StrawberryHeaven
StrawberryHeaven, commonly abbreviated as SH, was an bulletin board website created as a bunker, and later replacement to Heyuri, lasting from September 29th, 2020 (according to archive.org) to January 6th, 2021. It was once considered by some to be the lowest Heyuri ever sank and the very depth of the Dark Ages, though some believe the darkest period in Heyuri's history came afterwards. Some have speculated that upwards of half or more of Heyuri's users were lost during the move to StrawberryHeaven, which was marked by heavy Kolymization, Drama, spam, hacks, and more.
Although the site was widely condemned as shit and sub par to Heyuri, lolico's refusal to cooperate with Kuz left most users with no choice but to use it. Regardless, several notable posts in "Heyuri History" were made on SH, including the famous "Draw Yuno Thread".
The Story
Following the fallout and the death of Heyuri in early September 2020, as well as several attempts by Kuz to revive Heyuri, Kuz launched StrawberryHeaven. It opened with multiple boards, including several that differed from Heyuri; namely /d/, /gif/, /r/, and /mil/. The textboards that differed from Heyuri consisted of /hy/, and /chat/ (basically /lounge/). The board software (Kareha) was quite different to Heyuri: post numbers were per-thread, so every thread began with post No.1. The board software lacked many of the features and styles that Heyuri contained, and was considered barren by many of the users.
The site contained a counter on the front page that displayed how many times the site was viewed. It also contained multiple links to other non-StrawberryHeaven KolymaBBS boards ran by Kolyma. The site had relatively low activity and poor growth, as the shrinking userbase of Heyuri was fractured across multiple locations.
The board began with 17 (19 if you count the KolymaBBS boards), 12 imageboards, and 5 textboards. As usual, the most active board was /b/, followed by /r/ (allegedly).
As time went on and a few new users showed up, multiple complaints arose. Some complaints were about the appearance of the textboards, some about the management of the boards, and some about how the site had little to none of Heyuri's former appeal; and as such, the site was quite dead.
On October 7th—after posts from users discussing the issues and providing suggestions came in—Kuz made a newspost explaining how he would attempt to solve them. As per user requests, Kuz removed most of the boards, leaving only /r/, /b/, /q/, and /a/. He also stated that he would move the site to a different software. Another important part of this post was regarding his withdrawal from the site. Kuz mentioned how he was tired from trying to revive Heyuri, and gave himself two options to remedy this: take a break, or exhaust himself to the point where the site isn't fun anymore. He also took on three anonymous moderators, and left them to help with the site. The final big thing the newspost mentions is the ever-growing need of PHP devs.
On October 16th, another newspost was made. This one was made by "yaril", who kuz had handed the site over to. His adminstration was met with mixed opinions and criticisms, and many users of the site disagreed with some of his rule changes (such as the outright banning of the topic of Virtual YouTubers from the site).
On October 18th, another newspost was made. This one was made by a developer called man_of_steel, and it detailed the upcoming changes on the site, such as banning all lurking Russian IPs and restoring Heyuri's old features. This provided some optimism to the site, however other things were in store for it.
Behind the scenes, kuz and lolico were making amends, and it was discovered that Kuz had a backup of Heyuri from roughly a month prior to Heyuri's death, right after a previous spam attack. This, along with kuz and lolico making up, led to Heyuri's revival, which would happen in early December 2020.
As for Strawberryheaven? The site eventually became an archive of itself, but at some point it was taken down and the domain has since left Kuz's ownership.
Promotion
In an effort to bring over more of Heyuri's former userbase and to encourage new users to come to StrawberryHeaven, advertisements were made and posted on multiple imageboards across the web. These were met with mixed results: some Heyuri users found their way back to Heyuri through these advertisements, others dismissed it as another "kuz site" and forgot about it, and it also brought in some of the "wrong crowd". These advertisements made the site gain slightly more traction, as the post rate was a little better than Heyuri's post-lolico fallout, but this fizzled out not too long after the site's closure.
Community
StrawberryHeaven's community consisted of a small group of former-Heyuri users who had managed to find their way there, a handful of new users who had never heard of Heyuri, and some weirdos from 4chan and other imageboards. Original content was made, although not to the extent that was experienced on Heyuri. Threads like the Yuno draw thread gained some traction, which injected an ever-so-slight amount of Heyuri magic into the site.
By and large, however, StrawberryHeaven was not received well by the community. Complaints were made about the board software; it was very buggy and broken, and contained little-to-no features Heyuri had. It didn't even run on the same software as Heyuri (lolico's proprietary fork of FutabaWall), and instead ran on kuz's fork of Kareha named "ktaba". Another consistent complaint was the post activity: due to the death of Heyuri, many of the userbase never discovered SH and left under the belief that Heyuri was gone forever, or they did find SH but disregarded it due to how much it differed from Heyuri. Many SH users wanted Heyuri back, as they believed SH lacked the special something that Heyuri had. The general dislike only worsened when yaril took adminstration of the site, as users disliked how he handled things; many even wanted kuz back.
This was also a big factor that led to kuz and lolico talking it out, as many of the users had come to find out that it was a certain skiddie's fault that Heyuri had died, and that the two former Heyuri admins should talk out their differences so that Heyuri could return with the both of them at the helm.
There were some positive things about StrawberryHeaven: OC was made, though not much, and it didn't make much of an impact around the site. This may have been because the site was dead, or because the userbase had fundamentally changed. The /r/ board also saw some activity, but that was mostly the result of the one user who requested the board spamming it.
Final Thoughts
StrawberryHeaven was a buggy and broken mess, and served as little more than a temporary bunker for Heyuri users. Although it is regarded by some as a "dark age" in Heyuri's history, it demonstrated just how much the concept of Heyuri was loved (at least in our little corner of the internet), and that it would take much more than the destruction of a server in order to kill that idea. This is also arguably what caused Heyuri to return, as it would've been permanently dead had people not struggled for it back.
