Wallbase

» see wallbase.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Wallbase was a search engine for desktop wallpapers. Not a gallery you scrolled and not a forum full of attachments, but an indexed database you put queries into. You could search by tag, and you could search by color: pick a swatch and get back everything in the index that sat near it. In 2011 that was a trick almost nothing else did for free, and it is still the feature people name first when the site comes up.

It went online as wallbase.net. The earliest copy anyone kept is from 16 October 2009, and the markup on that copy carries one author tag reading yotoon, the handle the site ran under for its whole life. In March 2011 everything moved to wallbase.cc and the old domain started answering with a redirect. Nearly every account of Wallbase dates its start to 15 March 2011, including one written by the people who built its successor, and that is simply the day the Internet Archive first crawled the new address. The service was already about eighteen months old by then.

The end began in August 2013 with an update that shipped before it was finished. Pages were missing, uploading came back switched off, and the forum disappeared outright. Then Yotoon stopped answering. The staff-run Twitter account said he was missing, and nobody else on the team had the source code or the server credentials, so there was no copy of Wallbase that anyone but him could run. A few regulars waited a few months, decided he was not coming back, and had a replacement named Wallhaven standing up before the end of the year.

Wallbase itself kept serving for another nine months with nobody steering it. The last working front page in the archive is from 07:58 GMT on 8 September 2014. By 17:35 that same day the server was answering with an empty document, and the Last-Modified header on that empty document reads 13:54:42 GMT, 8 September 2014. There was no farewell page and no notice. Something wrote a zero-byte file over the index in the middle of a Monday afternoon, and the only surviving record of the moment is a timestamp in a response header.

~ the case file ~

~ scraped off the boards ~

Archive Team's description of what the site actually held is blunt: wallpapers and other high-resolution media scraped off the imageboards' wallpaper threads, then tagged and indexed into something you could query. That was the whole value. A /wg thread on 4chan scrolls off and dies within a few days, taking everything posted into it, and Wallbase caught those images on the way past and gave each one a permanent numeric ID. The IDs on the last archived front page had run past 2.9 million. Archive Team's volunteers put the full backup at roughly 300 GB.

A wallpaper site is not somewhere you belong. You hit one hard for an afternoon after a new machine or a new monitor, pull down half a dozen files, then do not open it again until the next machine. That usage pattern is exactly why nobody noticed this one dying: a site you visit once a year looks perfectly healthy right up to the year you go back and it is not there. By 2014 I was on a TTNet line where a 1920x1080 JPEG had stopped being a decision, which is quietly part of the story too, because the reason an index like this mattered at all was that a large image used to cost you something to fetch.

~ no copy of the code ~

The lesson the Wallhaven community drew from this, and they have written it down more than once, is about one person holding everything. Yotoon wrote the code and ran the servers, and shared neither with anybody. When he went quiet there was no fallback position. The moderators had the community and the goodwill, and neither of those could be pointed at a running copy of the site.

One user did save a great deal of it on his own account. A member called pluesch came out of the collapse holding every image except the first ten thousand, plus the tag tables and the mappings between them. That dump is most of the reason anything about the index is reconstructible today.

~ what the server said on the way out ~

There is a small forensic pleasure in the shape of this death. Most dead sites hand you a notice or a parked page selling the domain, and both of those are things a human decided to put there. Wallbase handed over a zero-byte response with a valid Last-Modified header, which is a machine reporting the exact second a file changed and nothing else at all. It dates the death to 13:54:42 GMT on 8 September 2014, which is finer than any farewell post ever manages.

Wallhaven has been running for more than a decade since, which makes this one of the rarer cases where the replacement outlived the original by a wide margin and kept the reason for existing intact. It started from an empty database that volunteers refilled with whatever they had saved.

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