Social tools originated at ArmchairGM, which was later bought out by Wikia, Inc., and despite Wikia not developing social tools anymore (since 2008), the social tools family of extensions continues to thrive.
2005
December — ArmchairGM, an American sports-oriented social wiki site, is founded and eventually social tools are being developed, primarily by Aaron Wright and David Pean, with some (FanBoxes) being developed by Rob Lefkowitz and also by Ashish Datta (PictureGame) and Jeffrey Tierney (MarchMadness)
2006
December — Wikia, Inc. buys ArmchairGM for "more than $2 million [USD]"[1]
2008
28 February — First public release of the SocialProfile MediaWiki extension [2][3]
21 June — Wikia opens its SVN to the general public, revealing that many SocialProfile features were taken out before the public release.[4]
1 July — Rob Lefkowitz's staff access on Wikia is revoked[5]
July — slowly more features from Wikia codebase are being added into SocialProfile extension
12 August — Aaron Wright (Awrigh01), the co-author of SocialProfile leaves Wikia[6]
4 September — release of SocialProfile version 1.2 with merely one big changed thing: special page aliases[7]
20 September — release of SocialProfile version 1.3 with SystemGifts and UserGifts features and E_STRICT & E_NOTICE bugfixes[8]
8 December — Halopedia is moved back to the standard Wikia codebase [9]
2009
22 January — Siebrand adds UserWelcome into core SocialProfile because he sees SocialProfile as an extension package, like the Uniwiki extensions.[10]
10 June — UserActivity and UserSystemMessages added into SocialProfile → version 1.4[11]
2010
20 January — Jack Phoenix contacts Jimmy Wales (who in turns contacts Gil Penchina, who contacts Jack) about open-sourcing ArmchairGM's skin; in the end, nothing becomes of it[12]
8 February — In a private email to Jack Phoenix, Gil Penchina admits that Wikia "dropped support" for social tools
February — PictureGame, QuizGame, PollNY, FanBoxes and possibly some other related extensions disabled on Halopedia per community consensus[13]
10 September – (task T145286) Extensions under the social tools umbrella which didn't already have officially removed their deprecated entry points (any other extensions that weren't listed had already removed their old entry point, besides Challenge and MiniInvite), which are: BlogPage, Comments, FanBoxes, LinkFilter, MediaWikiChat, PollNY, QuizGame, RandomFeaturedUser, RandomUsersWithAvatars, Video, WikiForum, and WikiTextLoggedInOut.
22 January — The ImageRating extension was requested to be migrated as a gerrit repo in Special:Diff/2369518.
24 January — The ImageRating extension was migrated as a gerrit repo by QChrisNonWMF in Special:Diff/2371164 and officially recognized as an extension under the social tools umbrella.
2020
Late January — Mandatory actor support in all supported social tools; MediaWiki 1.34 or newer is required for version 1.14 of Extension:SocialProfile; system administrators should update all affected social tools and run maintenance/update.php afterwards to ensure that the actor columns will be properly populated
Improved support for using social tools without having JavaScript enabled in browser (task T248390)
July — Social tools' MediaWiki compatibility policy changes: all social tools now aim to be compatible with the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release of MediaWiki (1.35 at the time) instead of the latest stable release of MediaWiki. This change was necessary because given the limited resources, it's not feasible to anymore try to target the latest stable version of MediaWiki.
2022
Late May — FanBoxes, PictureGame, PollNY and QuizGame now support using images already uploaded to the wiki instead of requiring the user to upload an image (or images, in the case of PictureGame) when creating a new userbox/picture game/poll/quiz question.[31]
