I’m not really up to date with the history of this website! Like who the first member was, who the first janitor was, or even why most moderators became mods, but that may change today. Here in the forums, the lore of e621 shall be bound.
Put any historical e621 facts below please!

There is the infamous interview (and a lesser-known follow-up interview) with Arcturus, the creator and former owner of e621, a few years back but they probably wouldn't answer much of your lore needs.

On 2010, Arcturus transferred ownership of the site to the current owner @Varka, who also owns Bad Dragon, and placed e621 under its subsidiary Dragonfruit Ventures, which is also used to manage other furry sites like F-List and FurryNetwork (more history on WikiFur).
While Varka likes to be more hands-off and focuses on keeping the lights on, he appointed @Char as lead admin to oversee the user management side of things.
Eventually, Char steps down and @EDFDarkAngel1 (Dave) is appointed as the next lead admin.
Eventually again, Dave steps down steps down and @NotMeNotYou is appointed as our current lead admin.

If you want to look at how the site looked like back in those days, there is a few Internet Archive snapshots listed on topic #6009 & topic #45032.

• Posts #1-12 were test images and were reportedly LOLCats. The pages do not exist anymore, so this can't be 100% confirmed, however.
• The first public post was #13. The original post was deleted due to removal request from the character owner, but the image can be found here. (CONTENT WARNING: young -rating:s, breastfeeding)
• The first non-test news post (June 2, 2011) was linking to a forum topic announcing plans to adjust the blacklist because people were complaining about a flood of My Little Pony content.

That's all I've got at the moment.

The first thing that comes to mind is:

On June 5, 2024, other staff members and I emptied the pending post queue for the first time in years, which led to the staff being able to better keep up with the queue overall, and no post since then have been deleted by the automod, for being older than a month.

Ever wondered why the different kinds of Pokemon don't implicate pokemon_(species) directly, but instead take a detour by implicating the generation they are from? That's because there are so many Pokemon that the system of e6 couldn't handle it. The implications had to be split into the different generations to prevent the site from breaking.

Also, as far as I know the use of the terms gynomorph and andromorph originates from e621 and spread out from here.

lendrimujina said:

• The first public post was #13. The original post was deleted due to removal request from the character owner, but the image can be found here. (CONTENT WARNING: young -rating:s, breastfeeding)

That's not the first image as the deleted one here has the tag heart_symbol which the one in your link does not have
It has a spade_tail but that's not a symbol

lendrimujina said:

• The first non-test news post (June 2, 2011) was linking to a forum topic announcing plans to adjust the blacklist because people were complaining about a flood of My Little Pony content.

That's all I've got at the moment.

are there any furries around that still have that weird absolute distain for MLP that we saw back in the 2010s? sometimes it feels like the only remnant of that is how the expanded uploader form gives my_little_pony as one of the examples of "Contentious Content", right alongside rape, gore, young, and scat.

also, remember the MLP-exclusive sister site to e6, 20pc?
I sure don't! it started in late 2011 and, from what I can tell, it was already kinda completely irrelevant by the time I started using e6 in like 2014/'15.

also, not 100% sure, but I think that staff merge over from there is why we have RD as an admin on here. and also why she's not called _hehe "Smoochy_Pooch" anymore.

#

Once upon a time, in the ancient times of pre-March 2020 ^{(Jeez, that was 5 years ago?! I'm old...)}, there were no BURs or voting on aliases/implications. Instead you could suggest ONE alias/implication, comment if you wanted more aliases/implications in the OP, and others would have to comment whether they agreed or disagreed. It was rather tedious...

demonthedarkhound said:
Also, as far as I know the use of the terms gynomorph and andromorph originates from e621 and spread out from here.

Yeah, and choosing which terms to replace c*ntboy/d*ckgirl with was a loooooot of drama. Not even the decision to replace them, just deciding which made up terms were the best ones. I think e621 definitely does have an effect on the language people use to describe furry porn outside of here. The term featureless_crotch most likely originates from here (created by Fifteen, then tagged on 100+ posts by me, then further popularized in a forum thread by Genjar).

On April 20th 2007, post #6268 was posted, a post so infamous that it became a meme here, until the creator requested it get taken down. The site documentation, etc. used to reference the number 6268 in various places as an easter egg.

I know there was once an e621 iceberg meme (partially jokes. Probably. I HOPE "plain text password storage" was a joke, lol), but the original link to it no longer works, so it might be lost to time...

fliphook said:
That's not the first image as the deleted one here has the tag heart_symbol which the one in your link does not have
It has a spade_tail but that's not a symbol

The heart_symbol tag used to be <3, which I could see someone tagging for the tail shape.

demonthedarkhound said:
Ever wondered why the different kinds of Pokemon don't implicate pokemon_(species) directly, but instead take a detour by implicating the generation they are from? That's because there are so many Pokemon that the system of e6 couldn't handle it. The implications had to be split into the different generations to prevent the site from breaking.

