TF2Tags

**TF2Tags** was the original website where one could rename and describe their Team Fortress 2 items and share them with the world, created and administrated by Dr. Dos. The site was online for 8 years, spanning from January 2011 to January 2019, and over that time over 220,000 tags were posted, voted on, and commented on. The site is now lost to history, with only some archives on the Wayback Machine saving specific snapshots of what once was.

## Founding and initial Growth (2011-2014)

TF2Tags was created by Dr. Dos over his winter break in his senior year of university. His reason for doing so was his desire to be a part of TF2's ever-expanding directions and community. The site's main purpose was for people to share their weapon or hat renames, made through usage of the in-game Name Tag and Description Tag items, and for other users to vote on them to rate the name's quality. Tagging during the first year was very different from what it would become. Users could only make tags anonymously, and sets weren't even available during item creation. April Fools' Week also occurred for the first time in 2011. The site went down for heavy amounts of maintenance in August, and reopened in December 2011.

In December 2011 several features were added, the most important of which was the ability to log in via Steam. This allowed people to have all their tags hosted in the same place under a profile, and the collective score of these Tags would contribute to their profile ranking, which was based on the strange ranks from TF2. Dos also added the ability for a user to click on a specific tag and enter its item view. Signing in through Steam and Item View allowed for the debut of comments. This update also updated the home screen to be the latest tags by default, rather than random tags which became its own page. It also added the search function. The awards tab now sorted between the best tags of all time, the previous 90 days, and the previous 30 days. The December 2011 update also introduced contests to the site, where users could make tags based on a specific theme and the winners would be awarded with metal or keys in TF2. These contests were monthly from December 2011 to February 2012, and then every other month from April 2012 onward.

The site continued its slow and steady growth throughout 2012. On September 15th, 2012, Dr. Dos would announce new rules (though he claims they were always present) as to what items cannot be published on the site. Any tags deemed racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic, as well as rape jokes, would be deleted and see the Tagger posting it potentially banned. Additionally, Lucksman and Kurt Cobain's Microphone tags would also be deleted, but would not be grounds for banning. This also came with an autofilter, where certain words would automatically ban any Tagger that attempted to use them for 24 hours. This autofilter controversially included the word "bitch", which led to many people getting what they considered to be unjustly temporarily banned. However, this autofilter was extremely specific, and could easily be bypassed by replacing a letter with a similar-looking one, or adding a space.

The site would once again go down in March of 2013 for another round of heavy maintenance, though this time was only down for a few days. The March update made set creating much easier, as well as adding the ability to edit sets after they've been posted and to change the order of items in a set as it is being created. It also implemented the permanent requirements for submission limits. In April, Dos added the ability to change one's username without logging out, changing it on Steam, and logging back in. 2013 would begin to see the fading out of contests, as August's contest did not happen and October's was announced on Halloween and would run until November 5th. The next contest would not be held until January 2014.

2014 would see a continual rise in growth with little new major updates from Dos. 2014, however, is of particular note as it was the year the majority of known Generation 1 Taggers joined the site, including Sensible Haircut and Lt. Col. Problem, as well as A Fucking Idiot in December, who would become an object of Dr. Dos's ire in the years to come. 2014 was also the year that contests ended, the final contests being held in April of that year.

## The Golden Years (2015-2016)

2015 was a turning point for TF2Tags in more ways than one. First, Dr. Dos's involvement in the site would continuously waver, only making updates and news announcements every few months rather than multiple times each month. No longer would contests be held every other month, nor would he link to any charity streams like he used to. This occurred in large part due to a long moving period, where Dos moved from Pennsylvania to Washington. Because of this, April Fools' Week 2015 did not occur.

In May of 2015 came the incident known as The Racist Anon, where some asshole (said racist anon) went on to the site and found a way to circumvent the anonymous posting limit of 3 daily tags. After discovering this, he decided to flood the site with a series of tags making various racist remarks against a whole slew of different races. This finally made Dr. Dos decide to do away with anonymous posting altogether, forcing people to log in to use the site. Timberwoof, through a terrible, terrible choice of words, accidentally made it seem like he was the racist anon and was subsequently permabanned. The Taggers were able to convince Dos that he wasn't the culprit, and soon the real racist anon was banned instead.

