4chan Civil War Era
(Nov 2005 - Nov 2006)
4chan's momentous Civil War Era begins with moot's dismissal of moderators W.T. Snacks and Shii, seen by many anons as a harbringer of impending doom. And doom seemed imminent for all; with exponentially increasing immigration, 4chan's /b/ had begun to experience sharp cultural changes that left long time users bewildered and newfags unassimilated.
During this era, the (initially) inexperienced 4chan community gets it's first experience with internet warfare in the coalition attack against Ebaums World for it's plagarism, and later Haboo Hotel. Raids soon become commonplace on /b/ for the first time. School shooting plans and stadium bombings are posted by 4channers attracted to the sense of anonymity.
The massive increase of threads proportionally increased the rate of thread deletion. Although the ratio of good to bad content changed little, the sheer magnitude of forgettable, rehashed content created class conflict with "oldfags" and "newfags". There was a hankering for a romanticized depiction of /b/ as an idyllic place where all content was original, funny, and fresh. While this belief could not be farther from the truth, the cynical ideal quickly became a major tenet of 4chan culture.
4chan's nominal anonymity begins to attract a bunch of colorful groups to 4chan, such as Touhou fans, guro lovers, pedophiles, and worst of all, Furries. Most of these groups are given their own boards to keep them out of the other ones, but curiously, Furries have not. A persecution complex causes them to react badly to criticism, and minor distaste evolves into total hatred that threatens to destroy the boards.
When the 4chan mods begin to impose much tighter rules, a number of /b/tards leave 4chan for dead and abandon en masse. A declaration of independence is made that establishes Anonymous as a seperate group with it's home anywhere but 4chan. Ironically, during the following Golden Age, their diffusion of 4chan memes around the internet will only solidify it's position as the ultimate center of internet culture.
16 - 3M GET on /b/, with a picture of Waha and Pedobear and how they would be seen in America. The post linked to itself, prefixed by ">>3000000" and "TIME PARADOX/what a lame GET/Surely you jest!". It was, unfortunately, a tripfag get, posted by Pixel Hotness !Ol2RiO/0Ro. The GET was considered "meh" and was suspected to have been a modGET.
25 - moot announces that "things are looking up" and announces that many new features will be added to 4chan, including the DevBlog. He also begs for people to advertise because he needs money to construct additional pylons.
30 - moot and Snacks have a long fight over IRC as moot takes the site down for a few hours to fix some problems. moot rages against Snacks for being a lazy coder and threatens to take away his server access, and generally being very arrogant towards Snacks. They both go to sleep, and continue in the afternoon the next day for about three hours, until moot tells Snacks that he will remove his server access (along with his moderator powers), which he does shortly afterwards, making him unable to moderate or code. W.T. Snacks then "leaves" 4chan for good.
2 - moot challenges Xenon, a popular camwhore whose artwork is often spammed on /f/, to a camwhore battle, which moot loses. moot then tells Xenon that since he beat him, Xenon received temporary admin status and moot declared November 2 to be "the Day of Xenon". Xenon used his new privileges to change /b/'s CSS layout, resulting in /b/'s background becoming pink and the Powerpuff Girls theme song being embedded into every page. /b/'s title was also changed to "All Hail Xenon".
3 - moot, liking the idea of fucking around with /b/'s layout, changes /b/'s background to a seizure-inducing GIF flashing yellow and white, with the techno-country song "Cotton-Eye Joe" by Rednex embedded into the pages. /b/'s title was then changed to "ON A STEEL HORSE I RIDE", and a sticky was created in which the new layout could be discussed.
4 - Shortly after midnight, /b/'s layout was changed again to a pink McDonald's-themed background, with "moving Javascript Golden Arches" as Lurkmore put it, along with a 1980s McDonald's jingle added as background music. This hack lasted for three days and was hated by almost everybody. During this time, Xenon released the chatlogs from moot and Snacks' fight, causing massive outrage on /b/.
19 - moot posts a thread in /v/ asking for applications to be a janitor (person who can delete posts but not ban), which was up to that point unheard of. News of this spread to /b/, and many applications were received, and the janitors were implemented within the month.
30 - moot implements forced anonymous on /b/, with users unable to post with a name, tripcode, or subject, remaining until March 26, 2007, which, by then, it had definitely worn out its welcome.
6 - orz.4chan.org and cgi.4chan.org crash and are not fixed until three days later. Among the boards hosted by these servers were /gif/, /h/, /s/, and the secret /5/ board. orz was restored; however, /5/ was not.
