits: September 28th 2006
11. 900,000 front page hits: December 28th 2006
12. 1,000,000 front page hits: February 15th 2007
13. 1,500,000 front page hits: January 31st 2008
14. 2,000,000 front page hits: October 9th 2008
15. 2,500,000 front page hits: April 1st 2009
16. 3,000,000 front page hits: March 13th 2010
17. 3,500,000 front page hits: April 7th 2010*
18. 4,000,000 front page hits: February 21st 2011
19. 4,500,000 front page hits: December 11th 2012
20. 5,000,000 front page hits: May 28th 2014
21. 5,500,000 front page hits: December 24th 2014
22. 6,000,000 front page hits: May 24th 2015
23. 6,500,000 front page hits: March 14th 2016
24. 7,000,000 front page hits: April 1st 2017
25. 7,500,000 front page hits: March 8th 2018
26. 8,000,000 front page hits: May 16th 2019
27. 8,500,000 front page hits: August 10th 2020
28. 9,000,000 front page hits: June 6th 2021
29. 9,500,000 front page hits: July 7th 2022
30. 10,000,000 front page hits: June 14th 2023

*The 3,500,000 milestone is an obvious outlier here; it was blatantly the result of an 'attack' on the hit counter, with an obviously fake spike to nearly 200,000 hits a day with overnight breaks (presumably created with an automated program, unless someone was dedicated enough to sit there manually hammering the refresh button multiple times a second for most of their waking hours). It started late on the fourth of April and lasted until the evening of April 7th when I noted in my guestbook that whoever was doing this wouldn't get a new splash or other milestone celebration out of it because this obviously didn't mean anything. There have been a couple of other, much more extreme automated attacks on the hit counter in the years since, but since I log exactly when every milestone of 10,000 hits was reached, once I become aware of the attack I have simply reset the counter to whatever it was at before the attack; I didn't do this after that first one, though, so the note is warranted.

Page last modified February 19 2026 at 21:47 UTC

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My own messages will be signed as Butterfree, with the Admin label below my name. If someone signs as Butterfree without that label, it's probably not me.

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