Memerator

Memerator is a meme website founded by Chew and her friend, TestTube.

History

Memerator as a concept was brought up by TestTube in the final part of their Sophomore year of high school, May of 2018. It was conceptualized to be a Discord bot where users could post memes and rate them on a scale. The concept was intended to be built upon during the summer break, but the project wouldn't be started until September 21st, 2018, a little over a month into their Junior year.

The bot was decided to be created using JDA, a Java Discord library, due to the nature of the Java course they were taking. Testing began on Friday, September 21st, 2018 to make the Memerator Discord bot. It utilized a simple database to store and access the memes. Memes were tied to a user's Discord user ID. Initially, meme ratings could go up to 10, but it was eventually decided to switch it to 5 later on October 3rd, 2018.

The first meme was submitted to the database on October 11th, 2018 during testing in a private server. A few other memes were submitted during this time.

Eventually, a month later, a website frontend for the website was created. The repository and initial commit were created on November 12th, 2018.

About 2 weeks later, the name of the project was officially decided to be "Memerator" (instead of "Memerater") and the domain for it was promptly decided and purchased as `memerator.me` on November 23rd, 2018. It continues to use this domain to this day.

Throughout November to February, the history is relatively undocumented, but it slowly became what is now seen today foundationally. On February 2nd, 2019, it was announced changes would be documented on the #website-changelog channel on the Discord server. An updates page was later announced, and all changes from this channel were backported to the updates page.

On February 16th, 2019, Discord blocked Memerator from being accessed, therefore forcing a disconnect from the reliance on Discord user IDs for usernames. Each user was given a username, then the link was promptly deleted.

Memerator continued to receive frequent updates throughout 2019 and 2020, about one major update per month. School stopped abruptly for the Memerator team in mid-March due to COVID-19. This eventually spawned MemeratorMC that numerous people played on throughout the rest of the school year.

On June 4th, 2020, a user began posting NSFW imagery to the site. This incident caused all memes to require approval before being posted to the website, as well as every meme to be scanned for NSFW content and being handled accordingly automatically.

On September 1st, 2020, Memerator received its last recorded change.

On April 21st, 2021, an update was posted to the Memerator Discord's #updates channel indicating that it may be making a return, and to announce the beta site that is incubating changes to eventually be merged into the main site. on June 7th, 2021, the message was reiterated and hope for a full-public release.

Memerator still continues to get the occasional meme, and it is still a fully functional website. Its current state can best be described as dormant.

Memerator Pro

Memerator Pro is a premium service offered by Memerator that gives users some benefits.

Pro was released on March 22nd, 2019. At the time, it was $5 for 1 month of Pro.

Eventually, the system switched to using "Pro Credits", where a user could buy as many Pro credits as they wanted, and could redeem them for +1 month of Pro, or they should share a link to a custom memerator.pro address where users could redeem a month for themselves.

For Black Friday 2019 (November 29th, 2019), Pro was on sale for $2. After the sale ended, on December 4th, 2019, the Pro price was set to $3, where it remains today.

The benefits of having Pro are:

• Ability to choose a custom HEX as your name color
• Ability to choose a custom background image and color (users are able to turn this off)
• The removal of ads where applicable
• Ability to see who rated your memes (and their ratings)
• Ability to use Markdown Formatting in meme captions.
• A badge on your profile

Security Vulnerability Disclosures

Memerator has publicly stated it had a few minor security vulnerabilities in the code.

Edit Any Memes' Caption

On January 16th, 2020, it was disclosed that anyone could edit any meme's caption. This was both discovered and fixed by the Memerator team and was disclosed to everyone via #updates on the Memerator Discord server. No one was believed to be affected by the exploit, nor was any data breached.

The cause of the issue was determined to be how meme captions were changed. At the time, the way to edit the caption was via a form. Users would enter a new caption into the box, then submit. The ID of the meme being edited was included in the form as a hidden input field. This value could be changed to any meme's ID. No backend validation was done to ensure the meme belonged to the user performing the request, so it was possible to exploit this and edit any meme's caption.

Disabled Memes in Search Results

On September 14th, 2020, shortly after the last changelog, it was discovered memes that were disabled or unapproved would show up in the search results of the search page. This was both discovered and fixed by the Memerator team and was disclosed to everyone via #updates on the Memerator Discord server. No one was believed to be affected by the exploit, nor was any data breached.