17 - The three new servers purchased during the Donate or Die 2005 campaign are successfully brought online. Each served as a backup for three of 4chan's content servers, with nov.4chan.org backing up cgi, bin.4chan.org backing up zip, and tmp.4chan.org backing up orz (img was already backed up by dat.4chan.org). In addition, the new servers took care of all post submissions, speeding up the boards significantly.
18 - The day after the new servers are installed, 5M GET is achieved, during which the posting rate increased twenty fold. The servers were put to the test, with jumbo.4chan.org maxing out its line at 99.31 Mbit/s (~12.41 megabytes per second). The 5M GET was a picture of cat taken at an angle that made the cat look large, with the text "Needs more towercat". Users were divided between whether it was win or fail, although moot himself called it "more garbage" in the DevBlog.
23 - 6M GET was achieved on /b/, with a picture of Senator Bill Frist holding up a card and the text "In after 6M GET". Mostly considered a winGET due to the potential for epic shoops.
1 - /b/'s CSS is fucked with yet again, with the page layout being changed to tanasinn.org's layout, with a looping voice saying "Don't think. Feel and you'll be Tanasinn." Letters were randomly changed to the three-dot triangle symbol.
4 - BAD END. Moot was eaten by a shark. fin
6 - Three new trial boards are added: /co/ (Comics & Cartoons), /po/ (Papercraft & Origami), and /sp/ (Sports). Two days later, five more boards are added: /cgl/ (Cosplay & EGL), /ck/ (Food & Cooking), /mu/ (Music), /n/ (News), and /tv/ (Television).
14 - moot announces that the three servers purchased during Donate or Die 2005 have been allocated and are up and running and also announces that he will rarely use the front page for small updates from now on, instead choosing to announce them on the DevBlog and blotter. moot also announces that 4chan will have a panel at which he will appear at AnimeCentral 2006, which took place on May 4. The next day, moot removes most of the Wordfilter on /b/ and implements new ones.
15 - Almost all of the old wordfilters are gone, and some new ones were implemented.
20 - 7M GET is reached, but due to the high strain on the server, the file was deleted, and the post had no text. However, mods retrieved the MD5 data from the picture from their database and found that it was the popular image macro of Chopper Dave from Sealab 2021 shouting "UH OHHHHHHH". Also, 13-year-old Mitchell Henderson kills himself, after which /b/ raids his memorial MySpace. The "an hero" meme is born after a classmate of his posted a poem she written on his memorial account in which she constantly referred to him as "an hero".
11 - Eight threads are stickied, all consisting of modified versions of a picture from some Japanese show with a puppet riding on a motorcycle and the text "DSFARGEG". All posts were followed by (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) and DSFARGEG almost always resulted in a ban or a sticky.
18 - /b/ reaches 8M GET, one of the first GETs to be autostickied. It was considered a WinGET, due to the fact that it was a picture of George Zimmer and the text "HI, I'M GEORGE ZIMMER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF MEN'S WAREHOUSE. THIS IS 8000000 GET. I GUARANTEE IT".
15 - Comedian Tom Green starts his own late-night call-in talk show hosted from his own living room, hosted every night at 11 PM EST. Over the next three months, /b/ trolls his show, with around 10% of all calls on the show being prank calls from 4chan. /b/ also focused on a section of his show, "Girl Talk", which featured five stereotypical "dumb chicks" giving advice on relationships. The trolling of Girl Talk was so intense that it was canceled on August 19th because of it, combined with bad response from viewers.
17 - A group of anons crapflood the Zelda Guide Forums for fun, after which a member threatens to "hack" 4chan. This prompts their leader, known as "Captain Cornflake" (the name of his raid account on Zelda Guide Forums, he was anonymous on /b/) to post this information to /b/. Many Anonymous joined the raid following this post and crapflooded the forums nearly into oblivion during the night while the moderating team was asleep. As the moderators were surveying the carnage the next morning, one mod actually pleaded for /b/ to stop and said he would give them their own board to spam, which just increased the raid. The forums now require manual admin verification, which keeps out many legit users, resulting in an anon victory.
19 - Yet another epic raid occurs, with /b/ destroying naruto-kun.com after a user there posted about their dislike of 4chan. Following a major pornflood after which the site admin threatened to sic the FCC on 4chan, one anon discovered a source code document hidden on the site containing the site's SQL database password (which Anon posted on /b/) as well as loads of unchecked MySQL injection vulnerabilities. Anonymous also discovered that the fucking dumbass's FTP had the same password as his MySQL database, following which tons of anons logged in to the FTP account and deleted everything, destroying the entire site, including premium accounts and the database, and bringing the site down for two days.
