4chan/Chronicle/qa

History of 4chan's /qa/ - Question & Answer board

>what is this

An intensely autistic personal project. If you are reading this, it's a WIP more closely resembling a collection of notes than any authoritative statement. nothing so far is guaranteed fact, all is liable to be corrected out. The other half this project, a timeline with dates on important events can be found here.

>why am I writing this

Personal endearment.

>but why?

Arguably the most revised (revisioned?) board history on the site, with years worth of accumulated misinformation and disinformation. I'd rather have this not continue.

>well then, what is it?

An series of offtopic & meta communities composed of posters from disparate origins that died prematurely due to unfortunate events and aggression from off-site cliques. Then it became something reminiscent of old /b/

>status?

Evidence gathering FUCKING DONE. The essay is 99/100ths done. Follow-up will be cleanup, really needs some images. ALSO: Cutting the fat on people-related links, this is not about weirdo birdwathcing

>hey why is this page locked

If only you knew how bad things really were. It will be unlocked after I've finished the project and I'm confident nobody will kill me over it.

/qa/ Historiographic Summary

Meta Period

Jan. 2015 to Oct. 2016

A community without culture but with an unending curiosity seeks a way to express their love and hate for the Yotsuba imageboard.

An Incidental Board

"See you later, space cowboy" - moot

/qa/ was created on the first hours January 23 as part team4chan's preparation for moot's farewell stream. The board was to serve as little more than an controlled environment where shitposters and GR1 violators could be spotted by dedicated handlers. In 2015, 4chan was arguably at it's peak of engagement if not influence, and very few imagined the New Yorker at the heart of site would ever leave, not even anons in open rebellion after the dual implosion of Gamergate and /pol/. Grievances are set aside in favour of sheer emotion. Common anons and bewildered personalities from every corner of the old chanverse come witness the passing of the giant while the diehard contrarians at 8chan try to attribute it to themselves. The mood for 4chan's future, despite everything, was fiercely optimistic and as the day goes by, nostalgic. Non-mod threads on /qa/ come by the hand of emotional anons reminiscing on personal core memories while new posters seize the chance to learn the mysterious imageboard's mostly oral history.

The Honeymoon

The next day is marked by a singular question. What now? /qa/ seemed to remain - likely kept around to host the stickies and link the stream for those who couldn't be there. But the board hasn't been locked as expected and anons were free to mingle. Seizing the opportunity, many took to crafting /qa/'s identity into an unique culture. /qa/'s board-tan was already designed and achieved almost a hundred illustrations in a day. The topic of today was determining what *exactly* /qa/ represented - As the last stragglers finished up the previous day's nostalgia threads, these culture crafters took inspiration and set their mind on a /qa/ oriented to 4chan itself - both it's past and it's present, yet refusing to become the successor of the recently gone /q/ - 4chan Feedback. The Declaration of /qa/ gets written in a thread that arguably represents the starting point of the board's culture. So begins a period of heightened activity as posters revel in the idea of having a direct rapport to the old guard and being able to share site trivia and meta anecdotes undisturbed by the dreaded Off-Topic Ban template. At the same time, the gathering of content creators led to a spur of off-topic threads and Original Content that cemented /qa/'s potential as a community in the mind of anon. A spur of forum games, quests, image folder dumps and embassies from other boards and communities landscape the catalog as the global announcement solemnly promotes the secret board.

A Community of Stragglers

By the end of March, the inertia of the proto-community is over and only a fraction of culture creators remain. /qa/ stabilizes as one of the slowest boards on the site with little real activity to call it's own. Thread participation is sharply divided - Some threads last weeks engaged in hundred post long debates between just a couple posters while others linger for days with merely a handful replies. Curiously, this division in activity seemed drawn along the lines of meta discussion vs off-topic threads and nostalgic meme references: The former fed by hotly contested differences in opinion; The latter having few if any replies, occasionally supported by community makers on the chance it may result in more Original Content - an increasingly precious resource. Rarely did either result in flamewars, a lucky thing in hindsight as post-level rulebreaking was rarely moderated.

Thus gestates the cycle of activity that defines the framework of /qa/ from start to end: Stragglers from all corners of the site come hoping to sate their curiosity, assisted by a small retinue of regulars with an hunger for news and context. These stragglers, once sated, leave to never return. This was the one constant, immutable basal culture - or perhaps lack of culture - which defined /qa/ not only as 4chan's meta board but also one of the comfiest boards.
On the topic of moderation, while generally perceived by anon to be laizzes faire, the moderation staff operated in a lowkey manner in the form of deleting raids and excessively /q/ threads but also killing strongly mainstream jokes such as frog or baneposting. During this period, memes imported from another board would periodically end in the bin in what seemed to be a low effort intent to shape, or maybe protect local board culture by one, and more unlikely, multiple staff members.

Enter Nishimura

"i am happy there are no stupid 4chan users" - Hiroyuki

On September 4chan collectively gawks at the most unexpected announcement in the history of the site: The living legend Hiroyuki Nishimura, former face of NicoNicoDouga and creator of the ancestor of modern textboards and imageboards 2channel was now the owner of 4chan. And on September 22 he was going to do a Q&A session on the forgotten /qa/. The board's activity immediately springs to life with a veneer of excitement. This also means that /qa/ is now on the map of the entire site, leading a small retread of the events of January - a wave of nostalgic old guards share stories with curious new posters. The one difference however, is Hiroyuki. After his hilariously - and possibly falsely - inept exchange with 4chan, hiroyuki goes on a site wide posting rampage ignoring 4chan's fundamental moderation rule: Do not publicly engage the posters. This affects /qa/ indirectly since his activity convinced a chunk of the site that their personal 4chan grievances can be personally handled and solved by the Admin himself - and sometimes he actually did, /his/ exists because of him. This brings /q/ threads back in force - now everyone and their mother tries to showcase their most deranged fantasies on how the site should work so the engrish speaking idiot king would blindly enact them.

Forming a Culture

"Did you have a question?"

After a couple months, this revived /qa/ coalesces into a small collection of meta aficionados, karens crying to the staff and anons looking for an off-topic board that wouldn't get swarmed with weirdos and porn, often interrupted by the spur of activity caused by Hiro's posts. While initially considered a disaster, the increased activity did not prove fatal and arguably led to a more diverse and entertaining Questions board.

This activity also gave a reprieve to the off-topic side of /qa/, long afflicted with a chronic lack of attention. The budding /qa/ community sees the return of forum games like Quests and the development of ideas such as Nametag factions. A slew of daily threads - Some good such as the test thread or the Rumi anon's poetry, some strange such as NO. and Remove (you) and some just idiotic such as Remove GR15 now mark the /qa/ frontpage. Threads too non-sensical to be discussed get witty retorts and new catchphrases join the age old /q/ import /deletepol/. The board becomes a tad more quirky and depending on who you ask, more engaging.

This community is not without drama however and by the second quarter of 2016 /qa/ had developed a full clique of personalities -shitposters, avatarfags and drawfags- that spent their day waging flamewars and hijacking other people's threads, gathered, likely off-site, by the sheer schadenfreude of interacting with one poster: Known as Catholic Anon this terminally online shitposter, if prodded the right way, could take threads almost to a 1000 posts on board whose bump limit is 310 replies. This also showcases an interesting development: Despite wildly incompatible posting habits there was enough space on the board to house both metaposters and this circlejerk undisturbed, both aware of each other but never really crossing paths, essentially letting his crew go run their course unreported.

In fact, moderator interest seemed to have waned and no attempts of keeping bad actors out could be seen, thus, off-topic threads on /qa/ both thrived and festered. The situation reached a low point when some daily threads - such as the Remove GR15 spammer's, began to cause the infamous barneyfag to visit /qa/ keeping threads alive for months. One passionate poster did try to contact the staff for help - only to be told to kick rocks with the infamous statement that /qa/ does not get moderated. Rebuked, this poster took justice to his own hands, scriptspamming the Remove GR15 with gibberish and pictures of his waifu Pikari. Officially becoming /qa/'s first avatarfag and spammer. This, however, set a very dangerous precedent.

Off-Topic Colonies

"Daily reminder that /qa/ is property of [s4s]."

/qa/'s technicality of being 4chan's only Safe For Work Off-Topic board is noticed by some who attempt (successfully and not) to export their board culture and activities.
The first group was an [s4s] at the nadir of it's influence. They had recently become protegees of prominent mod invisibro aka swaglord and evolving tastes (and demographics) within the board were ditching the irony culture in favour of a heavily /jp/esque and mildly erotic vibe spearheaded by local general [a/jp]. [s4s] posters -occasionally encouraged by swaglord himself- alternated between spamming and contributing on equal measure, and esfores' own platoon of content creators left their mark on the Question board. [s4s] lingo was common place and many namefigs such as punky brewster and milkless cereal made /qa/ their primary stomping grounds. Reception from other posters was ambivalent, many were not too happy about the prospect of being visited by the board infamous for it's raids. This detraction doesn't truly pick up until mid 2016 when the swaglord hatefandom reached an all time high, and every [s4s] post gets attributed to his "cultural enrichment" threads. All in all, [s4s], one of last boards with a culture of their own, was the first to extend the budding /qa/ culture the branch of friendship.

Other early colonies were the greater drawfag community, specifically two loosely connected, relatively new collectives of 4chan fanartists and writers: The older one had organized on the /co/sphere drawthreads (/co/, plus4chan, /tg/ among other boards' threads) out of the venerable 4chan House project, a sometimes-not-sometimes-yes general about board-tans. The younger came from the /v/ermin boards (then limited to /v/, /vg/, /vr/ & /vp/ with some connection to /pol/'s own drawthread) and had recently come up with the 4chan Harvest Festival AKA The Winter Ball event. These anons started using /qa/ as a bunker and soon a hub to discuss their communities. For a time, the Board-tans general saw itself gathering artists from every drawthread on the site, and had it's day in the spotlight by organizing the board wide Winter Ball events of 2015 and 2016. Existing in sharp contrast with /qa/'s stragglers - who generally disregarded them - they were however pivotal to /qa/'s identity, being responsible for the vast majority of the board's OC. Content that took form not just in Board-tan drawings (much cherished nonetheless) but also illustrations of various events and memes that pockmarked the catalog from time to time.

Over time, specially after Nishimura opened the floodgates to the return of /q/ threads, various metaposters formed pseudo-colonies in their never ending threads. Of note among these: /a/ was a constant presence in what could be best described as a permanent /a/ meta general. Marking the appearance of local figures such as Fun Things are Fun and fuwafuwa who argued with the ensemble of /a/nons in weeks long debates about the merit of /a/'s heavily diminished elitism culture. /jp/ and it's long, storied history of drama were often a permanent spot on the frontpage, leading to some of the most interesting metadiscussions /qa/ had and occasionally to the request of a 2D/Random Niijiura styled board. The /a/+/jp/sphere often exported their own board injokes, well received by the local anime enthusiasts. Other boards also visited /qa/ in some numbers; Stragglers, mostly from /lit/, /pol/ and... /vg/'s /gsg/, squatted the place begging for an /his/ - History board for months, up to trying to simulate a /his/ general. Miraculously, Hiro noticed their antics and actually gave them what they wanted.

Off-Topic Period

Oct. 2016 to Apr. 2017

Hiroyuki accidentally /qa/'s entire ecosystem. The board is permanently changed as it gets raided non stop for several months.

