4chan Genesis
And Legion said, Let the newfags lurk and learn the way. They shall be Anonymous, and forgive not, and never forget, and raep the weak: and catch the Phish of the sea, and throw shit at the fowl of the air, and lord over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. - The Book of Genesis, The Book of Anon
4chan is founded in 2003 as an english-language version of Futaba Channel. The site introduces a simpler and freer method of communication that Something Awful users have always dreamed of. It soon becomes wildly popular as a new home for banned ADTRW refugees, who in turn spread word across the internet. During this era, the first tenets of 4chan culture are created by ADTRW and 2chan. 4chan links quickly replace Futaba Channel links on ADTRW. Once Lowtax begins to create a Soviet-style police state of arbitrary rules on SA (which cost users their $15 accounts), 4chan quickly rose beyond the tired, old site.
The massive popularity of 4chan quickly becomes taxing, and moot just barely manages to keep it alive, through ads or donations. The controversial content becomes a major point of contention, closing 4chan at least 3 times. The majority of the boards take shape during this time, and the first tenets of 4chan culture are created under influence by ADTRW and 2chan.
Originally written on Jonathan's Reference Pages.
4chan was founded in 2003 by a kid from an IRC channel I visited at the time. It got popular purely by accident and when costs began to spiral out of control we told him the site was doomed to failure. If I had known it one day become a dominant source of Internet culture with five hundred million pageviews per month and an Alexa Traffic Rank in the global top 1,000 websites, I might have written more of this down at the time.
4chan's original culture really goes back to a board called Something Awful (SA), a major source of Internet culture in the early '00s. Some time between 18th April 2001 and 15th May 2001, SA added an anime board called ADTRW to separate the anime chat from the other boards. Members of ADTRW started Raspberry Heaven, a DC++ filesharing hub for anime, named for the ending theme to a 2002 series called Azumanga Daioh. Raspberry Heaven was itself a spinoff of SADCHUB, the Something Awful Direct Connect Hub, created to separate the anime from the serious business.
The Raspberry Heaven anime hub had a linked IRC channel, originally at the MircX network but later Pyoko IRC. Here, moot and several ADTRW members were regulars.
Sooner or later, Raspberry Heaven discovered Futaba Channel (2chan.net), a Japanese image board, and for a while the channel was full of 2chan image links.2chan itself was conceived as a replacement for 2channel (2ch.net). This was the now unrelated text-based BBS featured in the film and TV series Densha Otoko.
At some point, 2chan blocked non-Japanese from posting. At the time we thought this was to keep out us English-posting gaijin devils, but I think it later turned out they were blocking trolls from South Korea. moot, at this point just an average hub member on Raspberry Heaven, registered the site's original domain, 4chan.net.
<moot> regging 4CHAN.net
<moot> FOUR CHAN
<moot> brace for faggotry
<Negi-Sensei> What is the difference between 4chan and 2chan?
<n0> 2
<Lost_Technology> 4chan is twice as good.
<moot> its TWO TIMES THE CHAN MOTHERFUCK
<Lost_Technology> Did someone seriously register 4chan?
<n0> Time for 8chan.
According to Everything Shii Knows, moot registered 4chan.net on 29th September 2003. The first news post dates the site as opening two days later on 1st October.
The foundation of 4chan fired up much of the English anonymous forum community, especially in world2ch. The archived thread here gives a rare look into what was happening at the time.
RH went from full of 2chan links to full of 4chan links. I remember pasting links in other channels, too. The ease of which a person could post content and share links like this was a major factor in the success of 4chan, and other top websites later replicated this model: Youtube (video), Imageshack (long-term image storage), and Rapidshare (files).