Though the site banding together to unban Timberwoof planted the seeds of it, the community aspect of TF2Tags came into being in July 2015 with the advent of the first major community event (often referred to as "shitstorms"): Team Legownz, where First and future Second Generation Taggers would band together as a community for the first (but certainly not last) time, in support of Legownz against Player 1 + Player 2.

It was through the initial spark of Team Legownz that the community would band together in opposition to Dr. Dos's next major site update, the August 16th, 2015 Mobile-Friendly Update, which controversially removed the Miss Button from the site in its entirety. This sparked the Bring Back Misses movement, which for the first time saw the Taggers rally *against* Dr. Dos, who caved and returned the Miss Button two days later, along with some measures to combat the new Missbombing phenomena. However, the victory would not remain happy for long, as three days after that more drama occurred, with A Fucking Idiot being banned after CP reported him. This sparked another series of outrage among the Taggers, who loved AFI's style and unique goal of hitting Negative Hale's Own. August 2015 is most likely when Dr. Dos began to have his view regarding his own creation soil itself, which would eventually culminate later on during this era. He would disappear from the site for a few months following the Mobile-Friendly Update fiasco.

At some point between Bring Back Misses and Mid October 2015 (the specific dates are lost to history), Generation 1 Tagger Sensible Haircut posted a tag of the Flying Guillotine with the name "The Bruce Jenner Experience". This was a joke at the expense of Kaitlyn Jenner, a transgender woman who was at one point Olympic Gold Medalist Bruce Jenner. That same day, a random minor tagger by the name of Yuurg returned to the site and, after posting only one tag, got into a huge argument with Sensible, calling the tag transphobic and reporting him to Dr. Dos when Sensible refused to delete it. Dr. Dos would side with Yuurg and permanently banned Sensible from the site forever. This permaban seemingly came out of nowhere and sparked much outrage in the community, but Dos refused to go back on his actions. The Banning Of Sensible Haircut is the point considered to be the dividing line between Taggers of Generation 1 and Generation 2, with those being present but not considered "major" until after the ban being considered second generation Taggers.

In October of 2015, the Ulyssesstorm occurred, a brief but site-wide shitstorm where everyone, starting with L'Étranger, decided to change their name to Ulysses to get on the real Ulysses's nerves. This ended in a matter of hours when Ulysses steam messaged everyone doing it with threats of extremely detailed violence, usually involving spines.

The following month had an event that was unlike any other that preceded it, in what would be the first (but not last) instance in which the site seemed to be ending. On November 12th, 2015, Player 1 + Player 2 made a tag notifying the rest of the community that the submission limits did not reset from the previous night as it normally did. This theoretically meant that once users hit the cap on their daily submissions, they would never be able to post a tag again. This led to mass hysteria, with half the users shitposting their remaining tags away while the other half went dark to preserve what they had left. Dos returned to fix this bug three times (for this happened on November 12th, 17th, and 20th) over the month. This event became known as the Taggening.

On January 11th, 2016, Dos returned to the site with a new update that came as a response to Bonkspenser, Ulysses, Le Tryhard Hunter, and Kokogumi (mostly the latter) spamming comments on a particular submission. The total amount of comments reached over 50,000, and such a large influx of comments in so short a time literally caused the site to crash. Because of this, Dos implemented comments into the daily submission limits to prevent such a thing from happening again, meaning making 1 comment was now the equivalent to making 1 tag. Backlash eventually made him rework this into a separate limit that allowed for 10, 20, or 50 daily comments depending on a user's rank the following month.

Before this change in comment limits, however, came the beginning of what is known as The Colorless Times, a bug caused by the way the site automatically updated pictures and qualities from the TF2 wiki. Starting January 28th, 2016, this caused all item qualities bar Unique, Community, Self-Made, and Valve, as well as Strange for botkiller weapons, to be removed, including the Unusual quality and all its effects, which was a prime source of tags from the community.