The October Chaos

"winter is coming" - Hiroyuki

On October 1 & 2 Hiroyuki surprises the site with the introduction of new monetization changes and what can only be described as a fearmongering campaign to minimize the fact he was introducing malicious ads to 4chan. His thread while unannounced causes ripples across the entire IB scene, and even makes noise on news sites. Links to /qa/ get shared everywhere, with many people surprised the board still existed at all. Within the span of a day, /qa/'s board speed duplicates permanently then duplicates again within a couple months as the 2016 US elections loom and /pol/ -now the site's dominant board- has somehow convinced itself that /qa/ was an astroturfing front for 8chan's /leftypol/ to get /pol/ deleted and spends the entire third quarter of 2016 raiding /qa/. At it's peak during the first weeks of November, the time between new threads could be measured in minutes. For the fist time, threads on /qa/ require bumps to not fall of the catalog mid-conversation.

October was only the beginning of the problems. All the way to the end of the year would see high profile events occurring in /qa/: In December, Anonymous-San -modcat to /a/- legendary old guard moderator had recently returned to team4chan on November only to be controversially fired within the month due to a /qa/ thread, causing site-wide outrage even within moderation itself. Days hiroyuki starts posting again and pushes visibly ugly changes to the UI as a scheme to get people to buy 4chan passes to vote on it, all announced on /qa/. Two things were clear: First, Hiroyuki saw /qa/ has his personal rapport to the userbase, second, his presence was heavily disruptive to the board.

It should be noted that the board was already working with a booming off-topic environment before October, the /qa/ circlejerk having recently formed and several daily threads and meme imports such as /a/'s Pocari Sweat were thrown around by troupes of funposters. These anons go on overdrive at the prospect of increased board speed. New local figures surface such as the asukaspammer, an avatar with a mobile spamscript that would wipe the catalog every week or GR15 Defense Force, notorious animeposting tripfag fighting a war with imaginary ponyposters. The chaos brought on by both pro-/pol/ and anti-/pol/ threads served as a primordial soup a budding board culture to form. One question remained: What form would it take?
Asking this question comes side by side with the realization of how fragile the original Question & Answer ecosystem was - and so there's a split: On one hand metaposters, long established and upset their week long debates and history threads were simply not possible anymore, begin powerlessly pushing back against the tide. On the other funposters excited of having a whole playground for themselves tag along for the wild ride adding to the chaos. One thing was certain: However this went, /qa/ was not going to be the same again.

The /jp/ Spinoff Plot

"Would an /ar/ - Anime/Random work?"

"You are posting in it."

Within the /jp/sphere, an unexpected development occurs. One group of friends hanging out in private chatrooms had members who knew of /qa/ before October and they realized that the Question board was on paper, a seemingly unmoderated off-topic SFW IB. One that -if you ignore the raids- was practically empty and easily colonized. Composed of new guard /jp/sies who didn't exactly fit in within the veteran closed communities that inhabited the /jp/ bunkers, they saw the chance to make a name for themselves without going through the hassle of making another dead-on-arrival spinoff - and what better place to do so than the homeland? Well, not the homeland. /jp/ had lost the board culture that made it special, replaced by an array of micro-communities residing in generals and pre-emptive moderation killing all creativity - but a second homeland could be created. Of course, the /q/ spam from /pol/ would need to be gotten rid off first.

The exact origin of this posse is unknown, it's likely they were relatively recent discoverers of warosu.org, the /jp/ archiver and inheritor of foolz' /g/ - ghost board. There they fell in love with /jp/'s old guard culture but weren't made to feel at home by locals. Another possibility is a similar process happening through 8chan's /jp/ and /a/ spinoff chiru.no which had some degree of overlap (evidenced by a marked presence of 8ch filename hashes early on). What is known is that they arrived /qa/ with the news of A-san's firing and within the month began operating on /qa/ by aggressively telling off meta threads and specially anything related to other boards' jokes or the ages old delete /pol/ meme. It isn't until January 2017 that the true extent of their intentions became apparent: Then practically unnoticed, threads stating that /qa/ should be a random board start appearing, pushing back people trying to reorder it around meta and most specifically pushing for more anime. This was a bit of genius - shaping the terrain so local funposters, already quite accustomed to anime, wouldn't suspect a thing when phase 1 of the plan started.

Are we sounding too conspiranoid? Hold on to your seatbelts then. Phase 1 was a month long advertising campaign spread through all the /jp/sphere. IRC, textboard or IB alike. Within these invitations they declared /qa/ the unofficial new /jp/, a jaypee without /jp/'s anal moderation - one very attractive prospect for some shitposters. This however was only a ruse. Bringing all these raiders to pick fights with the other raiders and locals served as a tool distract anons from the real operation. Phase 2: Starting in February 10 - the date the first Spinoff aligned threads start popping out, an unknown number of bots were brought into play, crapflooding hated threads with random words, posts copied from /pol/ or markov chains while ghostbumping a whitelist of threads created by this unknown clique (that we will refer to as the Warosu clique for brevity's sake). This dreaded bumpbot combined coupled up with both their own spam and local antics such as the asukaspammer's were coordinated to cycle out threads they didn't like, effectively purging /qa/ of all threads without an anime OP. That was only the beginning, enter Phase 3: Under the veil of confusion they proceeded to astroturf /qa/ to hell and back, gathering under the flag of one Sachiko Touhou and one Kemono Musume tiger, several threads were made side by side by /ota/'s raid threads declaring /qa/ as the new 2D/Random, communicating and encouraging anons through Desuarchive's ghostposting feature, bringing back years old /jp/ memes and new original content made on the spot. They proceeded to roam the board publicly attacking every disapproved-of thread, telling them to go back there and even bringing back an adapted version of the age old Get Out of /jp/ Marisa. Warosu anons were specially hostile to actual /pol/ related threads who they saw as directly responsible for A-San's misfortune, replying to almost every post demanding "/pol9k/" leave /qa/ - yet in their judgement essentially any meta thread appeared made by /pol/. The battery of aggression, gaslighting and OC was enough at a glance to convince any onlooker that /qa/ was always an anime board.

The plan was a massive success. By the end of February the catalog of /qa/ was unrecognizable, no one was any wiser and the hot dozen regulars of old /qa/ were completely powerless to do anything besides complain in one of the last meta threads, the Happenings thread, the botters having decided to whitelist it in order to maintain the veneer of an organic demographic shift - another of their gaslighting tools. The more anime-inclined Off-topic posters were unknowingly press-ganged into the posse due to their eagerness to help bump their threads. Moderation while assumed to be inexistent, simply failed to pick out the signs something was happening in the sea of polshit, raids, frogs and /q/. The clique briefly took over the Happenings thread as their personal general but left when the outraged locals started attempting to figure them out, making their own not!general the 4chan Discussion thread. There they spent months bragging about their terraforming of /qa/ while a somewhat weirded out retinue of new arrivals laughed with them.

Reorganization

"Don't mind me just killing a thread!"

The clique's efforts in expelling everyone not /jp/ related were successful. The catalog was now primarily blogposting, the old daily threads were replaced with Tenshi eating corndogs, homura, touhou, kemono musume and more. [a/jp] memes such as teeth girl and older generals like the CSS thread were seamlessly assimilated. Several avatarfags such as hibiki and satania surfaced and the asukaspammer was elevated to meme status. Catchphrase memes original and imported such as the /qa/ meetup -an infamous NSFW vid-, dat /qa/ dream and My Friends are Here become the new language of Question & Answer. Local off-topic posters such as GRXVDF joined the ranks. The /pol/ bandwagon was over since HWNDU ended and other raiders simply couldn't complete with liberal (no pun intended) application of bots. Anyone who wasn't immediately ran out by the initial replies got their thread crapflooded to bump limit.

Eventually they got too successful: On April 7 they accidentally managed to get /qa/ frozen after botspamming the report queue in an effort to get rid of the latest set of raiders. This would have spelled the end of it, but what the Warosu crew actually wanted -forming a /jp/ oriented community- was achieved for the most part. All the spinoffs knew /qa/ was in their sphere, the backchannels knew they orchestrated the whole thing, they had their claim to fame if not their homeboard. Getting attention from the spinoffs, the touhou posters, the october newbies and the rest of /qa/ served essentially as a recruiting tool for their community, which got also an official hub by being invited to sageru's anonymous IRC, a super hacked server running anonIRCd at irc.sageru.org, a natural fit since while not a /jp/ spinoff, the admin of Warosu and Sageru were lifelong friends. There at #qa the rookies got to rub shoulders with some spinoff legends, mingled with textboard culture, and grew larger.

Getting Noticed

The Warosu clique wasn't the only group with an interest in the 4chan meta board. Being noticed by /pol/ also implies being noticed by the /pol/sphere, a growing network of altchans (as the term chanverse fell out of vogue) that grew out of the dual hubs 4chan/pol/ and 8chan/pol/ - a wide assortment of cliques & circlejerks spread over multiple sister boards, spin off sites & chatrooms, some of which became notorious troll groups. At the same time, the unexpected appearance -and immediate firing- of Anonymous-San, one of the foundational members of team4chan, put the board on the sights of the /jp/ spinoffs, a different collection of IBs that sprouted out of /jp/ circa 2013 and by 2017 were reduced to gated bunkers that occasionally culturally enriched other sites. Within the following months, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, several off-site cliques took to raiding /qa/ for various reasons if not for the sake of it.

First, an unknown number of anti-/pol/ groups were the earliest outsiders to make noise. Usually derided as /leftypol/ -an unlikely prospect- /pol/ haters came and went, the most active anti /pol/ group in /qa/ became notable during /pol/'s He Will Not Divide Us raid. Thinking /qa/ was pretty much /q/, they started using the board to call out /pol/ threads, specially it's attempts at doxing; the icemen encouraged other posters to "ice" these threads by fake GR1 reporting them. Since they were still grossly rulebreaking and not just a shitpost, the thread would get immediate attention even if the reporting anon was banned. One particularly dense member, completely oblivious to /qa/'s nature or 4chan in general, kept insisting in the dox call out threads until he got nicknamed Chris and later Icefag. Despite several bans and both HWNDU and the icemen having been ran out of the site by February, he continued making threads to the point he got a sizeable chunk of the board screaming about him.

The /jp/ spinoff boards invited by the Warosu raiders were practically all with a still active population - Chiefly, ota-ch, himasugi, merorin.org, 4taba, the sageru.org IRC (tied at the hip to warosu.org after all), what.ch, /nen/, GNFOS.org (soon no-you.org), chiru.no and possibly others. Of these, /ota/ was the largest by an order of magnitude while hima, chiru, GNFOS and sageru had minimal presence, the latter extending well into early days of /qa/ due to overlap in meta interests. When it came to the advertisement campaign, by far the greatest victories of the Warosu clique was bringing one of the living legends of the /jp/ janny wars, Trevor, legendary shitposter and then admin of GNFOS who would proceed to spend years... comfyposting and playing forum games, not really taking part in any fights - However his ever present groupies proved an excellent recruiting pool. Others who answered the invitation were ccd0, maintainer of the 4chanX app, who would become a fierce supporter of the colonization effort, plus almost the entire userbase of chiru.no who went on to create a Cirno general on March. Chiru had a direct line to the inner circle of the Warosu posse, but differences in attitude led to a public fall out as one of the lynchpins called them out for "not helping". Nevertheless cirnoposters grew truly large as, by sheer luck, they had the major announcement of a new Touhou Project mainline title starring the Ice Fairy herself. For a while they became the largest demographic on /qa/ and even brought in multiple drawfags and OC makers. Yet by May they left for the newly created /bant/ - International/Random, where they became one of the cornerstones of that board's culture.

