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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 2,339th most visited site on the Internet according to Alexa Internet's statistics.•
Site description The site is divided into discussion boards, image and upload boards, and drawing boards. Currently, there are 35 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. The site's other boards include an oekaki board, an Artwork/Critique board, an upload board that is used for the uploading and discussion of Flash files,and 19 text-based discussion boards. The discussion boards were once hosted on a separate site called "world4ch" (pronounced world four channel) until they were integrated into 4chan using the subdomain dis.4chan.org, and they use the same codebase as 4chan's previous discussion boards. The discussion boards were initially created by 4chan's administrators and hosted on world4ch as an homage to the defunct world2ch, which itself was a site created during as an earlier attempt to create an English version of 2channel, the Japanese site which started the entire anonymous BBS phenomenon. Because 4chan is provided to its users free of charge and consumes such a large amount of bandwidth, the site's financing often becomes an issue. To avoid long periods of downtime caused by a severe lack of funds, such as the four "deaths" that plagued the site during its first year of existence, 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 had been the presence of lolicon and shotacon imageboards on 4chan, since such content violated many service provider's Terms and Conditions agreements. The disruptions of 4chan's ability to receive funds through the use of these online payment services eventually caused 4chan's moderators to move the lolicon and shotacon boards to a separate website called "not4chan.org", which was run by some of 4chan's moderators. Sometime mid-April, the not4chan.org domain began giving no response, and it was assumed that the moderators had shut down the site. At the end of August, an imageboard with the not4chan title appeared under the "not4chan.us" domain. This has been confirmed to not officially exist as a part of the 4chan network, and was created by someone referring to himself as "narunet" as an apparent attempt to revive the site. /b/ The Random board /b/, named after the Nijiura board of Futaba Channel, is 4chan's most popular board by far according to statistics which have been released by 4chan staff, as well as the sheer post count: As of 2006-10-28, /b/'s post count has surpassed 15,000,000 posts with most of the other boards still struggling to break 250,000; the anime and video games boards (/a/ and /v/, respectively) are the only other boards to have accumulated more than 1,000,000 posts. After /b/'s 14,000,000th post was made on 2006-10-08, it took only 20 days to accumulate another 1,000,000 posts on /b/, meaning /b/'s posting rate has now surpassed an average of nearly 50,000 posts per day. The humor of /b/'s many residents (also known as "/b/tards", a derisive term which /b/ users have appropriated for themselves) has spawned enough intricate and hard-to-follow inside jokes that most newcomers find many posts incomprehensible. /b/ is known for the holding of theme days by small subsections of its user base, when pictures following a certain theme are posted in large floods, i.e. Furry Friday or Caturday (Saturday). For 2005-04-01 (a Friday), the moderators created a fake furry board as an April Fools joke and left it up until April 3rd. Every person who posted to the joke board was then banned from 4chan for an extended period of time. This incident is referred to as April Furs Day. Blocks in the UK Access to /b/ was blocked to customers of NTL, BT Broadband and UKOnline in early June of 2006. • However, some of the percieved inconsistencies in this theory are directly contradicted by claims made by 4chan's staff and other sources. For example, on 2006-08-05, during a 4chan panel at Otakon in which he was fielding questions from the audience, moot, the owner of 4chan, said that the blockings of /b/ and some of the other boards have indeed been a result of the Cleanfeed system. /b/'s front page has also been removed from Google search results due to a notice reportedly sent by the IWF to Google. •• NFL bomb threat hoax
Anonymity 4chan is an anonymous BBS that does not require (but does allow) the user to supply any personal information like name or email address before being able to post messages. Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have any kind of registration system. Any person can use any nickname to his or her liking, making it possible to post under the name of someone else by simply entering their name into the posting form. In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcodes as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity. As the concept of anonymous posting is a defining feature of Futaba-like imageboards, the use of tripcodes generates controversy amongst 4chan users. Many posters who use them risk being singled out and ridiculed, often with the use of insults like "tripfag". As anonymous posting causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", a running gag on 4chan is the idea that Anonymous is in fact a single person. Use of the (thus far) uncrackable secure tripcode is extremely rare. The complete immunity to trolling and impersonation these tripcodes provide is viewed as a character flaw. As such, secure tripcode users receive even harsher treatment than normal tripcode users. The /b/ board differs from the others in that it has "forced.anonymous" (a board software variable) enabled, removing the name field (as well as tripcodes) from the posting form and all posts entirely. 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 Memes 4chan has given birth to a number of memes, a select few of which have become popular enough to spread outside of 4chan and become widely recognized Internet phenomena. For example, some memes have even affected the work of several webcomic artists. Notable examples of webcomic artists that have been influenced by such memes include Josh Lesnick of the webcomic Girly, • Another popular form of meme is "copypasta" (a variation on copy and paste). This meme consists of the text of a previous post, usually a rant or boastful claim, continually reposted by users other than the original author. The meme's primary intent is to mock the original poster; however, there is the ancillary "benefit" of garnering reaction from users who never read the inital post. Additionally, users often alter the copypasta in a humorous way. When a meme is believed to have been created as a result of a single person or a small group reposting it repeatedly to increase the meme's popularity, rather than letting it gain widespread acceptance and recognition in a more natural way, it is called a forced meme. Forced memes are generally disliked by the community, but the observance of some (e.g., "Milhouse is not a meme") are actually memes. Ultimately, few forced memes ever attain the levels of popularity and acceptance afforded to naturally occurring memes. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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