Imageboard

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3 major imageboards: Futaba Channel, 4chan, and iichan, along with the Overchan index.

An imageboard is an online bulletin board system that revolves around the posting of images. Popular imageboards can be hit with bandwidth consumption reaching up to eighteen terabytes per month and beyond.

Characteristics of imageboards

Imageboards could be most simply described as a bulletin board focused on pictures instead of text posts; they share many of the same structures, including separate forums for separate topics, as well as similar audiences. However, imageboards are much more transitory with content—on some boards (especially high-traffic ones) the thread deletion time can be as little as 24 hours. The most popular English-language imageboards tend to revolve around Japanese culture such as CG artwork of anime. In Japan, where imageboards are many times more common, topics vary widely, including trains and news.

Imageboards are also different from online galleries in that most of the works posted are not made by the poster, but instead are taken from other online sources—galleries, other imageboards, and edited pictures. Content is rarely original to the imageboard.

Most imageboards allow anonymous posting and use the 2channel (2ch for short) system of tripcodes instead of registration. Anonymity is considered to be one of the advantages of an imageboard, with the logic that it discourages holding grudges and the overdevelopment of one's own self-importance, making internet trolls less likely. If a user wants to reply to a thread but not bump it, they can put the word "sage" in the E-mail field. It is considered polite to sage when replying to your own thread, but rarely followed. Imageboards coupled with discussion forums usually use a 2ch-like system which also allows anonymous posting.

The first English language imageboard was 4chan, which was founded by a small group of members of the Something Awful Forums, and has been in a state of perpetual flux since that time, due to financial, bandwidth and hosting issues. After 4chan shut down for around the third time, iichan was created to replace it. 5chan was also launched at around the same time. 4chan eventually returned, only to fail again, with iichan buckling to a lack of income at the same time. 5chan had been taken down by its webhost only a few weeks before. Currently, the two major boards are 4chan and iichan.

In Japan, the imageboard is a much larger cultural symbol, with one guess putting the total number of posts for Futaba's three /b/ boards (two of which are no longer linked to by the main site) at 56,000,000 and rising. ¹

List of Imageboard software

• Futaba, the original board script. (Japanese)
• Futallaby, derived from Futaba.
• Wakaba, backend coded from scratch.
• gazo-ch (Japanese)
• Joyful Note (Japanese)
• ImageBoard 2.0, imageboard module for dragonfly cms.
• Thorn, a flexible new script written in PHP.
• Seed Support, gives scripts above the ability to be seeded, similar to the way seeders seed BitTorrent

Futaba Channel

Main article: [[:Futaba Channel]]

Futaba Channel (ふたば☆ちゃんねる), or "Futaba" for short, is a popular, anonymous BBS and imageboard system based in Japan. Its imageboards usually do not distinguish between pornographic and "clean" content, but there is a strict barrier between two-dimensional (drawn) and three-dimensional (CG and photographic) pictures that is heavily enforced and debated.

4chan

Main article: [[:4chan]]

4chan (Japanese: Yotsuba, lit. "four leaves") was intended to be an English language version of the famous Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel. It is by far the most popular English language imageboard website. 4chan was first announced in the Something Awful forums, and attracted many fans from the website along with anime fans from around the world. 4chan is best known for its infamous "Random" board, a virtually lawless zone of trolling, comedy, memes and inside jokes.

iichan

iichan (formerly idlechan) was a replacement for 4chan when 4chan shut down, but when 4chan was revived iichan stayed up. It developed its own following of a small group of people who preferred iichan's slow pace and other differences from 4chan.

On 24 October 2004, iichan was closed due to lack of funds and "Wakachan", a distributed network over many servers, was set up in its place. Wakachan is notable for providing many boards that cater to niche interests, such as maids and miko. On 16 April 2005 Wakachan was merged into a newly revived iichan.

iichan has created memes of its own, including Wakaba-chan, the Wakaba frog, and Kareha-sama, who were mascots/memes for the Wakaba imageboard and Kareha message board software used by iichan. Born in the iichan oekaki boards, they are entirely unrelated to the other imageboards and are some of the few genuine non-photoshopped art-based memes that english-speaking imageboards have created. Tophat or the monocle dog was also developed on iichan's oekaki boards. This cartoon-style dog says "Pip Pip" on his morning constitutionals. Also, the demand of "$540", often quoted in discussions about 5chan, is the amount Thock, iichan's owner, lost due to PayPal locking his acount.

A few members of iichan have banded together to form iitran, a small, loosely organized manga scanlation and anime fansub group, focusing on the works of Kaoru Mori. Their current projects are the ongoing Emma manga and anime.

Other English boards

There are a few other English-language imageboards scattered around the internet:

• 1chan is a site devoted to pictures of trains. It also hosts the Overchan index.
• 420chan, a small imageboard noted for its drug boards.
• GUROchan is a board for Ero-guro, one of the only English language ones in existence due to Terms of Service and content limitations on most servers.
• onechan is a German imageboard similar to 4chan. It is one of the few non-English/Asian language imageboards.
• koChan is a small imageboard that features boards referencing 4chan and Bridget. In addition to a 4chan-like variety of sections, it added shota sections after the Burichan shutdown.
• Fchan, an erotic furry imageboard rumored to have emerged from the "Furry Friday" gag board on 4chan. Though popular, it's become notorious among the furry community for its seemingly-unceasing drama over picture content and art distribution, administration that is considered either too strict or lax in policies.
• WTFux is a small community populated mostly with former members of other imageboards, especially those who were banned from 4chan's Random board. It is most well known for the camwhores board and for having noticeable more "registered" (tripcode) users than other boards. WTFux was also notable for being one of a handful of popular English-language cat imageboards. The site was shut down in November 2005 by the company hosting the boards. WTFux has returned and is available at http://wtfux.org/

Dead Boards

• Burichan was an imageboard dedicated to shota, hermaphroditic, and furry material. The name came from Bridget, a young boy character from the Guilty Gear series who dresses as a girl. It shut down in September 2005 due to lack of resources, the admin being completely fed up with his users, and mod apathy.
• 5chan was another imageboard, notable for its non-anonymous discussion and imageboards (browsing the archives beyond a certain page required an account with HentaiKey.com; the discussion boards required registration). It had roughly 40 different subcategories, most of which were for pornography. It was shut down on 6 August, 2004 due to a personal conflict between its administrator, Zabadab, and the maintainers of iichan. On 17 September, 2004, it was revived for a short period of time, but on 23 October of the same year it was shut down permanently because of a misunderstanding between Zabadab and the server owner, Numbus. Altogether, it lasted about three months.

External links

• Overchan (a full directory of English-language imageboards)
• The Society for the Study of Modern Image Board Culture

Please note that many of the following links may include pornographic content on some of their pages, however, the entry pages should be worksafe.

• 4chan
• iichan The core of the WAKAchan network
• moeboard A Korean image board that focuses on anime girl images
• zero channel (a site dedicated to archiving imageboard content)
• wtfux Back from death!
• FChan A messageboard that revolves mainly around images of furry porn.