Far more hostile were the Infinity cliques. 8chan's /pol/sphere was inconspicuously large, divided into several boards with a common language but radically different philosophies, all of which in turn having heavy overlap with other boards such as 8chan's /b/ or private Discord groups. 8/b/ started reposting /qa/ links the same time the /jp/ spinoffs appeared, chiefly due the interest of it's board moderator fugthelug. fug started trolling on there with her personal simp posse in Fabruary, months later she has a fallout with /b/ and moved onto /srz/ to try a board culture experiment. The experiment fails and the group eventually migrates to another /pol/sphere altchan 8ch.pl, creating an unlisted board with a garbage html they refer to as [BOARD REDACTED], becoming an intense ancap troll group organized from a secretive Discord -Possibly named Anti-Goon- whose main hub was named Non Agression Pact Violating Lewd Voyeurs or napvlv. However the BR community implodes just as fugs tries to raid /qa/ with it. Thus in June /qa/ gets simultaneously warred on by two separate opposing groups: fug's [BR] in a well planned assault to take down the subversives and BR's banned schizos who fug comes to name the [BR] revolt trying to defame fug. Both groups wing their tactics which include passing off nudes of old 8/b/ namefag spiderchan as fugs', going on ridiculous tirades pretending to be her, sabotaging each other's threads and more, all while getting the local clique increasingly pissy.

A second /pol/sphere group was an /int/ off-shoot with heavy /pol/ leaning called /intl/, in turn part of their own network of raid focused boards called /int*/, famous for being master astroturfers. The /int*/ network by April 2017 was effectively dead, their ideology firmly rooted in not having any moderation whatsoever leading to their board and spinoffs getting botspammed to the point of unusability. Those who still engaged the culture were reduced to shrinking, closed communities. One such group organized within a 200 strong discord used the 2017 April's Fools event which merged several boards, one of them /mlpol/ - My Little Politics, as a pretense to raid under the mask of /mlp/. This specific combo seems to originate from overlap with 8chan's /b/ which always had an open door for ponies. Disguised, they "demanded" a return of the board while really just having a shitpost contest with each other to see how much they could fuck the place up. In true /int*/ culture as soon as they were leaked they quickly switched blame to the first thing they got named as, which was for some reason the mythical steamgroup of /gsg/ - Grand Strategy General fame. However, by pure probabilistic miracle, an actual founding member of turkslayer's willy wagglers Skype group just happened to be browsing /qa/ that day and refuting them. Eventually the group started pretending to be freech.net's /intg/ which was currently nothing but 0-replies botspam threads courtesy of bui. This drove /qa/ into a "one week war" as the growing Warosu clique fiercely opposed them with their own spam, causing several dozen threads to hit bump limit from shitposting alone - specially when the Discord realized they could just post a couple pastel horses and cause an assblasted teen to scriptspam the place. The situation almost killed /qa/, getting the board frozen on April 7 as the Warosus resorted to botspamming the report queue. Question & Answer remained frozen for the better part of April which saw the /int*/ discord and it's brony complement split apart, the latter creating the spinoff mlpol.net. In April 22 with an unfrozen board mlpol.net tried to reignite the raid but they were ran out by an even more organized clique, now popularly known as the /qa/ cabal or the weeb mafia.

Great Spam War

Apr. 2017 to Aug. 2019

Off-topic animeposters play unwittingly on the corpse of a /qa/ killed in a secret war between a botspamming manchild and literally everyone else.

Mounting Opposition

"They came here in february and they refused to leave"

/qa/ was unfrozen in April 22 for unknown reasons, some argue a surge of meta threads in other boards, but no explicit reason was ever known, maybe Hiroyuki just missed it. The board quite literally just unfreezes, with all the shitposters and regulars still around as if nothing happened - And the Warosu posse was determined to stay. Now larger, they handed out their spamscripts to the new /qa/ friends they met through their pre-freeze antics and created a series of infopics telling anons to go to IRC or Feedback instead of making meta threads, even going as far as to writing a 2000 words long revisionist History of /qa/ pic. After the mlpol.net and [br] raids puttered out - the former thanks to gorespam courtesy of one hibikid, the board was by all intent and purposes theirs. The lynchpins behind the raid already felt comfortable enough to make themselves known, chiefly Yotgo, who had been OP of several 2D/Random threads and adopted the CSS thread, began donning the tripcode !QAJP/YOtGo since March. His status as head honcho was mostly unnoticed as, aside of crashing out on chiru.no and the cirnoposters over ignoring the /intl/ pony raid, he kept his trip to the sidelines, only making stream threads from time to time. Nobody yet noticed that occasionally his posts would disappear because he kept botspamming and harassing others without the trip, calling random people instigators, concernbros, 8ggagers and all sorts of other names.

The level of vitriol #qa anons managed led, inevitably, to tensions with other posters. The first such case happened during March: An incensed /hap/ poster that was nicknamed the freak (but we'll call him February Anon for readability's sake) had determined to bully the weeb mafia out of the board, following them everywhere while calling them out for their raid, interjecting meta discussions with incessant references to posts he decided were 'proof' of an hostile takeover: infamously, the #999998 failed GET by GRXVDF demanding /qa/ be renamed to 2D/Random. February even took to astroturfing, making stealth callout threads with anime OPs and then explaining to himself that the board was getting raided. This harassment followed them into desuarchive's /qa/ ghostposts and post-freezing, the /meta/ board desumin created for them. He was completely clueless about /jp/ much less what the spinoffs were, and in the end his posts added more noise than context, specially taking into account the board was now practically empty except for pro or anti weeb anons. This continued for months, well into 2018 - While February anon was the most part harmless, a trend started to make itself clear: Interacting with the Cabal was guaranteed replies.

In turn, the Clique's hostility begins to burn bridges with their newly acquired allies. By May many /jp/sphere posters, most actual /jp/ vets, started to complain that people were insisting too hard on old /jp/ catchphrases, particularly offended that teenbro mannerisms, the calling cards of the spinoff troll groups, was getting celebrated as "/jp/ heritage". This didn't sit well with the Warosus, specially with Yotgo who took to mock them via concern spam and accusations of concern trolling directed at anons that specifically incensed him. Anyone who interacted with unapproved posters such as /pol/lacks was also labeled an instigator. This non-stop backseat moderation caused many /jp/sies to simply ragequit while accusing the clique of being a /jp/ cargo cult. By far the biggest fallout was with the chiru.no spinoff, which while part of the invitees plot had considerable crossover with Warosu inner circle. However this IB was too different on a cultural level to the /qa/ dream, cheerfully engaging any poster who'd extend the hand in friendship, even joining forces to create OC with mlpol.net raiders. Yotgo, who was a visage on the chiru.no chatroom and one of their contributors, working with them to make custom CSS hacks for their site and 4chan, had a public meltdown and almost ragequit himself. Unfortunately he decided against it, limiting himself to cutting ties with the chiru.no crew. Yotgo's intolerance for dissent started to chip at his emotional stability, leading him to mix up different posters with wantom accusations of samefagging, ultimately confabulating a series of boogeymen, first team4chan with accusations of persecution (just... pretend the botspam never happened) and later imaginary personalities he named the freak -after february anon- and concernbro when the internal strife began in earnest.

Weebs and Frogs

Consider the universal rule of anonymous communities: Whoever gets angry, loses.
It became apparent that many posters in the "anime camp" were simply uncapable of not taking the bait. And if right buttons were pushed, they could even be goaded to destroy their own threads in frustration. After the bumpbot became common knowledge, anons also realized that Cabal spent hours cycling out threads manually to "beatify" the catalog, an hours long effort each time. This no-fun-allowed mentality proved exquisite to any local troll - slowly, with the start of May, a troupe of anons began to engage the clique, trolling them by simply making threads and talking to them. Within weeks they found out that what infuriated their lynchpins the most was posting the age old Pepe frog which they associated with every thing from /pol/ to teenbros. So begins the Spam War: A years long trolling campaign between frogposters and the Warosu posse, one that paralyzes the board's evolution by preventing any sensible community from forming as everyone was dragging into a handful of shitposters's never ending flamewar.

Frogposting was always present on /qa/ albeit it was originally moderated out on the far flung days of 2015, the retreat of active content policing saw it make a comeback. By 2016, specially after October, it had become just another mainstay on the board. The art of posting pepe had evolved in many ways, but specifically in /tv/, /int/ and (some variants) on /pol/ it adopted a "casual blogposting" approach, where posting a specific Pepe serves as a call to make a general statement on a topic or whatever activity was currently dominated the frontpage. With the realization that merely doing this could make the weebs pop a vein, frogposters developed a low effort guerrilla war on the clique, making sure there was always a frog on the catalog, lazily putting out comments on random Warosu threads, parodying their OPs, their OC, and generally making a nuisance. This was met with open outrage by the hands of specific posters already mentioned, in part because they became convinced they were /pol9k/ horsefuckers putting on a mask to continue their raid. Frogposters came and went, none but a few sticking for longer a couple months. Of these, the most notable one was the Easter Frog, a flowery commenter whose calling card was avatarfagging /int/'s latest meme, Easter the Frog. His unique, sarcastic yet amiable prose made him a popular target, leading him to have both flamewars and positive engagements with various members of the opposition. Being one of the more entertaining posters, copycats soon appeared, cementing his prose as the "standard" method for mocking the mafiosos.
While many frogs claimed wanting to bring back meta as their goal, their posts betrayed was no actual motivation beyond getting their fill of (you)s, becoming another pressure point on the already untenable /qa/ ecosystem. By now even the Board-tans general has been killed, other permanent threads such as the CSS thread -now rechristened CSS/filter- had become venues for the Warosu lynchpins to seemingly show how much they hated other posters, creating an "MD5 Filter Megalist" that seemingly included thousands of hashes of every 3D, frog and wojak image on /qa/. It even seemed that the mafia had moderation support, as the mods had the infamous /qa/ was never /q/ post and moved a Kemono Friends thread to /qa/, a favourite of the mafiosos. There was in fact a notable bias for removing and even public banning frog posts -likely assuming from their choice of words that they were ranting about anime and not about a coordinated group of IRC raiders-. Still, effective or not, the war proved good entertainment for the frogs and they continued their antics for the following months.

The drama intensifies with catalog wipes becoming a weekly thing (and I repeat, only due to 2-3 frog OPs that were just likely to get deleted by mods). In August ccd0 started using the venerable browser extension 4chanX to shill for the Warosu mafia. Forcing a popup telling anyone who opened the board that they should not make meta threads anymore, redirecting them to the infamous /qa/ Infographic made by the clique to dissuade metaposters, done just a few weeks after Hiroyuki made waves again with a thread requesting /qa/ to test the new search function (causing many more catalog wipes). Weeks later, allegedly because the original operator of the bumpbot had retired, Hibikid (now as !HibikiZODI) programmed his own version of the bumpbot using Touhou spellcards for names while contributing interesting services such as an alternative 4chan banlogger. In October, ccd0 acts up again over the news of google's reCAPTCHA v1 getting disabled, trying to shill for an exodus from 4chan towards spinoffs. /qa/ became a bit famous for the never ending war, even inspiring a lurking drawfag to depict /qa/ as meidos playing with frog and bot muppets.
The first big upheaval of the frog/weeb war came not by the hand of either party or even the mods but by the hand of Hiroyuki's unwitting intervention. In October the disastrous banning of discussion about NeoGAF forums on /v/ caused the board to rebel, with their protests making it to /qa/ and hiroyuki's twitter. By what seems to be sheer luck, Hiroyuki finds the /qa/ threads and decides to personally intervene by reversing team4chan's decision, but the next day he compromises with the mod's unspoken ban of meta threads by listing /qa/ as the official 4chan meta board. Now they were able to put any meta thread through the humiliation ritual of having them sent to /qa/ to instantly die from lack of attention, as not even OPs were willing to move boards. The listing caused the Cabal to panic as their board lost it's secret club status - and therefore a lot of value in their eyes. The frogs celebrated, declaring this their victory (where they did absolutely nothing but maybe stress out one fat virgin). From here on, the joke has run it's course and the number of frogposters starts to shrink. The weebs accept their defeat and satisfy themselves by making a second #qa at irc.rizon.net (plus an invite only, secret channel from which they'd share spambot scripts) in January 2018.

