The GoAnimate Community, also known as The Vyond Community is an online community centered around what was the GoAnimate software.
GoAnimate Central's banner in 2019, representing the most notable GoAnimators in the server at the time. From left-to-right: Thinkerhats, SplashyTrash280, BrentAnimate, Isaac Anderson Animations, YRGvHD, CherryBlossom490, RareYellowWUUTBee, Fartnoise9, Kaneedian, Tboneodeth Productions, GoTest334, MegaT, Nova, Rack Animate, Stickman Jackers.
GoAnimate City's banner in 2021, representing the most notable GoAnimators in the server at the time. From left-to-right: Tbone Animate, Wizard Animate, Nate Animates, Daptic, NotSmirks, Rack Animate, murp, GoTube, Dutch, GoTest334, MJ the Spirit, Antitroopergirl, f0xyw4ffl3z and KBAMF2006.
FlashThemes's "About us" section, representing the contributors to the project. Most notably included are GoTube, Tbone Animate, MegaT, It'sJayyy, and Kaneedian.
The GoAnimate Community is infamously known for using GoAnimate to make Grounded Videos out of children's shows characters, notably Caillou. It peaked in popularity around 2016, and is often referenced in online meme culture and 2010s nostalgia.
Its reputation outside of the GoAnimate sphere was generally negative for many years, though its image has improved over the past couple years due to the rise of Generation Z online, many of whom grew up with GoAnimate videos as children.
Though the GoAnimte website has long since shut down and turned into Vyond, the userbase of the overall community has helped GoAnimate live on into the current day, through the development of revival software similar to Toontown Rewritten, such as Wrapper: Offline and FlashThemes. Additionally, many central hubs for the community such as Discord servers like GoAnimate City and GoAnimate Central have been created for the community to bond and grow.
The GoAnimate Curse[]
An inside joke inside the community is that once you enter the GoAnimate community, you cannot leave. This is because many GoAnimators, even those who have long since grown out of participating in the community, tend to come back and stay, whether to observe, discover old memories, or make new videos with a satirical twist. Some of these users include NotSmirks, Chaostoon and BrentAnimate.
History[]
When GoAnimate was launched in 2007, it initially had many social media features that made it similar to YouTube, such as likes, comments, shares and forum posts. This is what sparked the community's creation.
In June 2011, the first notable grounded video was made on GoAnimate and published to YouTube, called “Brian gets in trouble at school." After the publication of this video, grounded videos gradually began to increase in popularity.
On December 13, 2013 African Vulture made one of the first Caillou Gets Grounded videos, which became very popular. This started the "Caillou Gets Grounded" trend that exploded in popularity over the following three years.
By 2015, grounded videos had taken over the community and the site as a whole, being pretty much the only thing you would see on Goanimate. Around this time, Goanimate had been removing a lot of old features and themes as around that time, Goanimate wanted to focus on business and marketing more, considering their reputation had almost been completely ruined by the grounded videos.
For a while, most Goanimators had published their videos on the site and on YouTube, which sometimes would gain millions of views. In July 2015, Goanimate removed the last of the social media features, which sparked significant backlash from the community, and led to multiple people moving to YouTube fully or quitting Goanimate entirely. Little did the community know, the removal of the social media features was a warning for what was to come.
In late 2015, GoAnimate announced a major change in their business model. They would begin migrating away from Flash and towards HTML. Shortly thereafter in early 2016 they officially removed all non-business themes from their website, including all cartoony or "legacy" themes such as Comedy World and Lil' Peepz. GoAnimate claimed this was due to the fact that the legacy themes were not supported in HTML5, however this was a red herring. The legacy themes were in-fact compatible, but GoAnimate did not want to insult their userbase by admitting they were no longer the target audience. The legacy themes were still available on GoAnimate4Schools, so many GoAnimators moved there to continue using the themes.
When the legacy themes were removed on GoAnimate4Schools in July 2016, many GoAnimators left the community and shifted towards other content. However, using an exploit in GoAnimate's code, users were able to use extensions such as Requestly to bring the legacy themes back on both websites. GoAnimate originally tried to prevent this from happening, patching vulnerabilities in their code which initially stopped users from exploiting their service. However, many users had downloaded the files to the old themes and hosted them on their personal websites, which made it impossible for GoAnimate to patch.
For many years, GoAnimators continued using the Requestly method to bring back the legacy themes, even after GoAnimate had rebranded into Vyond. However, in December 2019, GoAnimate officially retired the Legacy Video Maker and replaced it with a new video maker that did not contain any code that allowed the legacy themes to be used. Because of this, there was no longer any method to bring back the old themes. Again, many GoAnimators retired after this event, believing it was the end of the GoAnimate Community.
In late 2019, VisualPlugin released GoAnimate Wrapper on GitHub, a piece of software which emulated the Legacy Video Maker along with all the legacy themes. It was completely independent from Vyond's services, being hosted on the individual user's computer as well as GitHub.
In early 2020, Benson released Wrapper: Offline, a modded client of GoAnimate Wrapper which was designed to not only be fully independent from Vyond, but fully offline, being hosted fully on the individual user's computer. This remains the most used GoAnimate revival service to this day.
In late 2023, MegaT and It'sJayyy released FlashThemes, designed to be a faithful, fully-online remake of the original GoAnimate website.