4chan
 | |
Type of site | Imageboard/TextBBS |
|---|---|
| Owner | "Moot" |
| Created by | "Moot" |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | None |
4chan (Japanese: Yotsuba, lit. "four leaves" Channel) is an English language imageboard, based on the famous Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel. It was first announced and created as an offshoot of the Something Awful forums, but soon attracted anime fans from around the world. On 4chan, many pictures (often related to anime and manga) are posted and critiqued. It is the 2,320th most visited site on the internet.[1]
Site description
The site is divided into discussion boards, image and upload boards, and oekaki boards. To date, there are 34 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.[citation needed] 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 known 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 or Caturday, traditionally held by a few dedicated users. For April 1 2005 (a Friday), the moderators created a fake furry board as an April Fools joke and left it up until April 3rd. Then every person posting to this board, furry or troll, was banned from the site. 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 popularity of the Random board over the other boards on 4chan moves some people to attempt to "start" a new catchphrase by mere repetition. Although mostly unsuccessful, the case of the kopipe (Japanese for copy-paste, a block of text that is saved and copied into other discussions) became a popularized meme on 4chan through this method. This style of rapid, nonsensical cutting and pasting is fondly called "copypasta" by the users of /b/.
/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, as well as the sheer postcount: [citation needed] as of June 18, 2006, /b/'s postcount has surpassed 9,200,000 posts, with most of the other boards still struggling to break 250,000. At one time, it took only 27 days to accumulate another 1,000,000 posts, meaning /b/'s posting rate has now surpassed an average of 37,000 posts per day. However, the humor 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, memes and wordfilters of 4chan can be found at WikiWorld.
Access to /b/ has recently been blocked to customers of NTL, BT Broadband and UKOnline using the Cleanfeed system.[1] It is unclear what warranted the IWF to add the board to their list of URLS, as Cleanfeed is meant to be used to block access to child pornography. While some child porn content may very rarely appear on the board, it is deleted within minutes, and the poster of the illegal material is banned. The 4chan TOS[2] and FAQ[3] also state that illegal content will not be tolerated, and will be punished appropriately. Strangely, none of the other boards on 4chan are blocked.
Anonymity
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4chan is an anonymous BBS that does not require the user to supply any personal information like name or email address before being able to post messages. 4chan does not reserve nickname like a traditional BBS board. Any person can use a nickname to his or her liking. 4chan provides trip codes to help those who wish to distinguish their posts from imposters who use the same nickname. Most users do not post their nickname with their messages unless it is completely relevant to the conversation at hand. Messages that are posted without the name field filled in are automatically labelled as "Anonymous" (or in the case of the random board, /b/, no name at all). As an ad hoc policy, posting anonymously is highly encouraged, and those who do not are often derided and ridiculed. Due to the perceived anonymity, morally questionable content are often posted on 4chan.
Content on the boards is often volatile and many threads are pruned in a matter of hours, especially on /b/ with its relatively high postcount (and subsequently low retention rate).
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.
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.
Please note that not4chan is illegal in Canada and possibly some other countries due to laws on child pornography extending to prohibit drawn media.
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. Recently, due to moot's intention to "unite the site", world4ch has been integrated into 4chan.org using the dis.4chan.org subdomain. World4ch's homepage now redirects to 4chan's homepage.
Memes
4chan has given birth to a number of memes. Many of these take the form of image macros; 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
References
- ^ "Alexa Traffic Rankings". Retrieved 2006-06-23.
External links
- 4chan.org
- 4chan news archive
- A list of 4chan memes and milestones
- Pedobear
- The Overchan List of non-Japanese imageboards