Den of Angels was created by Aimee Major Steinberger. It started out as a Yahoo Group on May 2, 2002, but quickly outgrew the 32MB limit.
The name "Den of Angels" is a mistranslation of Tenshi no Sumika (source).
On August 15, 2004, Aimee launched a phpBB forum to replace the Yahoo Group.
Aimee also had a personal doll webpage on this domain. In 2009, Aimee's doll homepage was removed and only the forum remained.
The forum software was changed to vBulletin in November 2005.
The forum was migrated to XenForo on Ocotber 13, 2015.
Ownership of Den of Angels was tranferred to Armeleia (also named Aimee for added confusion) then later tranferred to Dezarii.
A DoA user had a fire in her home and one of her dolls managed to survive. Check out her thread for photos of the damage and restoration.
Between 2010 to 2015, Den of Angels was invite only. Current users could invite others, but their account was on the line if they invited someone who had an account already or had been banned. The reason to close off the forum could have been spam bots or scammers but I dont believe the true reason was ever announced. This happened before the recast epoch.
On April 2nd, 2026, the DoA mod team announced the forums were going to close on August 15, 2026 [source]. This was to be the forum's 22nd birthday.
The mods had been unable to contact the current owner of DoA, Dezarii.
The forum became quiet after the announcement.
Over the next few months, replacements started popping up. The first was a collection tracker called Lychie Doll, which was very short lived. The second was Resin Grove, which appears to be a heavily vibe coded forum that did not gain a ton of traction.
The most notable replacement was Lovely Everyone, created by Armeleia with the help of the current DoA mod team. It was launched on August 12, 2026. Armeleia offered marketplace access to everyone who PMed her on Den of Angels with the email they were signing up with on LE.
On August 14, 2026, around 11:30 PM, Dezarii returned to Den of Angels to shut it down herself. The forums were closed with an announcement posted "Den of Angels is asleep. It will awaken in September." The forum was not put into read-only mode.