It's around this point that moderation realized something was up. The main lynchpin of the clique, Yotgo, had begun to catch too many IP wipes and his antics were finally linked to his tripcode, getting it banned till 2025. He insisted on his threads, his mask of goodwill slowly getting chipped away as he kept getting wiped basically every time he mentioned CSS hacks. In December and January Warosu posters started getting moderated harshly, likely from Yotgo getting reported over his constant cries of persecution and complete insistence on not changing his posting habits. Early in December in a thread making fun of him, both GRXVDF and Asukaspammer ate public bans after they came in force insulting the mods. At some point Hibiki too got his trip banned and in January the daily Tenshi Eating Corndog thread got a public ban - likely because of the meme having history on /jp/. This moderation onslaught culminated when the bumpbot finally got detected. The solution was simple: On February, post deletion was disabled. Still, the conflict showed no signs of ending.

Depopulation

The disabling of post deletion, while a massive morale hit to the Warosu posse, did little to change things. During March 2018 there is a bit of a lull in the spam as most first guard frogposters had gotten bored with the board and with them went most unapproved threads. The clique's target shifted from other posters to the mods themselves, spearheaded by the increasingly resentful pair Yotgo and Hibiki. For a while, this is interrupted by the April's Fool 2018 event making /qa/ one of the hubs of the food teams competition, a respite of positivity -and surprisingly interaction with the staff- within the gloom of the Questions board. Still, during this lull the war's effect on /qa/ becomes apparent: The board was pretty much dead with most threads either being dead-on-arrival meta posts moved from other boards or bot threads by the clique. The few organic threads - mostly reposted injokes from IRC or the blog threads - were kept artificially alive for months, first by anons manually spamming loli so they'd get IP wiped simulating ghostbumping, later by a modified bumpbot which in lieu of ghostbumping bumped with textless images, making the already cold board feel like a ghost town.

In mid 2018 new faces join the posse. lowercase-kun -oft confused an older sataniaposter- appears as a heavily unhinged animeposter writing thousand character long rants that abuse the term subhuman, screaming at basically anyone who disagreed with him in a thread earning him the moniker schizoweeb. Somewhere in July, discovering the clique through the stream threads, a poster soon to be known as Atechan makes himself known. This Brazilian sociopath managed to worm his way into the sageru IRC, where he became friends with the admins Tokiko and Meltingwax - maybe friends is too strong a word - and convinced them to make him OP of #jp. He also learned to botspam IRC and spent months spamming just about anyone he could, including #4chan official IRC. After a while most discussion outside the Happenings threads were reduced to chatroom phrases and memes, with Yotgo botspamming "boson" all over the board. February anon reappears in one last, desperate attempt to annoy Warosu by posting "weebspam" on every bot thread, causing Yotgo to counterspam with "schizospam" and "weensperm" on every frog thread (confusing him once again for someone else). After this February anon has had it and ragequits, only appearing once or twice every quarter. Around August a new frogposter starts making threads oddly aware of the inner workings of the mafia, making it clear that Sageru had been infiltrated. This frog (who will refer to as the schizospammer for redability's sake) is just as terminally online as the clique and falls into a cycle of thread spam and back & forth flamewars between him, lowercase-kun and Yotgo that last several months. The schizospammer also came up with terms like weeaboid and a whole set of /pol/ inspired lingo to bother the weabs with. Now, by all intents and purposes /qa/ should have slowed down considerably, however this renewed spam war was forcing the board to retain a thread cycle time measured in hours, never slowing down as the schizospammer's threads continued to provoke reactions from Yotgo. Not everything was vitriol however, by the hands of the sageru crew /qa/ got to play on the ancient 2ch Giko Cafe game, spurring a roaming drawfag to draw dozens of giko cats and turn them into a minor meme.

Of old /qa/, of the board before the raids, the only thread left was the Happenings thread. Kept artificially alive by the clique during the height of the spam it had more or less absorbed everyone who still posted and now was able to float in the catalog without ghostbumping, perhaps anons refused to let it die due to the engaging nature of it's topic. It's at this point where it begins to rise to prominence, even getting attention from the mods from time to time. Still it existed in a tortured state as the board personalities did not care for it besides using it as battleground for their flamewars; Yotgo, February anon or whichever frogposter felt like starting shit did so every thread. Even worse, /qa/ had become the target of the infamous /u/ schizo ACK, who came here baited by tripfags !Akemi and Warosuhitter then stayed as he thought this was a direct rapport to the mods. This had the unexpected effect of causing him to head to 4chan's official IRC and wage a months long harassment campaign alternating between accusing people of being Troid/!Akemi and demanding the mods they fire Troid/!Akemi. Needless to say, the mods' opinion of /qa/ was not exactly high.

By the end of the year the first fissures within the Clique materialize: ccd0 publicly calls out the spammers for keeping threads artificially alive when there's no community to actually sue them, causing a bit of a stir. Worse still, Yotgo's most lolcowish habits start flaring up as he accuses everyone he disliked of being boogeymen and the mods of operating anonymously to try and kill the "/qa/ community". In turn, rising tensions within sageru over differing posting habits - mostly on his part - create a rift between #jp and #qa, causing the textboard aficionados to start trolling the new blood's no-fun absolutism - at one point, atechan was made owner of #qa so he proceeded to abuse just about everyone until he resorted botspamming and ownership fell to a very upset yotgo, cementing the vitriol within the IRC.

Hiroyuki kept using /qa/ as his link to the site, deciding in August to get into the VTuber business by making a 4chan design contest. The even was quite hyped and received over a hundred entries, albeit by October it sadly puttered out in post-selection stage as hiro and anon realized just how labour intensive the VTuber business was. Mid-November, a series of rangebans, mostly on mobile ISP and many image-only sweep 4chan. It's revealed that soon 4chan was going to split in two: A NSFW 4chan.org and a SFW 4channel.org. The increased Hiro attention also brought back increased mod attention, a few days after the split announcement, /qa/'s maximum threads per IP get reduced from 5 to 3 to curtail manual thread spam and team4chan occasionally begins to /q/ post again, even casually shitpost on /hap/ while a certain mafioso gets a public ban.
Upset at the recent /q/ posting but specially annoyed over the rangebans affecting him, Yotgo and Hibiki -know renamed Verniy'- have the idea of (finally) making their own spinoff, citing mod harassment for making the board unfun. Announced in November and unveiled in December, kissu.moe -nicknamed pissu by /ota/- becomes the newest member of the /jp/ spinoff family.

Reductio ad Schitzo

"But the truth is much more disturbing and pathetic. They actually thought they had a community."

With the creation of Kissu, most of the Warosu clique moves out of /qa/ - those that haven't gotten in a fight with it's lynchpins yet . At this point, the "war" was little more than Yotgo, Hibiki and the schizoweeb screaming with who they assumed to be the freak (see why we have custom nicknames now?) a poster who seemed to be behind almost every frogpost on /qa/ stalking the mafia's activity through weekly blog generals. Everyone else had just gotten bored or been turned away by Yotgo's worsening behaviour. Still the worst was yet to come: Around February, the inner circle realized Atechan's constant harassment on #qa was oddly similar to the schizospammer's threads. The matter comes to blows in March as Yotgo bans him from their IRCs and publicly accuses him of being... the freak again, while other cabal members leak logs of him casually confessing to molesting his sister. This episode also finishes all goodwill between Sageru IRC's locals and the Cabal as Yotgo accuses them of being in line with Atechan and the #jp regulars simply grew tired of his endless snide remarks. Either way, the matter spills onto /qa/ birthing multiple 100+ post threads consisting of at best 4 people flaming. Almost everyone involved - namely Yotgo, lowercase and Atechan became increasingly unhinged as 2019 went by. It doesn't help /qa/'s infamy as a schizo asylum when, at the same time as the fight club was going on, other personalities were migrating to the board such as the dreaded unicodefag aka foxe & unrealskybox, a scourge of /bant/ known to have spammed CSAM and wiped their catalog several times, took to squat on the Happenings thread and brag about his ban evasion and antics on /trash/'s /gfur/ thread thinking he'd get attention from team4chan this way. He even tried to recruit Verniy' and Kissu into waging a war with the mods, thinking the site had an automatic botspam service. And of course he'd also wiped /qa/ on more than one occasion. On top of that, around the tail end of 2018 barneyfag began to get routinely harassed by what seemed to be a coordinated group, making threads every month testing his image recognition capabilities, calling out to each other while mocking him of missing threads.

Kissu's initial reception didn't feel too hot either. Verniy' wasn't best suited to his admin role as stragglers soon find out how ban happy he was. Their advertising on the (the last remaining) spinoffs was not well received and /ota/ started posting on both /qa/s to taunt them from time to time. Multiple dramas happen, one involving a massive fight with a discord group called /mahou/ over the allowance of loli that spilled over to /qa/, while other involves 10gu of /japan/ - an otaku board born out of 8chan getting booted over drama with it's leadership. Many posters end up resenting Verniy' -now nicknamed Vermin- over his explosive bouts of antagonization and liberal application of the banhammer. However the site keep strutting on, having a number of UI reworks and installing a cytu.be fork - one that could hardly get posted without having a mod say hi.

The situation on the board kept deteriorating. April's Fool 2019 had some activity, but nowhere near the level the previous year had. In April ccd0 forces the board title to change to /qa/ - 2D/Random and in June makes another change making the modpost text blurb of threads moved to /qa/ try to dissuade anons from posting. By mid 2019 new forms of spam began appearing as /qa/ was not immune to the soyboy shitposts plaguing 4chan - it seemed that the clique behind waves of soyjak/gigachad spam on /int/ was using the Questions board as their time off lounge. With all these new players and a steady source of migrants, /qa/'s traditional frogspam begins to take a sideline to general spam - albeit nobody could outpost the schizo brigades yet. Speaking of schizos: lowercase-kun's longer and longer, seemingly intentionally incomprehensible tirades started to weird out even the clique as he seemed completely unable to press the "off" button. The situation with Atechan boils over again in June with him getting his nudes posted, causing another wave of +100 post flamewars. Atechan didn't take this sitting either and increases his manual frog spam, harassing the mafia all the way to the end of the year. Most of /qa/ -that is the happenings thread as virtually every other poster had left by now- was well aware of who these personalities were and no longer put up with their antics, called them out whenever they showed themselves outside their own threads. With relations with sageru and /hap/ thoroughly fucked, the weeb mafia had successfully turned the entire board against them. All 10 of them.

In September, a new wave of moderation attention swept by - speculated to be caused by /hap/ getting somewhat popular within team4chan. This time it was short and direct: Tired of the bumpbots, the mods imposed a 7-day autosage on /qa/, ending all zombie blogpost and daily threads the clique kept alive for months at a time. Hours later most remaining threads get force archived and draconic rangebans sweep the board, affecting yotgo, some frogposters and unrelated anime OPs. This effectively ends the war, causing Yotgo to throw the towel and make a farewell thread accusing everyone of "ruining" /qa/, selflessly letting himself get laughed off the board. When he turned off the spambot /qa/'s pph immediately falls down by 1/3rd in a day, astonishing everyone. Of course a graceful exit would be too dignified for the man who spent years whining while botspamming his favourite board, and he and Verniy' go on to wage a months long spam advertising campaign, convinced somehow there were still anons who didn't already know of their antics, even by 2020 Yotgo could still be seen trying to convince people his clique was things to happen here.

Second Meta Period

Sep. 2019 to Mar. 2020

With the great botspammer out of the way, /qa/ slows down and reaches a short lived balance between meta and off-topic.