4chan drew many of its initial users from Raspberry Heaven and Something Awful's ADTRW board. Early 4chan thus inherited a lot of the Something Awful humour and memes, like image macros. The original 4chan staff and moderators were drawn from ADTRW. The spinning head title image is an Australian ADTRW member called Roobar. The "Dot net fo'shizzle!" title image is by ADTRW poster Rick_Feynman, who coined the term "ZOMG!" (we pronounce it "Zoh my god!") in an ICQ conversation with fellow SA goon Hannibal (see also this 2003 USENET posting); although they admit the term was used before then, it wasn't widely used until popularized by Something Awful and 4chan.
moot later left Raspberry Heaven, as he was cool for us. Raspberry Heaven DC hub would close some years later as BitTorrent took over from filesharing hubs and Pyoko IRC closed its doors.
* Quits: moot (HELLO@ool-44c644df.dyn.optonline.net)
<cathead> moot has left us
<cathead> what do we have left to live for
<microwiz> let's go waste more of his bandwidth
29 - moot registers 4chan.net, just because it looks like 2chan.net (Futaba Channel), which was an ADTRW pastime. Originally, his only intention was to own an e-mail address @4chan.net, but he quickly gets to thinking. regging 4CHAN.net FOUR CHAN brace for faggotry
1 - 4chan is officially founded by moot, a member of the Something Awful forums, intended to be used as an English version of 2chan, a Japanese imageboard created in 2001 out of an extremely popular Japanese BBS called 2channel. moot creates /b/ (Random) and makes a topic at Something Awful about the website, which is received extremely well. moot also announces the site on world2ch.
moot holds a contest to decide what 4chan's logo should be. In three hours of creating the contest, around 50 banners are submitted, after which moot decides to simply make it so that it would cycle through the best banners randomly every time a page was loaded. Members from both the ADTRW board and also the FYAD (Fuck You and Die) board begin filling up 4chan.
2 - 4chan's hosting company receives an e-mail from moot's friend (or right now, enemy) Shii complaining about lolikon and guro posted in /b/, to which moot writes back that neither of the two are illegal. Later in the day, moot creates a second board, /h/ (Hentai).
6 - moot creates four new imageboards: /c/ (Anime/Cute), /d/ (Hentai/Alternative), /w/ (Wallpapers/Anime), and /y/ (Yaoi), along with an oekaki BBS board. The /y/ board is unique in that (at the time) it was user-moderated. moot also fixes a retention bug that cause posts to be deleted too quickly and raised the maximum number of log entries for each board from 500 to 5000 (2000 for /b/).
9 - Two new imageboards are created: /g/ (Guro), and /s/ (Sexy Beautiful Women), both of which are user-moderated. moot announces that 4chan received over one million hits in the past six days and may be looking for sponsors to help pay the bills.
16 - 4chan is announced to 2chan, resulting in a massive amount of Japanese users coming to the site, at least doubling the traffic of all boards and decoupling the traffic of /c/. The onslaught of unexpected traffic causes /b/ to crash for two days. 4chan dies for the first time.
21 - 4chan.net is moved to United Colo, a collocation and webhosting company, following a discussion on the Something Awful forums.
29 - moot makes various changes to the imageboards, including Japanese character display and adding the day of the week to posts. moot also announces that the boards will now use a MySQL database (a modified form of 2chan's futabaSQL called yotsubaSQL) and added a robots.txt file to the site to keep out some auto-downloaders, along with an .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking. /g/ temporarily suffered a problem with Tripcode, and all boards had a problem where users said their posts were not appearing and they were getting a Japanese error message. Both of these were fixed within the day by modifying the anti-spam script and fixing the imageboards' .php files, respectively.
1 - moot begs for donations in the first of a long history of times, complaining that the site is running extremely slowly and that he would have to block Japanese domains unless something was done, and that the cost of moot's server bill was now $400/month. moot warns that 4chan will die slowly unless enough donations are received.
2 - moot resets img.4chan.net and deletes all posts, drops all mySQL tables, and reduces the maximum post limit for each board from 3000 to 750. MySQLd and PHP were optimized, and moot laments that he cannot implement auto-pruning after ten pages like 2chan.
