Information About4chan |
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HISTORY 4chan opened on October 1 , 2003 . It has been shut down due to lack of funding or hosting multiple times:
During these deaths 4chan had been shut down for several reasons reasons including Crapflooding attacks, lack of funds, PayPal disputes concerning freezing 4chan's donation account for too much income, and general incompetence on the part of the site's founder, moot. On August 11 , 2004 , 4chan returned for the fifth time. On August 29 , 2005 , shortly after celebrating one year of up-time and a panel at Otakon , an Anime convention, it was announced 4chan was "literally out of money", and called for $20,000 to buy new servers and a year of hosting. Known as the "Donate or Die 2005" period, the fund raiser intended to provide enough funds for another tweleve months. In response to lack of progress updates and skepticism the 4chan administration included a PHP -based fund-meter on the site, which updated as funds were donated. The indicator, which had an appearance similar to the Meme "longcat," reached around the $14,000 mark. To raise funds, several female users posted nude pictures of themselves with "donate4chan" written across their chests. The money from the fundraiser was used to purchase three Dell servers, and cover co-location fees (including a new 100mbit Cogent commit). On February 17 , 2006 , the three servers purchased during the "Donate or Die 2005" campaign were successfully brought online, decreasing the amount of slow page loads, broken images, and latency issues. On April 5 , 2006 , several new boards were created for Western-oriented subject matter in response to growing complaints that there was no place on 4chan to post images of American cartoons. In addition, image boards for politics, live-action, films, and television shows were also added. On April 20th , 2006 , 4chan's /b/ hit 7 million posts and crashed; this caused many posts to be out of order and missing images, including the 7 millionth itself, which was restored by finding the correct image according to the MD5 hash from the database. It is also worth noting that since the 6 millionth post was posted on March 23rd , 2006 , /b/ had at that point reached a posting rate of over 1 million posts per month, or over 35,000 posts ''per day''. SITE DESCRIPTION The site is divided into discussion boards, image and upload boards, and Oekaki boards. To date, there are 31 different image boards, with topics ranging from anime, weapons and photography to real and animated pornography. Seven of these (Cosplay & EGL, Food/Cooking, Comics & Cartoons, Music, News, Papercraft & Origami, Sports, and Television & Film) are trial boards, as their continued existence depends on the overall user response. There are also 6 discussion boards, one Oekaki board (the two original boards were merged on April 2006), and one Flash upload board. Because 4chan is provided to the user free of charge and uses so much bandwidth, financing often becomes an issue. The 4chan staff regularly requests donations, however, there have been numerous problems relating to the receipt of funds through several different online payment services. These services include: PayPal , YowCow , and the Authorize.Net payment gateway. Historically, a large contributing factor to these problems has been the presence of a Lolicon imageboard, since the content violates many service provider's Terms and Conditions agreements. The random board (/b/) is infamous for the holding of theme days by small subsections of its userbase, when pictures following a certain theme are posted in large floods, i.e. ''Furry Friday'', traditionally held by a few dedicated users. For April 1 2005 (a Friday), they created a fake furry board as an April Fools joke that automatically banned anyone posting on it every hour. The incident is called April Furs Day. Memes and Catchphrases are also a large part of the 4chan environment, as in any community; however the apparent popularity of this board moves some people to attempt to "start" a new catchphrase by mere repetition. Although mostly unsuccessful, the notable case of the kopipe (Japanese for ''copy-paste'', a block of text that is saved and copied into other discussions) became a Meme through this method. The Random board /b/, so coded as a tip-of-the-hat to the Nijiura board of Futaba Channel , is considered to be the most sporadic and sometimes the most disturbing of 4chan's numerous imageboards; it is also the most popular board by far according to statistics released by staff and the sheer postcount (as of April 21st, /b/'s postcount has surpassed 7,000,000 posts, with most of the other boards still struggling to break 250,000). However, the humor and creativity of /b/'s residents (also known as "/b/tards", a derisive term which /b/ users have appropriated for themselves) have spawned enough of these intricate and hard-to-follow inside jokes that most newcomers find many posts incomprehensible. A detailed guide to the abundant catchphrases and memes of 4chan can be found here . ANONYMITY Since 4chan is an anonymous BBS, there is no need to post using a name, as posts made without the name field filled in are attributed to '' Anonymous ''. This has resulted in frequent jokes implying that all anonymous posts are made by the same person, using the name "Anonymous", and the enduring Catchphrase "Anonymous does not forgive." Content on the boards is volatile and many threads are pruned in a matter of hours, especially on /b/ with its relatively high postcount (and subsequently low retention rate). Many new users do not realize that the name field is completely optional, and thus post with names. However, the overwhelming majority of posters do not use any name at all, holding to the belief that names on an anonymous BBS have no meaning, and that people who attempt to "stand out from the crowd" and differentiate themselves from others are attempting to become Internet Celebrities . Of course, there is an established viewpoint that the use of a name is not in itself wrong; however, people who constantly post with a name are ridiculed and derided for their perceived Egotism . Many users in fact have names and Tripcodes ; however, some choose to not post with them unless their identity is completely relevant to the conversation at hand. Some anonymous users derisively refer to tripocode users as "tripcode Faggot s" or "tripfags". All moderators have names with tripcodes, but will generally post without a name even when performing bannings or posting information. In this case, the post is attributed to "Anonymous ## Mod". The primary exception is when 4chan founder moot posts information relating to changes in the site, though moot also frequently posts anonymously. Attempting to post using moot's tripcode ("faggot") results in the user being automatically (and permanently) banned on an IP level. At present, /b/ is in a "forced anonymous" mode to prevent people from entering their name. Occasionally people will enter a username within the email field to identify themselves, but without tripcodes this method remains unsecure. RELATED PROJECTS not4chan Due to problems stemming from the disruption of 4chan's use of online payment services, the Lolicon and Shotacon boards were moved offsite to not4chan , which incorporates its own niche request and BitTorrent boards. Not4chan is run on separate servers, has a separate administrative team, and is owned by a different individual. world4ch On December 25 , 2004 , a separate site was created by the administrators of 4chan using the same codebase as the discussion boards. world4ch (pronounced ''world four channel'') is an homage to the defunct world2ch, which itself was an earlier attempt to make an English version of 2channel , the BBS which started the entire phenomenon. It has a much broader range of discussion and no images may be posted; it is purely a text-based site, like 2channel. MEMES 4chan has given birth to a number of Meme s. Many of these take the form of Image Macro s; a user posts a picture, and others add text or edit the picture in other ways. Due to an overwhelming proliferation of image macros, they were banned from 4chan in early 2005. However, this did not apply to /b/, which officially has "no rules", and thus image macros remain a staple there. When a meme is believed to have been created by a single person or a small group posting it repeatedly rather than by it actually catching on with 4chan users as a whole, it is called a forced meme. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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