4chan - Background

Background

4chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of a then-15-year-old student from New York City named Christopher Poole, who posts as "moot". Prior to starting 4chan, Poole had been a regular participant on the Something Awful forums. He intended 4chan to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") imageboard. Poole originally used the Futaba Channel to obtain anime-related images, and liked the concept of a message board where people anonymously shared images, which eventually led to his idea of creating a similar English-based website. During the creation of 4chan, he obtained the source code for the Futaba Channel website, and translated the Japanese text into English using Altavista's Babelfish online translator. When he first created the website, it had only two boards: "/a/ – Anime/General" and "/b/ – Anime/Random"; over time more boards were created, and /b/ was eventually renamed to simply "/b/ – Random".

The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards. The website is split into six categories: Japanese culture, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). These provide for on-topic boards to discuss anime, manga, technology, sport, photography, music, hentai, torrents, travel, physical fitness, as well as a random board. 4chan originally hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called "world4ch", but these were later moved to the dis.4chan.org subdomain. The site has had at least one employee, a programmer whom Poole met via online Tetris. All other moderators are volunteers. The boards that attract the largest amount of traffic, from greatest to least, are /b/ (Random), /v/ (Video games), /a/ (Anime and Manga), and /s/ (board intended for sharing explicit images).

During the early days of 4chan, the boards that originally existed were the anime, random, cute, hentai, and yaoi boards; a lolicon board also existed at /l/, but after being disabled for a week around the turn of the year 2004 it was removed in October 2004. The /g/ board also was initially dedicated to guro, before it was deleted and later remade as the "technology" board. During 2004, 4chan briefly went offline, although the site returned fully online a few months later. Following 4chan's return, non-anime related boards, such as the weapons, automobile, and video games boards, were introduced. In 2008, the "Japan/General" board at /jp/ was created for topics that did not fit under the anime and manga category of /a/; /jp/ was later renamed to "Otaku Culture".

4chan is one of the Internet's most trafficked imageboards, according to the Los Angeles Times. 4chan's Alexa rank is generally around 700, though it has been as high as number 56 at times. It is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth; as a result, its financing has often been problematic. Poole acknowledges that donations alone cannot keep the site online, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet. However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content. In January 2009, Poole signed a new deal with an advertising company; in February 2009, he was $20,000 in debt and the site was continuing to lose money. The 4chan servers were moved from Texas to California in August 2008, which upgraded the maximum bandwidth throughput of 4chan from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s.

Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously. Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as "Anonymous" or "moot". In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcodes as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity. As making a post without filling in the "Name" field causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users. Moderators generally post without a name even when performing sysop actions. A "capcode" may be used to attribute the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", although moderators often post without the capcode. In a 2011 interview on Nico Nico Douga, Poole explained that there are approximately 20 volunteer moderators active on 4chan. 4chan also has a junior moderation team, called "janitors", who may delete posts or images and suggest that the normal moderation team ban a user, but who can not post with a capcode. Revealing oneself as a janitor is grounds for immediate dismissal.

In January 2011, Poole announced the deletion of the /r9k/ ("ROBOT9000") and /new/ (News) boards, saying that /new/ had become devoted to racist discussions, and /r9k/ no longer served its original purpose of being a test implementation of xkcd's ROBOT9000 script. During the same year, the /soc/ board was created in an effort to reduce the number of socialization threads on /b/. /r9k/ was restored on October 23, 2011, along with /hc/ ("Hardcore", previously deleted), /pol/ (a rebranding of /new/) and the new /diy/ board, in addition to an apology by Poole where he recalls how he criticized the deletion of Encyclopedia Dramatica, and realized that he had done the same.

4chan has been the target of occasional denial of service attacks. For instance, on December 28, 2010, 4chan went down due to a such an attack. Christopher Poole said on his blog "We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.—an exclusive club!"

In 2010 4chan implemented reCAPTCHA in an effort to thwart spam arising from JavaScript worms. Later in November 2011, 4chan made the transition to utilising CloudFlare following a series of distributed denial of service attacks. The 4chan imageboards were rewritten in valid HTML5/CSS3 in May 2012 in an effort to improve client-side performance.

As of September 28, 2012, 4chan introduced a "4chan pass", which when purchased "allows users to bypass typing a CAPTCHA verification when posting and reporting posts on the 4chan image boards". The money raised from the passes will go towards supporting the site.