Something I am grateful for, as it allows me to specifically blacklist generation 8 pokemon, generation 9 pokemon, and (preemptively) generation 10 pokemon while leaving the rest alone. Six years later and I am STILL angry about Dexit.

dba_afish said:
are there any furries around that still have that weird absolute distain for MLP that we saw back in the 2010s? sometimes it feels like the only remnant of that is how the expanded uploader form gives my_little_pony as one of the examples of "Contentious Content", right alongside rape, gore, young, and scat.

I always thought it was kinda funny how it was listed like that, in an Arson, Murder, & Jaywalking kind of way.

The first Head Admin was Mellis, and his administration was much different from today's. Among the things he did were Bat Week, which was to reward helpful Users, and Shark Week, used to crack down on troublesome Users. His administration wasn't the most professional, its moderation much harsher, and it sometimes trolled Users, as can be seen with the infamous lobsterban. All a User needed do was report this post, and they'd get banned for 10,000 days (about 27 years and 4 months). It seems quite a number fell for it. (Have no worries. People no longer get lobsterbanned. Likely, the worst you'll get is a record for abuse of site tools. I have no idea if any lobsterbanned Users have been unbanned since Bad Dragon took over.)

In 2010, allegations of copyright infringement and the perennial issue of cub art led to pressure being put upon e621's hosting provider and to threats made against then owner and founder Arcturus. Alas, the threats succeeded and e621 shut down on August 30, 2010.

For one day.

On August 31, it was business as usual for e621, now under the management and, on September 8, the ownership of new Head Admin Varka. However, he did have his business to also run, so not long after, he made Char Head Admin, who continued much of the early reforms of e621 into a more professional and better organized site. After two and a half years, Char stepped down, and NotMeNotYou began overseeing things into the modern era. A good many of the changes and improvements we're familiar with today, like the CoC overhaul of 2015 and the revamp of the site in 2020, have come under NotMeNotYou's watch.

everything on the iceberg is true

skunk_in_scarf said:
everything on the iceberg is true

All staff are cat people confirmed! I knew it!

I said:
the original link to it no longer works, so it might be lost to time...

When I said the iceberg meme might be lost to time, what I actually meant was "I apparently have it save on my phone, buried under a bunch of furry porn". Here it is: https://i.imgur.com/VIfF7q7.png

demonthedarkhound said:
Ever wondered why the different kinds of Pokemon don't implicate pokemon_(species) directly, but instead take a detour by implicating the generation they are from? That's because there are so many Pokemon that the system of e6 couldn't handle it. The implications had to be split into the different generations to prevent the site from breaking.

That's not true at all.
All the pokemon tags used to imply pokémon_(species) without any problems for years. It did not "break the site".

The issue arose when the pokemon -> pokémon aliases had to be reversed, to get rid of the non-ascii character.
Processing hundreds of thousands of posts would lag the site quite a bit, so it was done in batches over the course of a few days, I believe.
The generation tags were created to simplify the process of making changes in the future, if necessary.

skunk_in_scarf said:
everything on the iceberg is true

Only half of the things on the iceberg are true.

cinder said:
That's not true at all.
All the pokemon tags used to imply pokémon_(species) without any problems for years. It did not "break the site".

The issue arose when the pokémon -> pokemon alias had to be reversed, to get rid of the non-ascii character.
Processing hundreds of thousands of posts would lag the site quite a bit, so it was done in batches over the course of a few days, I believe.
The generation tags were created to simplify the process of making changes in the future, if necessary.

also, as a nice side effect, we have easily viewable stats on the reletive fanart density for each generation of the games, which is kinda interesting information.

crocogator said:
All staff are cat people confirmed! I knew it!
When I said the iceberg meme might be lost to time, what I actually meant was "I apparently have it save on my phone, buried under a bunch of furry porn". Here it is: https://i.imgur.com/VIfF7q7.png

It's pinned in the discord innit

crocogator said:
Yeah, and choosing which terms to replace c*ntboy/d*ckgirl with was a loooooot of drama. Not even the decision to replace them, just deciding which made up terms were the best ones. I think e621 definitely does have an effect on the language people use to describe furry porn outside of here. The term featureless_crotch most likely originates from here (created by Fifteen, then tagged on 100+ posts by me, then further popularized in a forum thread by Genjar).