On February 20th, the next major shitstorm hit: The Attack of the Clones. A user known as the Shitposter of 2016 (later found to be minor tagger Pepe The Boi) decided to create numerous alt accounts impersonating several different active taggers. Using these "clones" he made it seem like all these taggers were, for some reason, shitposting, and not the good kind either. Dos was once again called upon to remedy the situation, which he did. However, in a tag he made confirming his response to the shitstorm (infamously titled "Good Morning": "I'm going to ban people.") he made several comments unleashing his frustrations against the TF2Tags community, revealing to everyone that he was fed up with the site and its users, and that the only reason that he hadn't already shut the site down was due to the extra bit of ad revenue that the site was giving him every month. He also banned a returned A Fucking Idiot permanently (though this was undone on April 2nd) for posting a page of items named nothing but 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA". The community naturally was taken aback at their administrator's true feelings, and many continued their Tagging career walking on various eggshells to avoid getting on Dos's nerves.

On March 10th, 2016, the Colorless Times came to an end, with all the missing qualities, including Unusual, being returned to the site, with the added bonus of items with normally impossible qualities (such an Unusual Proof of Purchase or Collector's Golden Frying Pan) now being tagable. The colors returned with much fanfare and many submissions that had been building up for months. April Fools' Week continued on as normal, with the submission limits being reset every 6 hours instead of 24, allowing for a whole slew of April Fools goodness to bless the site anew.

But of course, the site couldn't go a whole month without yet another shitstorm. Makin' Bacon became a target of seven large-scale missbombings from an anonymous user that made him lose several thousand points. Later, a man by the name of Endiome claimed responsibility for these Missbombs, and bombed Makin' some more. Dr. Dos once again came in to save the day, and after going through the various anonymous IPs he was able to trace them all back to a single Tagger, which he banned, along with deleting every single post, comment, and vote he ever made, though he did not name the user. It was soon discovered, however, that the man behind Endiome was in fact TGRobert (TheGamingRemote at the time), and the entire community was shocked at the man's actions given his reputation as the Justin Y. of TF2Tags. Despite this, however, two good things did come from this shitstorm. First, Dos implemented an improved version of voting logs which identified who exactly was critting and missing what, a further deterrent to Missbombers, and allowed anonymous voters to vote on only 5 submissions each day. Second, Tanner decided to create one of the most beloved things that TF2Tags has ever experienced: the Hon-Hon and Sneky series.

Following TGR's ban, things returned to normal for a little while. However, the normal of TF2Tags was actually quite unhealthy. The Second Generation Taggers who mostly populated the site, along with the First Generation Taggers who remained active, had become quite insular and prejudiced against new users. Taggers proudly claimed to be "more toxic than 4chan" (they really weren't) and caused many potentially new Taggers to abandon any hopes of making a name for themselves on the site. That was until a new Tagger by the name of vulture\_prime entered the site in June 2016 and refused to leave, despite many Taggers actively trying to get him out. However, the man had a legendary resolve, and eventually the Taggers learned to change their ways and become more welcoming of new users. This began the Third Generation of Taggers.

In that same month came the June 21st permanent banning of prominent Generation 2 Tagger Floro Sapiens, in a manner similar to Sensible Haircut's ban in 2015, though this time the offending tag was a joke against feminism. This was seen as an even harsher ban than Sensible's, as Floro was also kicked from the TF2Tags Steam group and had his letter of apology there deleted. Two days later, Floro released a video that was distributed to the community by Smash Z unveiling that he did some detective work. In this video, he exposed Dos's hypocrisy for his reasoning in banning Floro (as many other antifeminist jokes had been made on the site before without punishment) and postulated that the true reason for his banning was him often notifying Dos of each and every single Missbomb that occurred on the site, which he believes annoyed Dos to the point of not wanting to deal with him. He also announced that he would be holding the first contest in years as a farewell to the site, with the top three winners getting prizes.

The next major shitstorm occurred on August 5th of 2016, wherein the entire site appeared to have been deleted, the only thing present being a completely white screen with the word "Minisentry" in the top left corner. Considering what Dos had said in February, everyone had assumed that Dos had finally had enough and shut down TF2Tags for good. However, the Minisentry Incident was later revealed to have been a complete accident on Dos's part, which he quickly rectified. The site erupted in festivities following the non-death of TF2Tags.