Modicum of Peace

Just because Yotgo turned off the bot doesn't mean problems end. But things start to calm down. Anime spam threads slowly go away, replaced by more inane but workable off-topic shitposts. Not all of it was good either, the troupe of leebaiters had grown increasingly active as lee was growing increasingly inactive. As they noticed this, they developed a strange performance act where they play act baiting barneyfag and posting as barneyfag, going as far as to program (borrow?) their own versions of the tools barneyfag uses to identify depibooru reposts, on top of baiting the real lee - At some point in early 2019 the lion's share of barneyfag posts where by this leebot. Since august, specially after a massive raid on /tv/ -likely off-site coordinated-, nu-male / soyboy shitposting goes from a couple threads every other week to a permanent mark in the catalog, at it's height it filled out at least a tenth of the catalog while occasionally having 'soyduels': A practice developed months ago on /qa/, but one that only popularized in the group during a /tv/ raid where they'd keep quoting each others quotes in a bizarre game of chicken. Other shitpost factions such as frogposting cooled down, their (atechan's) obsessive attacks on the weebs left behind to engage more casual forms of posting, re-establishing frogposting as board culture.

While post speed was more or less static it became more organic - The effects of the October Chaos combined with years of trolls farming the clique for (you)s left the board in a strange state. By the start of 2020 anime-styled threads had become practically extinct while meta threads were less interested in 4chan history or internet discussion and more focused on commenting - often complaining - about ongoing trends on the site, chiefly, the changing face of remix culture that now resembled the rage comics of old. Consistent as always but practically irrelevant and rarely getting replies was the usual brigade of anons complaining about moderation. This is partly due to internal migrations within the chinz: Even before the exile of the clique /qa/ was already experiencing a growth of posting habits imported from /bant/ and /trash/, product of what seems to be a general collapse in off-topic posting culture. For the former, the cause was described as "spam culture" making the board unusable for casual posters, who took to occasionally posting on the Happenings threads and their own meta threads. For the latter, it was blogposters escaping a board getting asphyxiated by personalities, to not say raging schizos. /trash/'s influence was felt strongly on the Happenings thread, with the appearance of new tripfags such as Leafeon and a growing trend towards inane posts, much to the chagrin of veterans who hoped for a more on-topic thread now that the war was over.

"Actually we were /q/ all along"

"Just wanted to let you know you are a retard. I'll see on you /qa/" - Moderator Cygnus

As the year goes by, the long lost basal cycle of /qa/ springs back to activity. Meta threads have a respite after getting pushed around since the days of the October Chaos, experiencing a minor comeback that sees them make it to 3 digit replies on rare occasions. The 4chan Happenings thread is arguably at it's peak of popularity -albeit still slow enough to hit the 7 day autosage- having miraculously survived years of abuse from the Spam War groups. In recent months it became apparent moderators were routinely lurking as rulebreaking crosslinks to get axed minutes of being posted. After anons point this out the mask is taken off and multiple mods show their face to mock or help posters out. With such unique popularity come problems however, moderator presence encourages the much derided practice of using /hap/ as a personal report button to experience a surge in activity, leading to the appearance personalities that cause no end of grief when they get punished for it. Dramas from /jp/, /vp/ and /trash/ all spillover to /hap/. This is in turn made worse by the presence of certain mod stalkers such as unicodefag, sniping OPs and acting out on a quest for attention from the staff.

/qa/ would have likely continued in this (mostly) peaceful direction if it weren't for the intervention of much higher force, higher than 4chan and the entire internet. The COVID quarantine affected posting habits in manners nobody imagined, leading to a site-wide increase in posting speed, it's ramifications leading the Question & Answer board to have a very different outcome compared to what anons imagined.

Age of the Soyteen

Apr. 2020 to Nov. 2021

The COVID pandemic gives birth to a young community of shitposters that quickly snatches site's most novel culture and turns it into their own thing.

Soy Pandemic

Starting March 2020, 4chan's posting rate -more or less static since the last great migration of 2016- goes through an noticeable acceleration as the Corona Virus pandemic turns every house into a bunker. /qa/ is particularly affected by this, seeing a perfect y=x lineal growth of it's pph starting April, even higher than the 4chan average. In the third week, somewhat prophetically, a massive off-site coordinated soyjak raid, wipes several pages of the board. The origins of this migration is muddy, but the popularization of Soyjak posting can be traced to the antics of the Gigachad spam group of /int/ and /tv/ fame - however it seems this time there's more anons doing the work than discord members. Previously, wojak shitposts of all forms have been part of the /qa/ landscape since the tail end of 2019, it's at this point where the specific soyboy wojak overtakes the board, to the point comprises a solid third of the catalog at any given time. This, in turn, creates a feedback loop of infamy leading to migration, leading to more infamy, until the third quarter of the yaer /qa/ has by all intents of purposes become the cringe wojak board. Soyjak posters develop into an unique, standalone culture characterized by their penchant for assaulting threads and boards in a way not too different from 2012's ironic shitposting era.

This eager culture doesn't really identify itself as distinct until months later, around June, where one particularly spastic poster begins blogging his antics on Know Your Meme, merely getting rejected is caused enough to promp the new arrivals to raid KYM en masse, uploading every single variant they knew of - Which at this point numbered easily on the 4 digits, and they were creating new ones every day. This is unarguably the point where Soyjaks coalesce into their own identity, focused chiefly on two things: Collecting 'jak variants and raiding. Their formal foundational point happens in September 19 with the creation of the soyjak.party and the first Soybooru. Those sites, created on little more than a whim, accidentally become the safehouse the Soyjak raiders who to an extent were aware of potential repercussions. Their impact on /qa/ is palpable: Question & Answer becomes the fastest off-topic board by an order of magnitude - not in posts but by the sheer number of created threads - and unequivocally one of the youngest. This new generation of ironic shitposters settle into a competition where people who take their threads too seriously - namely karen type complainers - get their threads relentlessly mocked with 'jaks. /qa/ becomes a bit like the October Chaos era withthere's more new threads than actual replies as anons communicate and joke though one line OPs on the frontpage.

/qa/ - Question/Random

• For a brief span, /qa/ reaches a state reminiscent of old /b/ or the Infinity boards. But like all things /qa/, it didn't live long enough to do something of note.

Sharty Raids

The seed of the Gigachad Discord had finally germinated - Within the safety of the soon baptized sharty what can be best described as an horde of little kids determine to make a name of themselves through coordinated raiding. This leads to a sequence of, by the Party's own count, over 20 formal raids -announced and planned for in /raid/- between Sep. 2020 and Nov. 2021, spread not just on 4chan but on multiple Imageboards and social media sites, not counting ad-hoc thread bombings by the multitude soyposters spread on /qa/ and 4chan. While initially just pathetic - little more than kids manually spamming on their phone and declaring their bans an act worthy of history books, their notoriety and some notable early successes - encourages increasingly large crapfloods. The /jp/ & 8chan spheres and their large numbers of practically dead boards become the target of multiplecatalog wipes, sometimes raids are performed by a single kid desperate to fit in with the crew. Most successes however should be attributed to increasingly decrepit state of imageboards in an Internet that no longer has a needed for decentralized hangouts, causing many of these forums to simply be forgotten by the owners due to simple lack of activity, those that weren't hit by the 'jakkers were simply bled to death by illegal content spambots tiring the owners out. The sharty starts accruing a tally of victims, namely Desuchan, ZoomerChan, voxpopuli, and to the shock of much of the 4chan old guard 1chan, the trains IB originally funded by early 4chan dev thatdog. The teeming iconoclasm did not pass unnoticed, and /qa/ by 2021 had become the "soyjak raid board" in the eyes of 4chan, with every subset of the site having more than a reason to despise them.

Moderator response occurs sooner than people imagine. By February 2021 even making soyjak thread on /qa/ was motive for deletions and bans, despite /qa/ never having any rules beyond globals rules and meta discussion. Soyteens engage the staff for answers who just argue it's because of spam bumping out meta threads. Mods, while still doing the rare pranking /hap/, were less visible compared to early 2020 - save for a couple formal capcode replies. Still, thread deletion isn't enough and there's little team4chan can do to fight off what's both a board wide phenomenom and a raid bandwagon. Recent implementations of useragent bans and anti-flood detection -popularly attributed to the courtesy of a certain furry spammer- never quite let the sharty wipe any 4chan boards but also didn't stop them from trying. Worse: At not point did /qa/ ever stop growing as a board, by November it had reached a PPH of 8000, the fastest /qa/ ever was and a speed that let it compete the slower rungs of the 4chan ecosystem, most of it dedicated to breaking the rules. Inadvertently, this increase in moderation workload hasn't been sitting well with the upper echelons of team4chan for a while. In November 3 the sharty raids and wipes half of /lgbt/, and with the real culprit out of reach, team4chan enacts collective punishment and permanently freezes /qa/.

Freezing & Dispersal

Nov. 2021 onwards

/qa/ has finally achieved it's dream of having a board culture. At the ultimate price.

Epilogue: Stragglers Again

The death of /qa/ was a shock to the Sharty as many posters were permanent regulars there. An immediate attempt at a revenge raid buckles fast -or simply goes as every other 4chan crapflood by the sharty went: 3 pages of manual spam then banned- and locals cry and mourn, swearing revenge. While just empty words by teenaged shitposters, the fall of /qa/ or great soyset as they took to name it became one of the cornerstones of an ever growing post-ironic mythos collectively developed by soyteens, who took to archiving their culture by cataloging every possibly variant of the soyboy wojak while writing little bits of fanfiction about them and their community. (Won't lie: bit cute, if ugly as hell) It quickly becomes apparent that having to share a board with all the off-topic posters of /qa/ was causing problems as the site's old guard fell into a purity spiral denouncing the /qa/-tier daily threads for screwing with site activities. Thus a sharp division between off-topic and on-topic posts becomes a staple element of Sharty culture: /soy/ on one side and /qa/ on the other, roleplay camps who'd routinely try to wipe each other's catalog with /qa/ adopting the Spam Wars monikers of the weeb mafia and frogposters alike. Of course, with the former having homefield advantage, posters who choose the /qa/ side would often find themselves on the hard end of a janny hammer.

The off-topic posters of the kway community, most of them also soyteens, quickly try to colonize /bant/, almost wiping the catalog until it's stopped by the local jannyman. Threads lamenting the board surface all across the site only to be rebuked by anons still upset at the laundry list of slights. As for the on-topic posters of /qa/, that is the Happenings Thread: As they have effectively been taken over by the /trash/ emigres of 2020, the thread is almost immediately remade in /trash/ - which is also almost immediately flooded with hapless soyteens and personalities. Other attempts at moving the general were made at /bant/ and [s4s] which go unreplied and abandoned. Their sister general /nah/ is nowhere to be seen on /trash/ - the new local blogposters are now free to simply impose their habits on the poor metaposters. /hap/, having miraculously survived almost 7 years of non-stop raids, mod pranks, /q/ karens, and even the death of is own board, has somehow found itself in yet another rollercoaster of incomprehensible bullshit.

Where is Everybody now?

