This has been a very long journey. As a kid, 18 years ago, I had a dream of starting a large entertainment site, posting original videos and making games and whatever else I could think of. At some point, that turned into the original idea for TIH, maybe a bit inspired by both Newgrounds and YouTube.
The first version of TIH was just a simple forum site, while the rest of the site was "in progress." I found a partner online and we began building a PHP version of the site, but it didn't get very far. We then got a third person and began making the site in Ruby on Rails. That got fairly far, but still ended up dying out.
The site just remained a dead forum for many years, and a fairly active Discord server at a point, until finally in 2025 I set to work building the site myself. And now here we are.
There's still a long way to go. There are many features I want to add, styling changes will be forever ongoing, and I want to get working on original content for the site -- videos, games, comics, and more. But it's still great to have gotten this far, readying for a 1.0 launch.
Note: Media is currently broken, I know. Our host doesn't actually support media folders -- images and whatnot -- and actually deletes them all every time I push an update and restart the server. So I will need to be getting an AWS storage account ASAP before the site is fully functional and can store images. The code functionality is all there though, tested locally. We'll get there very soon.