Lolibrary History

Here you will find a general history of lolibrary and its various updates and iterations. For more information on the site itself and using it or contributing entries, please see the general lolibrary category page of the wiki.

Timeline/History

Lolibrary as it appeared Apr 2, 2013

Lolibrary was founded by Amy (amethystcitrine) and Soniabunny. Lolibrary was originally created in Drupal.

Lolibrary was released on June 15th, 2010. Per the launch post, lolibrary seeks to answer questions like "What size is this JSK? What's the name of this print? What brand is this? Is the lace itchy?". The founder of lolibrary wrote at the time of launch that "We hope this will be a sanctuary for the history of lolita fashion".

When it was released, EGL user death_spoon wrote the prediction "I think sellers in the future, may say: "For measurements, go to the Lolibrary" instead of taking them, themselves.".

On October 26, 2011 a Facebook group, Lolibrarians Unite was created for the core contributors / administrators to discus site policy.

In May of 2013, lolibrary surpassed 18,000 entries.

By summer of 2013, lolibrary started to have some issues due to being on an older version of Drupal and upgrades were attempted in late June / early July 2013. However, the upgrades failed and in light of the tragic loss of our founder, amethystcitrine, the changes were rolled back and the upgrade project tabled for a future date.

July 11th 2013, closet and wishlist functionality was added to lolibrary, and on July 12th, 2013, lolibrary created a Facebook page to post updates.

In February of 2015, the lolibrary team began to discus options for the future of lolibrary, recognizing that in it's current state, it would not last much longer and desperately needed to be either upgraded or re-written.

Lolibrary as it appeared Nov 27, 2015

In August of 2015, lolibrary was forced to move hosting from GoDaddy to another source abruptly. The move to Amazon Web Services took longer than the grace period offered by the previous host leading to a short outage.

By February 2016 the Drupal-based lolibrary had to have it's email service turned off to prevent it being taken over by spam bots. New user account creation was turned off to prevent it from being over-run by spam. The site was deeply unstable requiring manual intervention from admins sometimes multiple times per day. It was not uncommon for the site to go offline. The site which was funded by the same people who managed the site was also becoming increasingly expensive to run.

Lolibrary was registered as a non-profit to allow the site to take donations to help fund our educational mission.

Lolibrary moved internal discussion from Facebook to Slack in late 2016.

Because the admin team was having so much trouble keeping the site online, an executive decision was made to prioritize moving to a new system, even if it wasn't complete. Development of a new system started. Lolibrary originally allowed for reviews of items, but it was rarely used so it wasn't prioritized during the move. The highest priority was given to preserving the data and having a copy of the item information that was viewable to the end users.

The incomplete Lolibrary as it appeared May 9, 2017

On March 10th, 2017, lolibrary asked people to stop making item entries in preparation for the migration.

In March/April 2017 lolibrary made the choice to launch the incomplete version of lolibrary so that users could at least search the site. Item submission was not available at this time, nor were some of the other features like closets, wishlists, comments and private messages. Shoes were not migrated at this time. Roughly 5512 images were lost in the transfer (relatively a very small number). The site was down for several weeks during the launch.

Item submission was re-enabled in August of 2017.

In March of 2018, lolibrary moved to google hosting. This made lolibrary unavailable in China. We partnered with a Chinese developer who created a mirror site for Chinese users.

In March of 2018, lolibrary signed up for Amazon Smile, allowing lolibrary to get a donation from Amazon when people named lolibrary as their Amazon Smile beneficiary, and in June of 2018, lolibrary launched a Patreon to help fund the site.

Lolibrary as it appeared Oct 13, 2018

In September of 2018, a new version of lolibrary was launched, however it did not allow for admin to add entries. Shortly after the closet and wishlist features re-launched as private lists only visible to the owner.

In October of 2018, the admin panel re-opened to allow for submissions of new items.

In March of 2019, lolibrary opened their previously internal discord to all users.

In February of 2020, lolibrary surpassed 53,000 entries.

In November of 2020 a new feature was rolled out that allowed people to click a button under an entry to submit a correction via a google form if they were logged into a lolibrary account that did not have edit access. Users with edit access were shown an edit button to help streamline the process of editing entries.

Due to shoes being stored totally differently in the old drupal-based lolibrary, they were not part of the initial import. They were finally converted in early 2021, and began to be released in February of 2021. Each of the 716 shoe entries had to be manually reviewed and certain tags/features corrected or added to match the new styling.

In March 2021, Lolibrary added a new category for Aprons.

In April of 2021, Lolibrary changed the Taobao category to Chinese Indie Brand to better accomodate Chinese Indie brands regardless of shopfront, and to address them more consistently compared to indie brands from other countries.

In December of 2021, lolibrary surpassed 71,000 entries.

On June 6th, 2024, lolibrary surpassed 91,000 entries.