All of /qa/ is concentrated on the 4chan Happenings thread. The initial tenure on /trash/ is explosive, as having literally the entire board on one place was simply untenable. Months of shitposting ensue until the new stragglers get bored and leave. Once a calmer environment, /hap/'s stay in the Off-Topic board adopts a cycle akin to a sine curve; Oscillating as slow periods of metaposting contrast with month long episodes of pure chaos. By the end of 2022, the influence of /trash/'s natural fauna starts affecting thread culture as blogposters attract local board personalities who trip themselves trying to turn the general into their porn blog. The thread becomes dominated by a series of avatarfags and namefags replying to each other, including once again Leto who took to advertise his ban evasion service when not trying to get the mods' attention. In 2022 there's a leak of /j/ screenshots on the sharty, causing a massive flood of soyteens to raid the place as if possessed by some ancestral memory - however post-raid, the place appeals to them and some choose to stay as growing dramas within the Party had tired them out. So the turn of 2023 comes by the hand of avatarfag blogs, soyteen discordites and Leto's telegram cabal, the influence of these group has the /hap/ community see itself much closer to the "underground" internet than actual 4chan meta. Conversation shifts towards Discord grooming gangs, deranged site personalities, kiwifarms lolcows and accusing each other of being either of them. The situation implodes in the second quarter 2024 when metaposters tired of non-stop drama make a run for it, moving to /r9k/ and later /bant/. Attempts to turn trash/hap/ into /nah/ are made but blogposters are unable to keep a thread alive by themselves, dying in the first months of 2025. On /bant/ the Happenings thread gets much slower, but distinctly on-topic. It is to this day that the Happenings thread remains team4chan's favorite gossip grounds, with moderator pranks pockmarking every year of the post-/qa/ era.

Soyteens continue their meteoric increase in size and influence following a notably /b/-like evolution: Their culture becomes internet-famous and the sharty grows to be the second largest imageboard on the Internet, soyteen culture moves up to Social Media and even real life with teenagers gleefully adopting the ironic cringe. However middle schoolers can only be amused by internet pranks for so long - by the turn of 2023 turn soyteen culture goes through a lull and turns to private chatrooms (neé Discord and Telegram) to build personal connections which are... not the highest quality given the usual antics of the Party. 'jakker culture is slowly encroached by the post-COVID Internet underground, one dominated by infamous larpercore groups that lure the hapless into blackmail situations, self-harm and even murder. One such Discord group, KolymaNET/9ch, manages to acquire the site from it's original owner and causes a period of open war where soyteens splinter into several spinoffs and private chats, all of which raid each other with illegal content and attempts at doxxing. Years of strife caused by abusive chatroom-linked administrators and CSAM spam turn the sharty into moral hardliners who direct their attention to whoever they deem degenerates, many having seen the effects of such groups on their own peers.

In 2023, an injoke of an injoke had developed from a soyjak thread into it's own website, The Frog Pond, and later The Ribbit Rally. Starting out as ironic roleplay based on the kekistani mythos and party/qa/'s usual Spam War roleplay, somewhere around the line this microculture slash forced meme is adopted by an unusually intense poster who attaches references from (by now) old /qa/ history to the already obscure MAGAfrogs and rebrands it /qa2/, turning it all into one grand post-ironic injoke. The culprit behind most of these spinoff's content spends 2024 raiding /hap/, /r9k/, desuarchive, soyjak altchans and occasionally /a/, enough to gather a reputation and attract a small number of copycats - who are however not even a fraction of the total postcount of the /qa2/schizo. Eventually things run their course and the last /qa2/ related site dies on January 2025, presumably because Trump's electoral victory killed the joke. On February 5 the spammer comes clean on /hap/ admitting to have been behind most posts, confusing more than one soyteen at the sharty who assuming there was an entire community behind it. While mostly a minor sequence, this deranged frogposter is effectively the last great roleplayer of the Spam War, tidbit that had survived within sharty culture since it's creation. His departure signals the end of one of the bigger links between soyteens and /qa/.

Despite the initial hiccups, kissu.moe manages to persist, becoming the spearhead of a new generation of /jp/ -or rather /a/jp/- spinoff sites. It's soon joined by others such as chen2, Heyuri, Wapchan and later Hikari3, while still being the fastest of the group. The first years are slow and it's a chore to keep the site around, but as the time goes by the new guard overtakes the old guard as spinoffs age out of posting or simply close down. In order to prevent more dramas over bans Verniy' is encouraged to adopt a council system, mostly a ritual for the inner circle to hold each other back should the push come to shove. As the /jp/sphere shrinks and 4chan's moderation policies effectively banish off-topic posts out of all hobby boards, Kissu has effectively taken a leadership role among it's peers, becoming the home of a small but budding community. Yotgo continued to be periodically harassed by one Atechan until his tragic death in 2024, and kissu occasionally gets raided by soyteens with distant memories of this site being /qa/ related.

REVENGE AT LAST

"/QA/ FUCKING WON"

In a completely unexpected turn of events, an actual bona fide hacker joins the ranks of the soyteens and manages to worm his way into 4chan by the hand of obsolete code libraries related to .PDF files - "legacy" code from before the time desuwa got hold of development, which together with /f/'s board code and other frameworks has remained practically untouched for a decade. Claiming to have been gotten in since 2024, he announces his hack to 4chan in April 15 2025, opening /qa/ and redirecting the whole site there while showing up in the sharty to show screenshots of the admin toolkit, leaking the sourcecode and emails of the entire staff. team4chan immediately shuts down the servers, causing mass panic and a exodus to other imageboards that crushes the poor altchans' servers in a sequence not too different from 4chan's downtimes in the 2000s. Hopefully this doesn't result in actual harm to any staff member. Still, practically every soy-not-so-teen comes back to the party in awe that almost 5 years of non-stop writefaggotry have been validated and the culture's founding myth actually avenged. Only to immediately turn on the hacker because he never posted a soyjak. Some things never change.

Essays

Tidbits & lessons learned through the history of /qa/

Origin of the Soyteens

A pinch of /pol/, and a pinch of /v/, and a pinch of /int/

Consider that by 2020 soyposting was already ancient: The end product of a long-standing chain of injokes that developed somewhere around 2013, that hot year when 4chan declared war on SJWs & news media and a meme -meme as in the proper Dawkinian definition of an idea that survives generations- comes to life. Soyboys and Soyjaks are, in essence, the latest and seemingly final development in the decade long process mocking the emasculated male stereotype that's been plaguing the lower spheres of Internet culture and social media thorough the 2010s - Taken so far out of it's own context it became a subculture in and on itself.

The roots of this genealogic shitpost tree stem from /v/ and /pol/ -boards then mingling together over the culture war's encroaching on video games- mocking infamous social media posts by men claiming to be "male allies" of the SJW feminist bandwagon, who identify themselves as new males and often found themselves victims of cancellations, a source of great schadenfreude. From there on, /v/ and /pol/ took this nu-male in different directions. /v/ first remixes them with Soylent shitposts (due to the antics on one deranged speedrunner and one scam advertising campaign blatantly pandering to this "new male" phenomenon) and nintendo manchild injokes, specially after the Nintendo Switch is released in 2017 making everyone cringe with embarrassing unboxing videos. This sets in stone the perception that all nu-males are emasculated, balding with poorly groomed facial hair and always trying to pass as harmless by taking selfies with the infamous fake surprise face we now call the soy face. Later that year /pol/ starts digging up social media and streaming screenshots this stereotype and starts calling such people soyboys, coming up with a plethora of OC within their own drawthreads. Politically Incorrect anons proceed to spam these terms absolutely every where as a replacement of the wordfiltered cuck, to the point the word soy also gets filtered to onions by team4chan in 2018.

At the same time, wojakposting -a 4chan standard since 2011- had settled into regular board culture in a couple places. Past the obvious feelsguy capital of /r9k/, /int/ was also a keen on remixing wojaks- board oldheads fondly remember it as /int/ heritage due to it's origins as a Krautchan meme. Around the turn of 2018 the International board was having a bit of shitposting streak of their own, a period of cultural osmosis with /pol/ where they jointly developed the amerimutt macro and resurrected the Gigachad meme among other things. There a Swedish content remixer has been on a year long streak of making new wojaks, he non-chalantly remixes the nintoddler meme with the soyboy face and promptly forgets about it, moving on to his own idea of stapling ears on the poor twarz horrifying and amusing anons in equal measure. Within a day this soyak is already retouched and turned in a macro, finding itself spread on a couple dozen remixes around /v/, /tv/, /int/ and /pol/, occupying the ever changing repertoire of anon reaction faces. A bit later, around the first quarter of 2019, it gets unburied and turned a popular meme on /int/ where anons roleplay debates between one Gigachad and one soyjak. In typical /int/ fashion they try to wipe the catalog with these shitposts and the notoriety spreads the soyjak macro everywhere, becoming a mainstay in 4chan remix culture.

2019 is also the year 4chan goes through an ironic shitposting revival, this is the point where our macro takes protagonism: All across the site anons take to post 'jaks in order to mock current trends and contrarian opinions alike. In some boards, specially retarded anons quote the soyjak posts mocking them and reply with another soyjak. This soyduel's earliest appearance is on /qa/ around May and it lingers in obscurity until August when soyboy posting becomes rampant on /tv/. The A24 horror trend was in full swing, derided by contrarians due to pretentious critics praising it to high heavens. By June 2019, /tv/ gets absolutely floored with soyjaks mocking A24's "slow burn atmospheric horror" in a raid that lasts well into September, where soydueling goes from a couple rare shitposts to a whole ass trend. A trend that would find a home in /qa/ a few months later.

The Gigachad Discord

Or so the official story goes. A closer look on the exact posts tells things a bit differently. Soyjak shitposting was primarily coordinated by a single clique, one that achieved a year long streak of forcing their injokes through catalog wipes. This posse, led by one Gigachad roleplayer was seemingly behind all the cornerstones of early soyteen culture - Soyquoting, soydueling, parodying A24, raiding, collecting 'jaks, and of course gigachad posts all predating the rise soyposting on /qa/ by almost a year. In essence, it's responsible for the largest forced meme since that anon who came up with the 30yo boomer.

The most damning evidence comes in the detritus of the earliest raids: First, there's only a single raid going on at any given time, outside these periods and specially before the wipe attempts there's practically no soyboy wojaks getting posted. Second individual anons can be traced through their custom filenames - 4chanX and image randomization being a mystery to them. Third, after cross-checking the first and second arguments and with a bit of context, it becomes apparent most anons replying were keenly aware of what was exactly being said, their exchange not being an actual discussions but a back & forth chat between posters aware of person on the other side. Thus, we can trace the path of migration (but really just raids) of a crowd of anons who knew each other outside 4chan that roughly goes /int/ -> /tv/ -> /qa/. From the very first posts however, the clique preferred to communicate through /qa/ the most.

The earliest traceable activity can be seen on /qa/ around May, where the first soyduels -unnamed, short and ignored- took shape. first forays into /qa/ came and went unnoticed as the final stage of the Atechan/Yotgo drama dominated the wasteland of a board. Their activity doesn't truly pick up until June and July where they took to /int/ and developed the habit of roleplaying characters in greentext aka soyquoting. However it should be noted that International had a years long tradition of wiping it's own catalog to get back at the janitors, likely the reason why nobody batted an eye when a bunch of randoms started filling it up with roleplays of Gigachad and Soyjak, specially since the former had been a popular remix macro for years. In June, the clique also makes moves /tv/ bringing the art of soyquoting to full force. A growing contrarian sentiment towards the horror revival explodes into a several months long raid as they manage to get the entire board to shit on A24, lasting all the way into September. In August 2 one namefag named CHAD wrote the rules of soydueling copypasta. In November, the begin posting in all 3 boards a MEGA collection of over 500+ soyjaks. After that, there's a lull in activity (or I simply couldn't find any more raids) with posters being spread in their usual hobby boards, until 2020 where board raiding restarts, first on January with /his/ and finally they raid /qa/ on April, where the joke spirals out of their control. In May 2020 the discord has it's only known leak. Outside these pictures, no other direct proof exists beyond the oddly specific MD5 posting histories.

