Editing Vlare (section)

== History ==
Vlare started development as an overhaul to VidLii, known as VidLii 2.0. In the latter half of 2018, a prototype for a modern frontend was being worked on by Jan. A while later, VidLii 2.0 would later be split off from VidLii and would become the basis of Vlare, with the frontend prototype being used for said site. During its early development, private sign-ups were conducted through VidLii, with a request to access to the private alpha (via private messages).

Vlare's beta was officially unveiled on December 10, 2018. It would include its own features and well-regarded features YouTube removed, including Groups, Friends, Live-Chats, video sync-playback (such as Watch2Gether), and personal channel blogs; there were plans to implement video annotations, a feature that YouTube removed back in January 2019. On April 24th, 2019, Vlare announced on their Twitter account that the co-founder of [[Vanillo]], Sudeurion, had joined Plutonium as both a content creator and developer for the site, where he was assigned to design the site's UI and to improve the site as it neared its launch. Vlare exited beta and became public on May 7th, 2019, gaining over 3,000 sign-ups in 6 months.

In November 2019, the site experienced massive growth due to changes YouTube made in order to comply with COPPA. An unreleased site known as "Slivr" and Vanillo merged with Vlare around this time; as a result, over 15,000 members joined, leading to traffic that caused the development team to upgrade to a 40 Terabyte Server.

Before the start of the new year, the development team had confirmed plans to release a major update referred to as "Vlare 2.0". It would've been a rebuild of the site and API as it promised to give the site a new interface and additional site features; before these changes could be implemented, however, Melony resigned on December 15th, 2019, due to mental health concerns, though she had stated that she may have rejoined the team in the future. In February 2020, Melony and BMF would lay off the majority of the moderators due to the inactivity and Vlare's slowing growth.

On February 14th, the Vlare Discord server would be restricted to those who were original members, patrons, and premium members due to the server being mostly inactive. The closure of the Discord in particular led to controversy and drama in the community, causing more people to leave.

On August 17th, 2020, Vlare went down because of a DMCA takedown notice issued by Hetzner, which for some reason was never notified to the Vlare administration. This wasn't the first time Vlare went down, as the site went down in May 2020 and mid-June 2020 in order to fix its uploader or do maintenance, but this became the last time Vlare was up. The Vlare team decided to go ahead with rewriting the site while they looked for alternatives to host the site, though these plans were delayed as on October 31st, 2020, WYSIWYG (the main developer for the rewrite at this time) announced that she was unable to work on Vlare due to a shortage of free time and other private circumstances that prevented her from developing and that she would resume development once she was able to work on Vlare again. While she did come back to make a landing page for the site, in February of 2021 she announced she was ceasing development of the new Vlare and taking a hiatus again due to mental issues.

Later that month, the site's landing page was updated, and WYSIWYG sold the site to Toby R. and Bradley, who were relatively unknown to the community. To the public, it seemed like Vlare was going steady and may have been coming back; however, Toby began to over-professionalize the site and make staff members sign NDAs barring them from working for other sites. Sks2002 later leaked a document recounting several instances of Toby and a few others trashing the community and in particular WYSIWYG (now going at this time under the name Kay). On July 25th, 2021, Toby announced that the Vlare project had been cancelled, finally ending the site after three years. The site was changed to include a message recommending visitors to try [[VidLii]] and [[Tracle]] (the latter is discontinued as of 2024).

A few years later, the website message was updated by the developers, now saying that while there weren't direct plans on restarting development of Vlare, they were open-minded about it returning in the future and that they would allow users to download the content they had posted to Vlare.