8 - Two more imageboards are added: /a/ (Anime) and /l/ (Lolikon). moot announces the future release of a database of archived 4chan threads that requires a paid subscription, which had been suggested by Spork, a mod, a week before.
10 - moot and his friend thatdog begin testing on the beta-archive and set up a new board, /r/ (Trains) to test it with. The same day, thatdog registers 1chan.net and sets up a similar train board on his site. /r/ quickly fills with /b/tards in order to help moot out.
20 - Apex tells moot that 4chan has to go. The following days ushered a lot of down time due to site changes/problems. 4chan dies for the second time.
22 - The site returns following two days of downtime after the server is reformatted to RH9, making the site considerably faster. moot deletes /r/ (Trains) and announces that the thread archive will be up shortly. The next day, the RH9 apt-get repository was cleared out, causing GIFs not to be thumbnailed correctly for a few hours.
16 - A new board is created, /t/ (Torrents), along with a torrent tracker. moot tightens the rules regarding /h/ and /l/ and cracks down on rule breakers. moot also considers blocking Japanese domains due to the fact that they make up half of 4chan's traffic and post only extremely rarely.
17 - moot blocks all Japanese domains from accessing the site, significantly reducing 4chan's server bill while maintaining the same level of contribution. Apparently, moot says that in the two weeks before the announcement, Japanese domains had accounted for 650 GB but only made about fifty posts or so.
20 - 4chan changes its board software from modified GazouBBS (modified 2chan code) to Futallaby, created by 1chan's thatdog.
29 - Following a massive flood of real-life child pornography, /l/ (Lolikon) is temporarily deleted. moot announces that although he has blocked Japanese domains, his traffic from the rest of the world has now passed the rate from before December 17, meaning that moot's server bill is still $400/month.
8 - /l/ (Lolikon) returns along with a new imageboard, /r/ (Request), which was created after many posts on /t/ were requests instead of links to torrents, so a new board was created for torrent requests, although it quickly morphed into the /r/ we know and love today.
25 - Censored Vagina announces that the torrent tracker has been taken down due to it being a major strain on the server, along with the /t/ board. Censored Vagina announces that the torrent tracker will return shortly, albeit it in a considerably smaller form, with a maximum of 40 torrents.
11 - Something Awful user "nubdestroyer" attempts to get 4chan shut down by e-mailing GoDaddy, the owner of 4chan.net. He succeeds. 4chan dies for the third time.
14 - After GoDaddy suspends the 4chan.net domain three days before without moot realizing it, moot registers 4chan.org as a temporary domain. At the time it was expected that they would eventually return to their .net domain.
19 - /t/ (Torrents) returns, albeit without the tracker, along with a new board, /f/ (Flash). moot adds a new server, cgi.4chan.org, on which /f/ is hosted.
21 - Two discussion boards are added, hosted on 0ch: /amh/ (Anime-Manga-Hentai) and /bbs/ (4chan Discussion). The next day, Censored Vagina makes a newspost announcing that the cost of running 4chan for the rest of 2004 added up to $2,200 and that the money would be needed in donations. The links on 4chan are reflected to link to 4chan.org instead of 4chan.net so that users will not need to write 4chan.org's IP into their hosts file.
1 - moot announces that the site will not be able to continue because the March server bill is too large to pay and that more donations will be required to pay it or 4chan will die. He makes one final request for donations and hopes for the best.
8 - After a week-long swarm of donations, moot announces that not only does he have enough money to pay the March bill, but that enough money was donated to keep the site running into 2005. moot thanks all donators and posters and announces that he is currently in "Cancun, Mexico".
28 - The 4chan.org domain becomes permanent, with 4chan.net now occupied by domain squatters (people who buy domains that will get a lot of traffic, such as porn.com, and put ads on the page). moot tells users to inform all people linking to 4chan about this change so that the domain squatters receive as little traffic as possible and therefore not profit from the incident. moot also deletes /g/ (Guro) around this time, possibly due to issues with PayPal.