Soyteens as a Community

Actually pointing down when a coherent community formed and distinguished itself from the site-wide habit of soyposting by turning to collecting soyjaks is hard to pinpoint. Even the well-recorded Soyjak Party's wiki is uninterested in finding out when and how it came to be from a demographic point of view, handwaving it as "we came from /int/" despite never carrying any influence from that board. Even the famous Swede only resurfaced months after soyjak.party was created, amazed his one-off shitpost created a whole trend.

What is undeniable is the influence of the COVID pandemic in the development of the culture. The Discord set the grounds for it, with a precedent of around half dozen raids to their name they managed to manufacture considerable side wide notoriety for soyjak variants. Every board they raided left behind a small retinue of amused newbies enacting copycat shitposts, the meme was slowly but successfully forced, becoming a thing as 2019 went by - yet in the eyes of the site it was still indistinguishable from /pol/'s usual soyboy verbal assaults or just generic 4chan dunking, after all, soyjaks were merely the latest development in mocking people who took 4chan too seriously. It's during the first months of the pandemic -February & March just as school classes in the USA are suspended and the lockdowns set in- where we can find the inflection point that sees soyjaks go from "forced meme" to "meme" and the clique's injokes taken off their hands by an horde tweenaged anons. Still, there's the matter of how they found themselves on /qa/ specifically.

The migration process happened seemingly at random with no reason discovered so far - but the earliest point where it can be affirmed to have already occurred can be found in April 20, the clique's largest raid, almost wiping /qa/ clean (well, seemingly the largest due to /qa/'s slow speed and lack of jannies). It's at this point where there's arguably more copycats than movers, and the culture truly differentiates onto it's own identity. Noticing the bandwagon, the clique sets to "teach" the kids all they they can, and so does soydueling, raiding and SLOW BURN HORROR get reintroduced to the new soyteen lexicum. The growth of this phenomenom is truly explosive, causing /qa/ to visibly outpace 4chan's pandemic induced growth with a perfect y=x linear function. By September 2020, both a site and a booru for 'jak OC is created and soyteen culture has it's formal starting point. As for the original clique, it's activity dwindles around the third quarter of 2020, possibly assimilated into the inner circle of the Soyjak Party or competing groups such as Kuz's KolymaNET, if not dispersed entirely.

There's a bit of irony in the fact an off-site community has essentially created soy culture when you consider the debacles that plagued the Sharty a few years later saw the entire site turn against the very concept of using off-site chatrooms. Maybe something could be said about the consequences of letting middleschoolers have access to unmoderated chats.

Demographic Summary

Regulars

Core /qa/ posters, the natural userbase of the board for good and ill

old /qa/

• metaposters
  • 4chan Aficionados --> Discussed their favourite boards, history of the site, and ran analytics. Made nice map threads and dug around for old pieces of OC.
  • Nostalgic Oldfags --> Mostly there to tell the aficionados how good they used to have it. Occasionally made threads of old memes.
  • Armchair Admins --> Countless foolish but well-meaning "how i will fix 4chan/my board" threads.
  • Internet Hobbyists --> bibanon is here! - Anons who wished for a board best described as "/internet/ - Internet Culture" and found /qa/ it's closest equivalent, discussions about the role of imageboards, reddit, and internet culture dominated their interests.
• complaintposters
  • /DELETEPOL/ --> Primordial fire of all 4chan metadiscussions, parodied to the point of becoming the board's longest running meme.
  • The 4chan Karen --> The quintessential complaint post. Anons that come to vent and call people names, which unwittingly acted as the greatest conversation starters on the board.
  • /a/ & /jp/ --> Their numbers alone were enough to develop a persistent meta threads during the early days, mostly denouncing or celebrating elitism culture and requesting spinoff friendly boards.
• offtopicposters
  • Off-Topic Colonies: At first it was [s4s] & the /a/jp/ general (soon to become neo [s4s]), whose influence was felt through exports in the form of memes and namefags and mod attention, specifically swaglord's. Other posters were ambivalent to their presence, but they were not aggressive and contributed large quantities of OC. Slowly, smaller groups like /co/ (Board-tans), /a/ & /jp/ (Holding essentially permanent meta threads), "/jp/" & /pol/ (Election tourists) made /qa/ their home away from home. All the colonists got ran out the board by the end of 2017, either due to the board speeding up, loss of interest, or the creation of other boards.
  • Board-tans General --> Board-tans as site culture arguably peaked around 2014. As the larger drawthreads moved on to other fotms, drawfag remnants of the /co/ (formerly /tg/) 4chan House and the /v/ Winter Ball projects found the newly created /qa/ as a refuge to ship anthropomorphic imageboards undisturbed. Acting as a hub for the general board-tans fandom, the therad managed to eke out a good 2 years worth of OC: Around a thousand illustrations and two cross-board events in the Winter Balls 2015 & 2016. Changes to /qa/'s speed killed the already fading general by first quarter 2017 and changes in site culture and mod's attitude aborted the Winter Ball 2017, marking the end of the tradition.
  • CSS/Filter Thread --> 4chan UI customization threads. In some ways a /jp/sphere colony on /qa/. It was taken over by raiders from the spin offs where it essentially became a filter thread. Here they developed the MD5 filter megalist.
  • Happenings Thread --> Originally a mix of GET spotting and commenting on high profile events (ie: stickies, raids), it slowly became the central hub of /qa/ and center of all meta oriented discussions. Spent at least 3 digits worth of posts arguing on what exactly constituted a happening. Survived multiple near death experiences and grew to become the most active thread on the board.

late /qa/

• metaposters --> Generally veterans of /qa/ who survived both hiroyuki memeing the board and the great war, plus a new batch of anons. all nucleated in the Happenings thread. jaded as they get.
  • (Punished) 4chan Happenings Thread --> A thread denied it's board. Took in refugees from every demographic as the board collapsed into non-stop shitposting while dealing with multiple problem posters. By the end of the board /hap/ was a multifacetic beast with competing points of view taken from all 4chan epochs and /qa/ demographics. It was the thread to close the door on /qa/ as the board got frozen.
• complaintposters --> remained relatively unchanged and became irrelevant as the board speed quickly swept them away.
• offtopicposters --> Mostly new stock. Moderately hostile to both frogposters and the kissu clique, but not afraid to post content related to either.
  • frogposters --> With the spinoff bots out of the picture, the more unhinged frog raiders leave and the remaining frogposters settle down. They go through a demographic shift that sees them more in tune with posting habits you'd see in /int/, /tv/ or /bant/.
  • blogposters --> The majority of /qa/'s new blood from 2019 onwards consisted of one-line blogposters running rolling threads, emigreés from /bant/ and later /trash/, as both boards were ravaged by spammers. Well adapted to board culture, but often simply too dense to handle.☼
  • Not a Happening General --> As soyjaks ate up the board, blogposting migrated in increasing numbers to /hap/. Eventually the situation became unsustainable and the /nah/ thread was created.
  • randomposters --> As soyjak spammers became infamous site-wide, /qa/ becomes a household name for shitposting. This attracts a batch of anons who see the board in the same vein as old /b/, [s4s] and /pol/. Albeit brief, the managed to a semblance of colour to the wojak monotomy of the board.

Personalities of /qa/

Not a tripfag list. These are local posters that reached infamy through organic means by waging personal wars against mods and poster alike, plus spammers from other boards that visited regularly.

If you considered yourself a regular of /qa/ and are not on this list, you were a nice dude.

Glossary: 
*Name/Tripcode/Handle - Anon
*Popular Nickname - Anon
*Never Named, wiki-only name - "Anon"

/qa/'s lovely band of crazies

• "Remove GR15 Spammer" --> A single poster on a years long campaign to get GR15 removed. On /qa/ since first quarter 2016. Argumentative poster who'd defend his view to the point of flaming, on top of usually attracting the barneyfag spammer or being confused for him. His insistence on the GR15 hill caused a minor riot that ended up with every thread he made getting scriptspammed. His final posts were around February 2017. Arguably the first true personality of /qa/.
• "Remove (You) Spammer" --> For the entirety of 2016 and a good chunk of 2017, one insane anon demanded the mods remove (You)s from the site every week. Unlike Remove GR15, he never posted much.
• Catholic Anon / Andy --> Old /qa/'s lovely resident retard. First appeared in June 2016; Known for his rants about religion and Reddit (sorry, reddit) ruining 4chan and anime. Managed to get all of early /qa/'s panties on a twist reaching a level of infamy that would see him still get talked about years after his age cohort left the board. Became the target of harassment by a group of trolls that haunted him well past the point of reader amusement. Moved to /bant/ in 2017 and became known for posting Junko Enoshima from Danganrompa, then had brief stints visiting /qa/.
• "Old /qa/ Circlejerk" - Gun Control Anon, Prose Anon, Meiling, Pikarifag, remeranAuthor !.neWrem.g., Lucas & others --> Assortment of personalities that surfaced in the second quarter 2016, most out of trolling Catholic Anon. CA gets led on into a months long flamewar that took multiple threads several hundred posts past bump-limit. This spiraled into a barely comprehensible sequence of fights between personalities that seemed to know each other outside /qa/. Gun Control Anon was a troll from Norway mistaken for female by CA, who then became the object of his ire. GCA harassed CA for months, pretending to be multiple people and making vague references to steam groups, later claiming to have baited CA into steam and doxxed him. CA's lolcow behaviour started to see him get piled on by other posters such as Prose Anon, allegedly from New York & also female; Known for criticizing other people's prose but more famous for being an avatarfag for Luluco from Space Patrol Luluco. In turn, other posters began getting involved in rapid-fire style back & forth flamewars, including a drawfag known as newrem who ended up in a case of mutual doxxing and short lived avatarfags of Hong Meiling from Touhou Project and Pikari from Amanchu!. Most of them stopped posting by 2017, with Prose Anon being one of the last.
• Pikarifag / sa.ge --> Arch-nemesis of REMOVE GR15. In late 2016 he attempted to ask the mods for help with ponyspam and got rejected then took the nuclear option botspammed Remove GR15 threads with broken text and images from various anime, but he is best remembered for avatarfagging Pikari from Amanchu!, several "how to fix /pol/" threads and hanging around the CSS and happenings threads. His antics resulted in a minor resurgence of the old /a/ Pocari Sweat meme thanks to detractors/circlejerks.
• asukaspammer ---> Avatarfag of character Asuka Kurashina from Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, first spotted by early 2016 but only active as a spammer from third quarter 2016 onwards. He utilized a crapflood script to wipe /qa/ then gloat after he gets nuked and 3/4ths of the board go with him. Initially well received for fighting off the October /pol/ spam, he ran out of goodwill by 2017 after it became he clear he wasn't going to stop. Ran the earliest instances of the bumpbot (rofl variant). Eventually, coordinated spam with with the /g/+sageru raiders - and most likely was part of the clique himself. Publicly banned in December 2017, becoming less active, with the #qa clique likely enacting copycat asukaspam. Stayed around till early 2020.
• GR15 Defense Force / GRXVDF !!mQybBQsWzGP --> /qa/'s first problem tripfag. Donned the name in late 2016 in order to argue with the Remove GR15 spammer. Fell in with the #qa clique and spend considerable time flaming with the /mlpol/ IB spammers; His claim to fame is the failed GET that unexpectedly became an infamous reference point for the start of the spin off raids. Got his trip permanently banned in December 2017 and dropped off public posting soon after.

