Drama

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Drama is an intrinsic component of the Internet and society itself. It is the bringer of flames, tears, and in certain circumstances, LOLs.

Being a website on the internet, Heyuri is no stranger to drama. Several notable episodes have occurred over the years, and the details of a few of these episodes will be provided below.

TEH DRAMA

TEH DRAMA of 2020 was one of the most notable and historically-significant episodes of drama relating to Heyuri, and even caused the temporary death of the website.

Background

In teh beginning (February 2019), lolico created Heyuri as a homemade booru-type site. On November 24, 2019, lolico relaunched Heyuri as an imageboard, and on March 8, 2020, lolico brought Cavalier on board to be Heyuri's co-admin to help with the public, community-focused aspects of the site. After Cavalier had done significant amounts of nothing, lolico replaced Cavalier with kuz as the new co-admin on May 24, 2020.

At first, things worked well between lolico and kuz; lolico quietly worked on Heyuri's code in the background, while kuz was the public-facing "community leader" that brought in many new users, provided much entertainment, and brought the userbase together. Heyuri had a Dicksword channel where lolico, kuz, other staff members, and many site users would regularly communicate with each other. Over the next couple of months, Heyuri's users created a lot of OC featuring kuz, but not much featuring lolico.

Cracks begin to form

Live action footage of lolico and kuz going at each other

Kuz was the original creator of Rule 8, but even as early as June 2020, his activity outside of Heyuri would seldom follow that rule. On his first(?) Twitter account (since deleted), he would frequently post Rule 8-breaking material and express hostilities towards other imageboard administrators. Kuz would also troll various IRC channels, managing to get himself banned on channels relating to 4chan and their /qa/ board. This kind of activity did not sit well with some Heyuri users, though others didn't care.

Behind the scenes, lolico and kuz were regularly clashing on Dicksword over various matters relating to Heyuri; they would frequently disagree with site direction/operations, flame each other, and be reduced to namecalling. Most of these arguments were unbeknownst to the wider Heyuri userbase until late August 2020, when Dicksword leaks began being posted. Until then, Heyuri's users were largely under the impression that lolico and kuz were just occasionally pretending to fight in public for the LOLs.

On July 10, 2020, Heyuri would experience TEH CRASH. At the time, it was believed that Heyuri's servers (located at this time in kuz's home) had experienced a catastrophic failure on multiple drives simultaneously, with all the site's code and data being lost. However, after Heyuri's September 2020 death, it would come to light that this was in fact intentional sabotage by a Heyuri staff member named Akima; a developer who had been brought on after claiming to know PHP (the sole requirement to become a Heyuri developer), and was granted root access to Heyuri's servers by lolico.

One common cause of friction between lolico and kuz was the fact that kuz had been given the role of "admin" along with full control over Heyuri and its servers. kuz often made use of these powers to make changes to the site and its contents without asking lolico, or just doing it anyway even if lolico said no. Occasionally users would see something new appear on the site, only for it to mysteriously disappear later.

Lolico expressed annoyance about the fact that kuz was featured in so much OC, yet lolico—the original founder of the site and the one spending hours each day developing it behind the scenes—was rarely mentioned at all. Heyuri users found this very funny, and made some consolation OC for lolico.

KA-BOOM

By August 2020, the animosity between lolico and kuz had reached boiling point. Akima was purportedly fuelling the flames on both sides in secret, trying to get them to hate each other more. It was also said that Heyuri's staff had split into two camps; one that supported lolico, and one that supported kuz. Not helping matters was Heyuri's activity level, which had dropped suddenly and significantly since the heights of late July.

Around this time, faganon—who had been repeatedly banned by kuz for being an angry, miserable, butth0le—went to 3chan and numerous other websites to bitch about Heyuri.

In late August 2020, kuz suddenly launched several new 2ch-type boards, which were immediately spammed to oblivion. lolico promptly "fired" kuz, and reduced the number of 2ch-type boards. Kuz was enraged and went on a CSS hackathon while ranting about the board baleetions, and in the process he somehow accidentally made all the text on Off-Topic blue.

A couple of days later, kuz was fired for real along with two mods who lolico believed were on kuz's side. Meanwhile, the site was being frequently flooded to death with Rule 8-breaking material by some form of bot. Lolico was effectively running the site alone at this point, but genuine user activity was lower than ever, and the mood across the site was sour.

Excerpts of lolico and kuz's Dicksword arguments were being posted everywhere both in and outside of Heyuri (including in faganon's drama thread on 3chan), leading to many users becoming angry towards lolico. Discussions about the drama moved to 3chan, largely because lolico was deleting all mentions of it on Heyuri.

On September 3, 2020, lolico provided his version of events on a static page on Heyuri, which he would link in the Heyuri drama thread on 3chan. It contained various Dicksword screencaps as well as a link to a purportedly complete log of the private messages between lolico and kuz.

A couple of days later on September 5, 2020, Heyuri was "hacked" by Akima. Akima deleted the entirety of the Heyuri website, and replaced it with a simple HTML page containing semi-dox of lolico and his family, plus download links for various Heyuri backend files and databases. Lolico eventually managed to regain control of the site and take it all down, and this (temporarily) spelled the end of Heyuri. ;_;

Aftermath

More information: StrawberryHeaven

After Heyuri's "death", lolico camped Heyuri's domain (heyuri.net) and put up a static page detailing his thoughts on the situation, as well as expressing that he may or may not eventually restore Heyuri. The page would be updated several times over the next couple of months.

Meanwhile, kuz had retained ownership of Heyuri's former domain (heyuri.cf), and he used it to attempt to revive Heyuri several times in rapid succession; however, each attempt was swiftly thwarted by Akima's skiddie flooding powers. Eventually kuz gave up on reviving Heyuri and instead launched a new site named StrawberryHeaven, which became a refuge for former Heyuri users (although the number of StrawberryHeaven users was small compared to Heyuri's golden age numbers). Akima was unable to flood StrawberryHeaven because his fail scripts didn't work on the Perl-based software (Kareha). CAMELS FTW.

After a couple of months on StrawberryHeaven, user demand for Heyuri's return remained strong, and kuz stated he was back in talks with lolico to try and organize a true revival of Heyuri. Heyuri would return on December 4, 2020 with kuz as the sole administrator, and lolico would assist with various aspects of Heyuri's backend for a little while before choosing to disappear from the internet.

Due to the events of "TEH DRAMA"—along with faganon's "I haet Heyuri and here's why you should too" tour that continued across the net—Heyuri, lolico, and kuz's reputations were in the dirt. Any threads on other websites where Heyuri was mentioned would invariably end in flames being fired towards the site and its former staff, along with rampant trolling. This negative reputation would unfortunately be a dark cloud that lingered over Heyuri's head for the next couple of years, which made any kind of traditional promotion on imageboard-adjacent sites nearly impossible.