Overview
2ch was opened on 30 May 1999 in a college apartment in Conway, Arkansas, on the campus of University of Central Arkansas by Hiroyuki Nishimura, known simply as "Hiroyuki" (ひろゆき?)
The website's scale and management style are unique. It has more than 600 active boards (Japanese ita (板?)) such as "Social News", "Computers", and "Cooking", making it the most comprehensive forum in Japan. Each board usually has around 600 active threads. Each thread, in turn, contain up to 1000 comments which are anonymous.
2ch operates on innovative forum software which is a major departure from 1980s bulletin board systems or 1990s forum software such as vBulletin. Most importantly, nearly everything is done anonymously and voluntarily. A posting in a thread will either "age" (あげ/アゲ?) (bump, from Japanese "ageru" (あげる/アゲる/上げる?), to raise) or "sage" (さげ/サゲ?) (not bump, from Japanese "sageru" (さげる/サゲる/下げる?), to lower) its position in the thread list; "sage-ed" posts have no effect on its position. Threads may be "sage-ed" if the thread is disliked, or to keep it from cluttering the main thread list, or to prevent idle browsers from flooding in and trolling the thread at the top of the list.
Each thread is limited to 1000 postings at maximum, and a new thread must be opened (by some anonymous user, self-elected during discussion) to continue discussion. This prevents the rotting of old threads and keeps active topics refreshed. It also saves bandwidth, which is a major concern on a forum as large as 2ch. Old threads are moved to a paid archive, then eventually deleted.
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