Woah, didn't expect my name to crop up in a context like this for a thread like this. I didn't actually create the tag, it already had 2 posts by the time I discovered it, though I did write the first wiki page for it. I was a heavy TV Tropes user at the time, and that naming pattern was in line with some of the vocabulary being used over there (even though there's apparently no trope by that exact name these days, they call it BarbieDollAnatomy ).

I did also observe e6 vocabulary spreading outwards over time, and sometimes even whole concepts. "Spermicidal takeover" (coined by Ortenphia back in 2022) is one that struck me as having really exploded in popularity over the past year, just from people finding out about it and being able to put a name on it. Cavity storage (by AblativeShield) is also one I've been seeing artists use.

clawstripe said:
The first Head Admin was Mellis, and his administration was much different from today's. Among the things he did were Bat Week, which was to reward helpful Users, and Shark Week, used to crack down on troublesome Users. His administration wasn't the most professional, its moderation much harsher, and it sometimes trolled Users, as can be seen with the infamous lobsterban. All a User needed do was report this post, and they'd get banned for 10,000 days (about 27 years and 4 months). It seems quite a number fell for it. (Have no worries. People no longer get lobsterbanned. Likely, the worst you'll get is a record for abuse of site tools. I have no idea if any lobsterbanned Users have been unbanned since Bad Dragon took over.)

In 2010, allegations of copyright infringement and the perennial issue of cub art led to pressure being put upon e621's hosting provider and to threats made against then owner and founder Arcturus. Alas, the threats succeeded and e621 shut down on August 30, 2010.

For one day.

On August 31, it was business as usual for e621, now under the management and, on September 8, the ownership of new Head Admin Varka. However, he did have his business to also run, so not long after, he made Char Head Admin, who continued much of the early reforms of e621 into a more professional and better organized site. After two and a half years, Char stepped down, and NotMeNotYou began overseeing things into the modern era. A good many of the changes and improvements we're familiar with today, like the CoC overhaul of 2015 and the revamp of the site in 2020, have come under NotMeNotYou's watch.

Whoa, that's some neat history. realised as my account was made in 2015 so I missed all of that with an account as I had lurked here since 2012 haha. This place has been around longer then I realised. Youtube as an example also only came out in 2005 so this site is almost as old as it.

Unfortunate to see that Arcturus account got deactivated, such an old account the 7th user. Imagine being in the single digits.

Edit: 2028 20 year party!

https://e621.net/posts/5418766
https://e621.net/posts/5418757

ihatethissitelol said:
https://e621.net/posts/5418766
https://e621.net/posts/5418757

He look like poet is a young girl...

ihatethissitelol said:
https://e621.net/posts/5418766
https://e621.net/posts/5418757

He look like poet is a young girl...

I fail to see what these have to do with e621's history.

clawstripe said:
I fail to see what these have to do with e621's history.

Isn't it obvious?

clawstripe said:
I fail to see what these have to do with e621's history.

What are these supposed to do with the history of e621??? 🤔🤔🤔

clawstripe said:
I fail to see what these have to do with e621's history.

OK, Clawstripe. I not Uploading Human Without Not Furry post. I'm Sorry!

nekoisopods said:
What are these supposed to do with the history of e621??? 🤔🤔🤔

The countless times oblivious users of e621 would post stuff without reading the Uploading Guidelines, only to complain about it in the forums asking why it got deleted.

demonthedarkhound said:
Ever wondered why the different kinds of Pokemon don't implicate pokemon_(species) directly, but instead take a detour by implicating the generation they are from? That's because there are so many Pokemon that the system of e6 couldn't handle it. The implications had to be split into the different generations to prevent the site from breaking.

Also, as far as I know the use of the terms gynomorph and andromorph originates from e621 and spread out from here.

Cinder: "That's not true at all."

That... might explain some of the issues that I saw on another Booru with BURs.

That is actually documented: post #24332 (I found this by looking at the Metasearch for those tags)
So yes in fact, e621 did it first, like I remembered. There's quite a few terms that can be traced back to these forums or tags, as mentioned above in other replies.

My awful memory: I thought there was a site like e621 around 2005-2010 that had a message where it got DDoS'd because some people got mad about hosting art without permission. Considering that you could just use DMCA process, that would not make a lot of sense. Mandela effect is real!

This probably doesn't count, but I was the first one to upload the first post of Roxanne Wolf to e621 🤘🤘

waba said:
This probably doesn't count, but I was the first one to upload the first post of Roxanne Wolf to e621 🤘🤘

It does kinda count man! The speed of porn artists is a very good history!