4 - The first of many in a series of /b/ CSS hacks in July as the background was turned red and the text yellow. July 10th saw the theme song from "Bill Nye the Science Guy" embedded into the background (no layout changes however), while July 15th harbored a sticky in which "Also Sprach Zarathrustra" by composer Richard Strauss (2001: A Space Odyssey theme song) was embedded. Toward the end of July, ten threads were stickied, taking up the entire first page of /b/, and the theme song from Inspector Gadget was embedded into /b/.
7 - 10M GET is reached, considered the most failed GET of all time, simply a picture of Hazuki from the anime Tsukuyomi -Moon Phase- on a merry-go-round, with the text "hazukiget". Ironically, it was much later revealed to be a modGET, but with no trickery involved; Shii (4chan admin; coder of discussion boards) got the GET out of pure luck, proving that all modGETs, staged or not, will always be fail.
8 - 4chan returns after nearly a day of downtime. There has not been any honest answer in regards to the cause, some claim it was due to 4chan's bandwidth provider, Cogent, and the image flood to reach the 10000000 GET; to reports of the FBI seizing the hardware in search of CP.
12 - 4chan (along with Encyclopedia Dramatica, YTMND, GNAA, Bantown, and others) storm Habbo Hotel, a virtual online role playing game where, among other things, people pay real-life money for online money (which is pretty stupid when you think about it). Thousands of "Nigra" (black characters with afros wearing business suits, the official raid costume) filled nearly every room on the site, especially the Pool Deck, during which the pool was blocked for hours because the pool had AIDS. The sheer number of Anonymous was so great that the Habbo mods could not ban the nigras faster than the accounts were being created, resulting in the mods having no choice but to reset their server, after which the raid continued for a few more hours on Habbo servers in other countries, particularly the German Habbo Hotel (where the nigras would form in swastika patterns). The Habbo raid is often considered /b/'s best and spawned the "Nigra" meme and the " Pool's closed" meme. The word "AIDS" was later wordfiltered on Habbo as a result of the raid.
16 - Moderators make a sticky of a girl known as Ban-Chan, knowing full well that it is [[CP]].' Later that day, in a hypocritical statement, moderators inform 4chan that there will be less tolerance for posting illegal things.
20 - moot announces that 4chan will have a panel at Otakon 2006 from August 4-6 in Baltimore, Maryland, with enough seating capacity to allow 680 people compared to the 230 from Otakon 2005.
22 - /v/ reaches 1M GET, considered to be one of the greatest non-/b/ gets of all time. The GET was a picture of PONG, the first-ever video game, thus a very fitting get for /v/ (at the time, at least...). A small group of users believe that the GET was staged, citing an overload of Final Fantasy VII pics as the reason.
4 - Otakon 2006 starts and so does 4chan's panel. Many important 4channers are there, including moot, shut, Shii, and the apparent return of W.T. Snacks. An epic sermon was delivered by "Reverend" Lemmy Caution to spread the gospel of Raptor Jesus, and moot even created a new board, /con/ (Conventions), for people at the con to use, which was deleted a few hours after the con ended.
12 - The 4chan :codes: (words put between colons that are turned into smilies, like how posting :happy: would display a happy emoticon, for example) are released to the site. They are soon spammed all over the place, and threads are pruned extremely quickly. Images and .gifs of "eng101", "w00t", "SAGE" (the classic blue Sega image edited to spell sage), "owned", "iceburn", the classic flashing "5", the green 4chan "cone", "sweatdrop", and "Hard Gay" were posted in large amount, often causing threads to be derailed in seconds.
22 - A group of Anonymous go on a midnight raiding spree, eventually attracting tons (~100) of Anonymous to their posse in raid threads. They charged, destroying Proana.us (a pro-anorexia community), deleting all accounts on the site. After this (by now around 1:00 AM of August 23), they attempted to raid the myg0t forum, but the raid failed to due myg0t's massive size. Instead, they raided teenbabynet.org (not only furries, but teenage furries with diaper fetishes), locking the forum and rendering it totally unviewable by 10:00 AM. At around this time, they turned their attention to WikiFur, leaving it in complete disarray. With mods extremely worried, moot does something drastic around noon of August 23...
23 - /b/-day - moot (in a somewhat justifiable fit of anger) posts a sticky announcing that anyone who posts illegal content will get you permabanned and possibly arrested, and that even people who REPLY to illegal threads will receive a two-week global ban, with the definition of "illegal threads" referring to CP, jailbait, personal info, and raids (some of /b/'s most cherished traditions). He warns of a new "report thread" option. The sticky was deleted and replaced with a new sticky restating the policy, which was then destickied and restickied over and over by moot and some other mod.