On September 11th of 2016 came what is widely considered to be the end of an era. Ulysses, in a mad attempt to kill the site for good, carpet bombed the site with shitposts and missbombs in an attempt of pissing Dos off so much that he would pull the plug. This failed, and Ulysses was permabanned from TF2Tags. Many mourned the loss of this icon of the TF2Tags community, though he did eventually return the following year under an alternative account named Ulysses.

In October of 2016 came the shitstorm known as The Attack of the Clones II: The Buttrapening, where clone accounts were once again used to stir up trouble on the site. However, instead of it being a user impersonating other active users of the community, it was instead a single user making several alts under different names, the most memorable among them being TrumpButtRape. TrumpButtRape proceeded to use these clone accounts solely to shitpost. Dos swiftly came in and banned him.

December 23rd, 2016 saw the first largely Third Generation shitstorm: The Sappening of 2016. This was mostly a joking shitstorm, as Tagger DudeTheNinja made a joke about sapping Steam, only to have the Steam servers shut down for over three hours not long after. Other Taggers pointed this out and began making various jokes on how to "fix" the sapping of the Steam servers. It was all in good fun and is often remembered fondly by those who partook in it. The rest of 2016 consisted of relatively minor events, such as Makin' Bacon's Announcement and the Wahfather's Ascension.

## Steady Decline (2017)

2017 began with the January 20th Greatening of 2017, in which a rather bad submission by a random user was mocked incessantly by a handful of Third Generation Taggers, which ultimately resulted in eleven pages of tags, all consisting of a single joke.

2017 continued the previous year's string of shitstorms in Fedbruary, where a bunch of Missbombs all occurred around the same time, with a handful of victims losing hundreds to thousands of points. Dr. Dos stepped in and banned all the bombers, but when he left he took the Miss Button with him once again. The Removal of Misses (2017) sparked another Bring Back Misses movement, this time consisting of Second and Third Generation Taggers. Fancytag, who had over the years become friendly with Dos, reached out to him over email listing the new BBM movement's grievances, and offered a solution of implementing site moderators. Dos replied to the email telling Fancy to add him on Steam, the only message being "Let's talk." The Steam chat that ensued from this talk has been sworn to secrecy by Fancy, but two results came from it. First, the Miss Button was returned to the site, and Fancy was promoted to TF2Tags's first (and only) moderator, allowing him to combat Missbombers in Dos's place.

2017 continued on with business as usual. March was a normal month without any major shitstorms, and April Fools' Week returned once again with the usual fanfare, for what unfortunately would be for the last time, though at the time nobody knew this. However, following April Fools 2017 was a major problem: the site was bleeding users. Many Taggers stopped being active on the site, and no new Generation 4 Taggers were coming in to replace them. The site was slowly but surely losing activity as Discord became the preferred method of meeting and discussing.

The next shitstorm would not occur until September 17th's Greatest Event in History. A new Tagger by the name of Polareon discovered an exploit that allowed him to use a VPN to constantly change his IP and give him the ability to Critbomb himself over thirty times, propelling himself to 1300 points within a week. However, people soon took notice of this and retaliated. Taggers from all 4 generations came together and Missbombed Polareon to put him in his place. Danny\_Fantom used Polareon's method against him, and was able to cancel out his self-critbomb with Missbombs of equal magnitude. Polareon continued to post but always received a score of at most -7, and Makin' Bacon and Ass Ketchup labelled him as the unironic AFI, where he was "afi but you're actually a fucking idiot". This ended with a Discord voicechat party and Relk Cehi uncharacteristically calling for a purge-style event where for 24 hours all Tags, no matter the quality, would be allowed and upvoted. Fancytag stepped in and stopped the purge before it could go into full effect, however, stating the event had gone too far. Following this event, however, was a continuation of the slow death of TF2Tags.

