Topic: Downsy and the Downsy "serving posts" counter from 2007-2008

Hello party people :1 , this whole thing started because I was curious about the art contest that was held back in 2010 which led to the creation of e621s iconic mascots. The rabbit-hole led to me looking around on wayback machine where I found out that in the far off year of 2007 instead of the abstract hexagonal "serving posts" counter on the e621 homepage that we see today , the site used a different counter that can be seen in this post #20674 with the images being from a directory called "downsy"

http://e621.net/images/webcounters/downsy/0.gif

Only a few of the counter images seem to actually be on the wayback machine which is disappointing, but the "downsy" tag led me to find this post #5502935 where someone seems to have gone down a similar rabbit-hole as I did.

Who is Downsy? Is the Downsy.net comic completely lost? Who created the counter art that was used in the 2000s? What happened to Mellis? If theres any unc staff that could offer insight I'd really appreciate it! Thanks

Mellis seems to have eventually taken up the name Rhodox. here's his website, it appears to currently just be entirely swf-based now, so inaccessible without a legacy browser with flash installed, there are a few Wayback archives that are normal html, though and there's a bit on there.

and, yes it's the same Rhodox that made the Painterly Pack for Minecraft back in the day.

EDIT: latest activity I can find online so far was this random YouTube video from 2019

Mellis was e621's very first Head Admin, before Bad Dragon acquired the site and Varka took over in the role. Downsy was Mellis' character and was a giraffe/rat/jackalope hybrid. As his name suggests, Downsy had Down's Syndrome and was apparently portrayed as something of an innocent, child-like character.

All of them except 7: https://vps1.softhyena.com/downsy.zip

clawstripe said:
Mellis was e621's very first Head Admin, before Bad Dragon acquired the site and Varka took over in the role. Downsy was Mellis' character and was a giraffe/rat/jackalope hybrid. As his name suggests, Downsy had Down's Syndrome and was apparently portrayed as something of an innocent, child-like character.

I was able to gather that from the "cast" page on downsy.net that survived on archive.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20071014073148/http://downsy.net/?a=cast
Definitely seems like an interesting character and it's super interesting that Downsy represented e621 in its early years.

dba_afish said:
Mellis seems to have eventually taken up the name Rhodox. here's his website, it appears to currently just be entirely swf-based now, so inaccessible without a legacy browser with flash installed, there are a few Wayback archives that are normal html, though and there's a bit on there.

I installed ruffle to view rhodox's website in its current state and it just seems like a shitpost :( the older site on archive.org offered some pretty cool stuff though! I'm sort of curious what sidemoon.net is or who it belongs to, it seems like the sidemoon.net website has been the same earthbound screenshot since 2013 but it's not super relevant it could just belong to rhodox. How did you manage to find this website?

notsofemmy said:
How did you manage to find this website?

wayback has some archived versions of the wikifur page for Mellis, it had a link to the website there.