Due to the fact that this policy was introducing rules to /b/ for the first time, rage ensues and the Civil War Era begins. CP/JB is posted in defiance, multiple "WTF IS THIS SHIT," Hitler references, then there was a sudden universal reset. /b/ had no posts, and the sticky was gone.
A new and softer sticky was posted, only to be destickified and a repetition of the previous sticky with new information re-stickied in a moderator battle. This pattern continued until 4chan crashed, leaving 14 boards, including /b/, /an/, /b/, /c/, /cm/, /g/, /k/, /m/, /o/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /t/, /v/, and /w/ inaccessible. A civil war broke out, with many /b/tards permanently leaving 4chan and taking up new homes at 7chan, iiChan, [2ch.ru], and 420chan.
25 - /b/ is restored with img.4chan.org, inciting floods by opposers of the mod's new policies. Later this day www.anonib.com/invasions/ is flooded (presumably) by 4channers with desu and images of Suiseiseki, leading to the board crashing and all of the content being deleted. Debates and flamewars are sparked across /b/ between both opposing sides. In addition, /b/ in general had been divided into two factions of /b/tards with the original /b/ claiming the majority. Many /b/tards trolled both sides and managed to spark a few debates over which board was better. One side saying the other had gotten boring while the other side claiming the others weren't real /b/tards. Eventually the threads burned themselves out and the people went to bed.
26 - Despite all the internet drama; 4chan /b/ is online and back to running as normal. Floods by those angry with the more vigilant enforcement of long-standing rules against illegal content have mostly subsided. The only remaining conflicts have led to meme wars and a competitive "Who's better than who?" flood war. However, the rage slowly calmed and the major populace of both 7chan and 4chan grew tired of it. What was left were threads developed with the hopes of cultivating peace, harmony, and friendship, but ultimately things ended in bitter separation.
On the other hand, the mass migration of the era caused many anons to reenter popular sites, in turn exposing 4chan memes and culture to the rest of the internet. For better or worse, this began the so-called "Golden Age" of 4chan, as the America of internet popular culture.
4 - World-famous Australian "croc hunter" Steve Irwin is killed by a stingray barb to the heart while filming a documentary. /b/ is immediately flooded with this information and one of the first threads to announce it was stickied for a week, becoming the most replied-to thread in /b/ history with slightly over 5,200 replies (later beaten by the "#fortune" sticky on April 27, 2007). Many Rule 34s and general parodies are posted in /b/ during that time.
11 - In response to Steve Irwin's death, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and hatred for Habbo Hotel, /b/ starts another massive raid on Habbo, with around 5,000 Anonymous partaking in the raid (~600 nigras on the Pool Deck alone). They blocked every single room, announcing that not only did the pool have AIDS, but also had stingrays as well.
1 - /b/ celebrates its third anniversary, and places blue-and-pink striped party hats on the top of each thread. /b/tards made pictures interacting with the hats, causing many threads that are epic win (a good chunk of epic thread screencaps are from this day).
20 - Jake Brahm turns himself in to authorities following a now-infamous copypasta that he had written, reposting it around 40 times within the previous 30 days, in which he warned of simultaneous terrorist attacks against seven football stadiums across the United States on October 22nd. Two days before this, on October 18, the Department of Homeland Security was notified about the copypasta and attempted to track down and arrest the creator of it; when the Wauwatosa, Wisconsin police department (Brahm's town of residence) received a tip on October 20, he turned himself in and faces up to 20 years imprisonment, thus making him the only person to have been party v& for his actions as of 2007. The phrase "DON'T MESS WITH FOOTBALL", uttered by FBI agent Les Wiser during a news report on Brahm's arrest, has since become a meme.
7 - After moot doesn't pay the bills, the site goes down for two days, during which a page was put up explaining that the servers were gone because moot didn't pay and that the problem would be fixed within "24-48 hours" (crossed out with "FIFTY-BILLION YEARS" written next to it). Many /b/tards, looking for a temporary imageboard to go to until 4chan returned, caused a major spike in traffic for other *chans. 7chan and 12chan were destroyed by the flood of traffic and suffered severe downtime. The Civil War Era ends at this point after /b/tards realize there is no suitable subsitute for 4chan.
30 - moot announces that more banner ads from AdBrite will be added to 4chan in December due to the fact that donations are no longer possible. As a result of the extra money, 4chan becomes faster after moot uses the money for extra bandwidth capacity.