about:danbooru

This page records key parts of Danbooru history in a timeline format. Currently work in progress, featuring Danbooru-adjacent developments, archived link usage to be examined.

Early Danbooru

2005-05-17

@albert launched Danbooru.
http://memo.donmai.us/post/view/422

2005-05-24

Danbooru's first update was pushed, database is reset in the meantime;
http://memo.donmai.us/post/view/432
post #1 was uploaded, and thus is considered Danbooru's birthday.

2005-10-01

Shimmie went live, inspired by Danbooru (though initially built on Futaba and Ajax more).
http://shish.is-a-geek.net/projects/shimmie/about.php circa 2006-01-17

2005-12-01

Anonymous uploads are briefly uploaded as @MD_Anonymous.

by 2006-11-17

Moe.imouto.org went live (earliest instance of Moebooru/yande.re).
http://imouto.org/blog/2006/11/

2006-11-18

Albert acknowledges Shimmie, wishing Shish the best of luck.
http://memo.donmai.us/post/view/652

2007-01-19

post #100000 was uploaded.

2007-03-02

Albert publicly took down Danbooru to work on improvements; subsequently released original source code, spawning many booru-style imageboards to come (whether based on or inspired by the codebase);
http://memo.donmai.us/post/view/1107 circa 2007-03-04
http://danbooru.donmai.us circa 2007-03-22
The site would remain available to select users in the form of a private closed beta, through miezaru.donmai.us (forum #3261).

2007-03-07

Earliest pre-release public appearance of Shimmie 2 was launched.

2007-XX-XX

Version updates to Danbooru's code continue, with 1.1.0 releasing 2007-03-10, setting up Trac on 2007-03-11, 1.2.0 on 2007-03-15, 1.3.2 on 2007-03-26, 1.4.0 on 2007-03-31, 1.4.1 on 2007-04-02, 1.4.2 on 2007-04-05, and 1.5.0. sometime around 2007-04-25, with some smaller blog posts here and there.
http://memo.donmai.us/ circa 2007-03-12
http://memo.donmai.us/post/view/1119 circa 2007-12-25
http://memo.donmai.us/?page=3 circa 2007-04-08
http://memo.donmai.us/?page=2 circa 2007-04-08
http://memo.donmai.us/ circa 2007-04-08

2007-03-14

The last truly anonymous post that was attributed to Albert's account. The first version of each post now shows an actual uploader's username, suggesting registration became required to post.

Modern Danbooru

2007-XX-XX

Danbooru went live once more; miezaru.donmai.us would be used for the invite-only open public testing, while danbooru.donmai.us was used for Q&A, source code and links to 'booru alternatives.
http://danbooru.donmai.us circa 2007-06-05

2007-04-XX

Rule34.paheal.us went live (Paheal being derived from Filipino Ragnarok Online slang meaning "please heal").

2007-04-21

Shimmie 2 went properly live.

2007-05-XX

Gelbooru went live, developing its own software code.

2007-06-15

Anonymous uploads are once again briefly uploaded by MD Anonymous, but show "MD Anonymous" as the first version's creator instead of "anonymous".

2007-09-06

Registration became available once more (topic #167).

by 2007-10-16

Danbooru.donmai.us once more directed to the front page.
http://danbooru.donmai.us circa 2007-10-16

around 2007-12

Standard users couldn't search for multiple tags anymore (topic #473).

2007-12-20

Danbooru 1.12 released, among other things making rating:e posts publicly available, but now hiding loli (topic #511).

2008-09-XX

One Yukkuri Place went live.

2009-03-03

Notdanbooru.donmai.us was launched, filtering out explicit and questionable posts; was renamed to Safebooru.donmai.us two days later (topic #4414).

2009-08-20

Posts under Albert's account from this date show their original uploader as creator of the first post version.

2010-01-29

Safebooru.org went live.

2010-09-29

Anonymous uploads are no longer possible.

2010-11-12

Rule34.xxx went live.

2011-09-20

post #1000000 was uploaded.

2012-12-21

Albert announced plans to upgrade Danbooru on 2013-02-16 (topic #8830).

2013-02-16

Danbooru received its announced upgrade to Danbooru 2, danbooru.donmai.us directed directly to Posts now; relevant thread (forum #83840) and forum in general was filled with bug reports and varying opinions on the upgrade.

2015-05-01

post #2000000 was uploaded.

2015-07-07

Janitor level was removed (topic #11837).

2015-10-23

Contributor level was removed.

2017-05-06

@evazion created the Danbooru Discord server (topic #14030).

2018-01-27

post #3000000 was uploaded.

2018-03-21

Uploader names were obscured, replaced with Top Tagger in efforts to curb some bad practices (topic #14857, topic #15088).

2019-01-30

Top Tagger was hidden (topic #15916).

2019-11-29

UA College of C&IS researcher Dr. Brian C. Britt published an article entitled Content Curation, Evaluation, and Refinement on a Nonlinearly Directed Imageboard: Lessons From Danbooru (doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880020), discussing the site in detail, a month after invoking Danbooru in his article The use of nondialogic trolling to disrupt online communication (doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i10.10164).

2019-12-06

Albert resigned from his position of Danbooru owner, and declared evazion as his successor (topic #16472).

evazion era

2020-02-25

Super Voters were removed along with the Curated pool (forum #163413).

2020-05-13

Danbooru Discord server was sponsored on the main page for a couple of weeks. It jumped from around 100 users to around 4000 in a matter of days.

2020-06-13

Following discussion, Danbooru's romanization system switched from a strictly Hepburn system to a more permissive one based on the system used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan for their passports. (forum #168056, topic #17011).

2020-07-07

Paid Rewards were banned from Danbooru (topic #17092).
Some rules were rewritten (topic #17091).

2020-07-14

post #4000000 was uploaded.

2020-07-15

Uploader names were back (topic #15924, forum #169413).

2021-12-23

post #5000000 was uploaded.

2022-05-07

Danbooru got banned from Stripe, preventing users from upgrading to gold.

2022-05-22

Rating:General was introduced. Rating:Safe was renamed Rating:Sensitive. (topic #21277)
Safebooru.donmai.us would be renamed to donmai.moe by this day (forum #213208)

2022-06-04

Danbooru launched new upgrade code system, to sell codes for gold membership on Shopify.

2022-06-29

Danbooru was banned from Shopify. Gold upgrades are disabled once again and remain so long-term.

2022-09-25

NovelAI announced on Twitter that they have been using Danbooru to train their artwork AI.

2022-10-03

A Japanese Twitter user pointed out that NovelAI has been using Danbooru to train their artwork AI. Some mistakenly interpreted this as outright support on Danbooru's end, and the news got traction. In the following days hundreds of artists asked Danbooru to take down their artworks for various reasons. This led to AI-generated artworks being added to the list of prohibited content (forum #223144).

2022-10-30

The Contributor user level was back alongside Approver, fully replacing the "unrestricted uploads" and "approve posts" Builder permissions.

2023-01-20

post #6000000 was uploaded.

2023-12-19

post #7000000 was uploaded.

2024-08-14

post #8000000 was uploaded.

2024-08-31

Hatsune Miku became the first character to reach 100,000 thousand posts with post #8079477.

2025-03-15

post #9000000 was uploaded.

2025-09-21

post #10000000 was uploaded.

2026-01-14

Touhou became the first copyright other than original to reach 1 million posts with post #10609487.

See also

External historical links