It all started when Nintendo shut down WiiConnect24 on June 28, 2013. A person by the name of AwesomeMarioFan decided to make a thread on a popular gaming forum named GBAtemp about reverse engineering WC24 on July 6, 2013. On March 5, 2014, he made another thread about what he was able to do (which only was getting the News Channel to work). Eventually on August 6, 2015, people starting posting on the thread talking about bringing WiiConnect24 back and started planning out the project. Since GBAtemp wasn't the ideal place to plan this out, three people which are now developers of RiiConnect24 today (PokeAcer, Larsenv, and AwesomeMarioFan) made a Skype chat to talk about the project. Within a few days we had a server up and running, with the name of "CustomConnect24". Knowing that NeoRame, a great design artist, had made Wiimmfi a logo, we contacted him regarding a logo. NeoRame then pointed out how "RiiConnect24" may be a better name and gave us a logo. RiiConnect24 turned out to be a great name for our project because (in case you aren't aware), it has the same pronunciation as "Reconnect", and the goal of the project is to reconnect Wiis to the WiiConnect24 service.
After some slow progress, we released the RiiConnect24 News Channel with the latest news on June 28, 2016, 3 years after the shutdown. Over time, we've rolled out more features such as having pictures and the location where the articles take place. We also added support for other languages and have the latest headlines shown on the Wii Menu, thanks to some breakthroughs that took place.
We decided to start using Discord as Skype was getting too bulky (it became utter chaos near the end of the chat's existence) and we now have a close-knit RiiConnect24 guild with over 8400 members. The server offers support for any of RiiConnect24's services. There's even a bot that looks up error codes and helps you share friend codes, stopping the need of constantly asking "What's your Friend Code?".
On December 3, 2016 we released Wii Mail, so now people can send messages over other Wiis. It also allows you to share data between games, sometimes without you even knowing. 16 days later, we released the RiiConnect24 Forecast Channel with the latest forecast. The project became open source on April 22, 2017.
On December 2, 2017 the RiiConnect24 Everybody Votes Channel was released, and we were surprised how many votes were sent.
On Feburary 10, 2019 the RiiConnect24 Nintendo Channel was released.
Today, RiiConnect24 focuses on bringing more Wii Channels back and making your Wii work to its full potential again. If you set up Wiimmfi as well, you can play games online again that used Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, so we recommend you use it; some things work better with RiiConnect24, such as Mario Kart Wii gaining the ability to use Friend Challenges again.
RiiConnect24 has been possible thanks to these people. Please note this is not an active list of developers, as some of them are no longer working on the project.
Additionally, here are some of the services we use to run RiiConnect24.