## The Tagpocalypse (2018-2019)

On January 16th, 2018, the site's domain name expired, and the site went down. Mass panic and hysteria once again came over the site and its users, but once again this was not the end. After Proto Kirby notified Dr. Dos of what had happened, it was revealed that he had renewed the domain on an expired credit card. In two days, the site was back up and running. However, not all was well, for on January 30th, Dos returned for the first time since October of 2017, and updated the news section of the website for the first time since November of 2016 in an update titled "FAREWELL.". In this post, Dos talked about many things regarding the site, from how he started it, to the community, to regret for past actions, to finally the announcement of the site's closure. He announced that he will not be renewing the site domain again in 2019, and once the domain expired, TF2Tags would close forever. After this announcement, Dos would never return to TF2Tags.

The immediate response to this announcement was varied. Some made jokes, others thanked Dos for the site he created, others decided to extend olive branches and bury old hatchets, others rejoiced at the site's closure, growing jaded towards the community and what the site had become. Many decided to create bucket lists detailing all that they wished to achieve on the site before the impending death, which later became known as the Tagpocalypse. Walumancer, perhaps Dos's most consistent and outspoken critic over the years, criticized his farewell message. Finally, TGRobert (who did not stay banned long after the Endiome incident, as the Endiome account itself was not actually banned) proposed that a new site be built from the ground up to replace it. All in all, the community came together that day in ways it had not done in a long time.

Though the announcement initially breathed much-needed life back into TF2Tags, this activity was short-lived and pretty much gone by May. No shitstorms had occurred naturally on the site throughout the whole of 2018, and what events did occur were mostly orchestrated by Walumancer and his sizable TF2Tags faction, the Wahfia. The Wahfia raided the site twice over the year: the Purple Raid on July 21st, and the Raid of Age on October 15th. Walumancer also hosted a weeklong event called the TF2Tags Summer Sendoff, where all Taggers were welcomed to come and play TF2 together every night for a full week in the beginning of August. Besides these events, however, the site was very much on life support, with only a few tags being made every day. Some days, no new tags were posted.

On top of the dying TF2Tags, tragedy struck the Tagging community as it was announced that beloved Tagger Twelve Hour Respawn had died following complications from a surgery meant to treat his hereditary skin cancer in August 2018. The community went into a state of mourning, and to this day are trying to figure out different ways of honoring his memory.

Activity slowly came back when January 2019 finally came, with various veteran Taggers that had long left the site and the community returning for one last hurrah. In the final week of TF2Tags's life, Walumancer had three final surprises up his sleeve. When 7 days remained, he announced a final, collaborative series that any Tagger could partake in, titled "The Final Week". Many partook in this effort, and it was seen largely as a success, with Walumancer even reviving the beloved Hon-Hon and Sneky series. On the final day, as a capstone to the insanity of TF2Tags, the Wahfia led one final raid on TF2Tags, which was the largest and most chaotic yet. And finally, as one last middle finger to his greatest enemy Relk Cehi, Walumancer commanded the Wahfia to not just Critbomb, but to Critnuke Makin' Bacon from the third most critted Tagger in TF2Tags, to Number 1, surpassing Relk who had held the position for many years, cementing Makin' as the winner of TF2Tags.

Many returning Taggers said their farewells to the site and joined one of the few Discord servers that the community had set up over the years to keep in touch with the friends they had made along the way. After unexpectedly staying up past the expiration time, TF2Tags finally shut down forever on January 17th, 2019, the date of the Tagpocalypse. Shortly after, Dos renewed the site for a little while longer to post one last message to the community, putting his baby to rest after eight years.

## Aftermath (2019-2020)

Shortly after TF2Tags bit the dust, an announcement was made on each of the TF2Tags Discord servers by Ulysses, who revealed that TGRobert had convinced his older brother AncientShed to rebuild TF2Tags from the ground up as a completely new site with updated features and a community drive, as well as announcing that this site will have moderators, including himself, TGR, Walumancer, Makin' Bacon, Le Tryhard Hunter, The Lazygineer, and Moura. This new site, which would become known as Tags.tf, went into development shortly after this announcement, with a new, official Discord server being made for Taggers to join, communicate, and keep up to date on the site's progress.

Development of Tags.tf took a year and a half in total. During that time, Ulysses left the moderation team and the disgraced TGR had gradually been welcomed back into the community after both his actions on site and actions on the various Discord servers he has been a part of.

Tags.tf launched on June 1st, 2020, to stunning success, with around 90 users and 450 tags in the span of 13 hours.