In the comments, please tell us how long you've been playing and what your best and worst memories of CS are!
Our Oekaki Weekly Challenge this week is: let's celebrate 7 amazing years of Chicken Smoothie by drawing what you love most about CS! Click here to view the entries or draw your own!
Wow, another year has passed us by! When I first started CS in 2008 it was just a few dog adoptables I threw out to try and draw some traffic to another site I had, and truly just blind luck that those adoptables ended up being popular enough to become a site of their own. I never expected the site to reach 1 year old, let alone 7! I'm constantly amazed by the continued existence and growth of Chicken Smoothie, the best accidental creation of my life so far :') Thank you all so much for being a part of CS! We have an amazingly active, supportive community and that's what makes CS so special. And thanks most of all to all the people who have supported CS in various ways as team members, helpers and guest contributors. Without the continued support of our community, CS would not exist! Let's use today as a reminder to thank our moderators, artists, general helpers and other team members and contributors for their generous efforts to keep CS fun for you all, year-round
Here's a little bit of Chicken Smoothie history for those who are interested:
The early months:
You may have noticed the archive doesn't go all the way back to April 2008, so you're probably wondering what we were doing in the first couple of months of CS without pets. Actually there were pets in April, May, and June 2008, but they were created on a different adoption system where pets didn't receive unique IDs, and unfortunately it wasn't possible to add them to people's accounts. We started using the current adoption system in July, so that's where the archive begins. The non-Christmas-themed "advent" dogs and rats of Christmas 2008 were re-releases of the first ever Chicken Smoothie pets of April-June 08, so those are actually the earliest designs, even though most people will assume the Sunback, Coontail and Galaxy dogs were the first!
The website's name:
Everyone always asks about why the site is called "Chicken Smoothie", and I always tell a slightly different version of the story to try and keep it short, so it may seem like I tell a different story every time :') they're all true!
The name is actually borrowed from a different website I made in 2005. So it actually had nothing at all to do with this site. When I first came up with the name "Chicken Smoothie" it was because I loved pet chickens and I used to make a ton of silly websites which always had "Chicken" in the title somewhere. It was just a necessary part of any website name I made. The "Smoothie" part was because that site I made in 2005 was meant to be a mixture of all kinds of different stuff, blended together like a smoothie! Well this site has nothing to do with any of that, but I had been using "chickensmoothie" as a username since 2005 so I named this site after myself. There we go
hope that wasn't too disappointing! If you're wondering about my older websites, or the original "Chicken Smoothie" site from 2005 - sorry, but none of them exist anymore! The only members of those sites were my school friends, and I would get bored and abandon each website I made after a few weeks. This is the only one still standing, and it was a total fluke! We finally welcomed chickens to the site in 2013, as this is their rightful home 
Items, trading, oekaki, store, forum, stamps and other features:
For those of you who weren't around when CS began, it may surprise you to learn that most features on the site didn't exist in the first 6 - 18 months of CS. We started off with no accounts to store pets on, you just had to bookmark their adoption pages. Eventually we added a forum, but for the first few months even that didn't exist and you could only leave messages on a little tag box on the home page. I was the only staff member for the early months, although eventually I recruited Nick, and hired the first batch of mods in September - including Sorren Fey and Vampiric who are still working on the CS team 7 years on! At first you couldn't trade at all, but after a few months it became possible to send people free gifts - one pet at a time - which you couldn't block or reject. Eventually trading was added, to everyone's great relief. In Christmas 2008 we introduced the first ever items which was the first time you could dress up anything. The Store and Oekaki boards weren't added until late 2009. And all of these features have seen improvements and upgrades in the past few years - especially the oekaki and forum which started off with only a couple of general boards and now have approximately a zillion categories! Our newest big feature would be the stamp collection which was added in July 2014. We are planning to make some improvements to our item categorization system tomorrow, which should be a relief for most of us having trouble finding things in the current system.
We're very proud of how far we've come since April 2008 and we hope to keep growing and improving the site for many years to come! Lets share our Chicken Smoothie memories and regrets, and remember to show our support for the various staff and contributors who've made CS possible