Dreadful outsiders ruining our fun

• barneyfag / Lee Goldson --> Infamous /co/ spammer; an autistic who despised Barney & Friends and associated it with cartoons My Little Pony and Steven Universe. From 2012 onwards he imposed a reign of terror that spread to several boards including /v/, /int/ & /qa/. This in turn attracted my a gallery of trolls that tested his (likely script aided) image identification ability. His most active period was circa 2017, same year he got doxxed. By the turn of 2018 he was getting harassed non-stop by a group of trolls known as the leebaiters. Unlike previous trolls, this group knew each other through private chats and personally contacted Barneyfag even before making their posts. Lee's will was slowly chipped away as his posting habits slow to a trickle by 2019, and he stops posting entirely by 2020.
• leebaiters / leebot --> After Lee slows down, the troll clique that formed around him kitbashed a leebot spamscript with image recognition capabilities hooked to the derpibooru website. The group and potentially the bot can be traced as early as second quarter 2018, but their activities don't take a unique spin of their own until mid 2019. This clique coordinated both botspam and manual spam to continue the pretense of baiting Lee. Early on, boards such as /int/ & /qa/ were used as testing grounds for the script's image recognition. Starting on the tail end of 2019 they increase their activities and develop an entire set of phrasing and injokes. By 2020 some developed a persona in the form of an avatarfag of Don Turtelli from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with pictures taken exclusively from an obscure My Little Pony fetish porn comic. Leebaiters steadily upped the ante, making several threads a week, paying a Barney voice actor to perform stealth injokes, making elaborate posts such as pretending to be barneyfag such as making a "surrender" post and an infamous feet fetish post.
• Anti Crack-Kun / ACK - Infamous personality from /u/. Formerly a guerrilla scanlator, he was a high functioning autistic with serious hangups about shipping. His condition deteriorated into paranoid delusions of targeted trolling, leading him to blame Team4chan for his woes. ACK turned to spamming both #4chan, /qa/ and Desuarchive at several points in the board's life; a drama retinue of /u/ personalities such as !Akemi and warosushitter !!dApALfIDywS followed him around.
• leto / unicodefag / foxe / furnigger ---> A creature out of old /b/'s nightmares. Arguably, as of 2025, the most infamous spammer the site ever saw. Developer, botspammer, homosexual, zoophile, CSAM dumper, and furry. His earliest appearances date around late 2017 on /qa/ and /bant/ as an avatar of Nick Wilde and other characters from Zootopia. He later moved onto fursonas, one black/red and one white/blue, taken FA artist letodoesart. His signatures were also using emojis for filenames and invisible unicode characters in his name. unicodefag cut his teeth by botspamming /bant/ on 2018 with a combination of premium proxies, 2captcha keys and a residential proxy list of unprecedented size stolen from Luminati allegedly thanks to a /r9k/ spammer he befriended. On occasion, he attempted to bait the #qa clique claiming to have a copy of their bumpbot code, but wasn't picked on. Later appropriated /trash/, specially the /gfur/ general, and spammed that general to high hell. Fell in with the 2chen /cumg/ crew and by late 2022 ran a fork of the [CENSORED] ban evasion tool that he started adspamming the poor /hap/ thread with.

Raiders

Groups who organized to bring /qa/ to it's knees one way or the other.


Only name those suspected of running bots or raiding, this is not a witch hunt nor does bibanon encourage such behaviour.

October Cliques

(2016-2017)
Transient groups that discovered /qa/ through the October Chaos and tried to carve their name on the board.

• /pol/ Bandwagon --> The first group to pervasively raid /qa/ was /pol/, as payback over perceived slights originating from the also pervasive /deletepol/ threads. Attracted by the noise of the October announcements, the presence of anti-/pol/ threads riled up election tourist /pol/lacks who never heard of the board before. Thus /qa/ joins the ranks of the /leftypol/ boogeyman in the eyes of the culture war aficionados. In what's essentially a months-long sore winner tantrum from the then most influential board on 4chan, teenage /pol/yps gloated to /qa/ddit of resisting supposed attempts at bringing their board down, winning the election, getting modcat fired among other things such as falling for trolls claiming /leftypol/ infiltrated the staff. As all bandwagons, it was intense enough to speed up /qa/ by an order of magnitude, but also short-lived..
• Icemen --> An off-site group of liberal activists decided to use /qa/ as public staging ground around January 2017, likely noticing /qa/ after the firing of asan over /pol/'s /diy/ raid threads. Their goal is little more than disrupting /pol/ activities by reporting technically rulebreaking posts as GR1 violations, such as the HWNDU threads. Immediately noticed by /pol/lacks who proceeded to accuse them of everything on earth, sparking thread long flamewars. Initially passing through the mod's radar, they were put down by February, however one of their more intense posters, nicknamed Christ and Icefag by locals, refused to leave for months making anime OPs about /pol/ raids or otherwise campaigning and confusing Sageru threadbombings for anime /pol/ cabal.
• /jp/ Spin Offs / "/jp/" - warosu.org/g/, ota-ch, 4taba, himasugi, merorin, /nen/ & GNFOS/no-you --> In February, a yet unknown, off-site connected group of spinoffers invited the Spinoff communities to /qa/, inciting an massive, months long raid by most of the /jp/sphere. The raid quickly evolves into an competitive shitposting campaign, instigated behind the lines by this clique who used the chaos to agressively attack meta threads. Tactics included bumpbots (3 letters gibberish) and spambots (Suck My Cock Dude) and plain copypasta spam. The pretense of /qa/ being a spinoff board held on for months, and many spinoffers (well mostly just /ota/ and hima) would come by during downtimes. Most spinoffers left by the freezing of the board, with some flares of activity through the second quarter of 2017 but eventually were ran off the board through disagreement with other posters, with the unusual exception of Trevor of old /jp/ fame. Only the inviting clique remained; One that would quickly become infamous as the #qa clique.
  • Trevor / T --> Admin of GNFOS & no-you, legendary /jp/ shitposter and spinoff pioneer. Visited /qa/ around February causing an entire mob to follow him there. Had a period of absence then returned to the fray mid 2018. Didn't actually do much raiding, mostly blogposted and comfyposted. Created a /qa/ steamgroup, linked to /qa/ in no-you and at one point did daily Youtube reviews of the /jp/sphere. Went just a little bit nuts over it. By mid 2019 he was out of /qa/ posting on ota-ch.
  • Satania / Trevelyan --> Avatarfagged as Satanichia Kurumizawa Mcdowell from Gabriel DropOut (bruh) around 2017. Mostly playfighted with the frogs, who'd confused him with trevor for a while. He'd go around /qa/ rating threads and generally shit(fun)posting and engaging the frogposters, who nicknamed them Trevelyan after confusing them with Trevor. Left by third quarter 2017.
  • Cirno General & Touhou Posters --> The only group to actually come from /jp/. Touhou posting flared on and off as a side effect of the general chaos of election month /qa/. It isn't until the February 2017 Spinoff raids that Touhous appear in any meaningful numbers. Many early threads are deleted for unknown reasons. By late March, a coherent group of Cirnoposters appear, and remain all the way to the freezing of the board. /qa/ is unfrozen two days after the announcement of Touhou Project's Hidden Star in Four Seasons, starring Cirno. Cirnoposters thus come back in mass, accompanied by multiple OC artists. They coalesce into a single thread and make an earnest effort to fin; arguing they'd be more welcome in /qa/ than in a /jp/ that became dominated by topical generals and a growing hostility towards newcomers. The posters in question had some ties to /a/'s cirno spammers, King of GETs and the Cirno spinoff chiru.no, likely one of the reasons behind the staff's initial opposition to their presence. As a general however, they remained by far the best behaved of all /jp/sphere groups, albeit this resulted in some grumbling from the sageru clique. The Cirno thread remained undisturbed until the creation of /bant/ prompted a migration; the /qa/ thread limped a bit into June, then dropped off the board. In /bant/ cirnoposters would grow to become one of the main fixtures on the frontpage, becoming board culture, until the group degenerates into an infamous Discord spam clique.
• Infinity shitposters - The October Chaos brought /qa/ to the attention of /pol/, which in turn put /qa/ on the map of several /pol/sphere related groups, most of them rooted in 8chan. While /pol/ forgot about /qa/ by the Elections of 2016, much like an earthquake's creak, subsequent ripples may be felt. A number of Infinity-related cliques appeared on /qa/ months after /pol/ left, some exceedingly skilled at falseflagging, causing no end of confusion to /qa/'s inhabitants.
  • /int*/, Brony Discord & mlpol.net --> The April's Fool 2017 prank caused a stir in /mlp/, as merging with /pol/ to form /mlpol/ was the most interesting thing to happen to that board since 2015. A bunker was quickly created by /mlp/ anons, but the idea of requesting the board back through /qa/ was floated around but didn't gather many replies. Strangely, despite the bronies' usual IB savvy ways, a raid still occurred on April 3. It's later revealed it was orchestrated by a 200 users large Discord server with some ties to 8chan's /b/, a haven for bronies, and to /intl/'s trolling culture. The raid intensifies by April 4 and the Sageru clique ops for mass reporting fake GR1 violations, prompting the mods to freeze /qa/ in April 7. After this the discord moved onto greener pastures and the actual /b/ bronies there create their own imageboard, mlpol.net. It dabbles on trolling and it reignites the /qa/ flamewar as soon as the board is unfrozen, this time opposed by a very angry #qa clique. The raid loses momentum by the second week of May. Surprisingly, their IB remains in operations as of 2025. At least one member is confirmed to have remained on /qa/ supposedly switching to frogposting, causing some on #qa to assume every frog was a horse for most of 2017.
  • 8chan /b/, [BR] & napvlv - fugthelug was the female lynchpin of a discord clique whose name was never known beyond a single chatroom known as Non Aggression Pact Violating Lewd Voyeurs, or napvlv; Related to the /b/ clique ran by Board Owner Dysnomia. She developed an interest in /qa/ after the /pol/ raided it during the elections and linked it on occasion. Drawfag and avatar of Hatsune Miku, she experiments with trolling a bit in February 2017 and does a bit of drawing. Months later, in a very confusing episode, she causes a raid by provoking what's claimed to be 8ch.pl's secret ancap board, [Board Redacted], getting the local lolcows to raid /qa/ between May and June. There they cause minor chaos in a desperate attempt to dox and defame fug, posting old 8/b/ personality spiderchan's nudes and attributing them to her, even spilling over to other boards. Posters from 8chan /b/ and the /int*/ sphere would be seen from time to time through the next year.

</ref> The antics of this 8gag group caused massive rage on the "/jp/" clique trying to colonize /qa/, who proceeded to wildly speculate on them being behind frogpost and every single mention of /pol/, being behind the icemen of January (which developed into the Public Enemy of /qa/ copypasta) and being part of a journalistic plot to prop up their careers.

Spam War

(2017-2019) 
The manchildren behind the great weeb/frog war. Made /qa/ practically unusable for all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.

• Warosu Clique / /qa/ Friends / /qa/ Cabal / weeb mafia / kissu.moe --> Initially, /jp/sphere posters were just another group among the endless meta crossboarders, gathering in /jp/ meta threads to discuss spinoffs, /jp/ history, spinoff-adjacent sites like textboards or just requesting a "2D/Random" forum in-tune of the old Niijiura boards of Futaba. Enter the October Chaos, new stock mingling at warosu.org/g/ and other spinoffs was attracted to /qa/ thanks to moderator Anonymous-san's activity in November. His firing caused these posters to despise all meta through association with /pol/. In essence, what likely started as an idea while discussing Asan & meta topics within /jp/sphere back channels - private chats and IRC, the exact origin is unknown, but some of it happened on sageru.org's IRC channel #jp, composed of warosu veterans - evolved into a plan to terraform /qa/ into a spinoff board. By January 2017 there's threads discussing running out metaposters and turning /qa/ into 2D/Random, and a slew of pre-planned /jp/ aligned threads began to appear. By March, an eclectic mix of teenbro shitposters and no-fun-allowed neurotics had determined to take over /qa/ with a number of their ranks declaring the board 2D/Random, citing a fantasy vision of 2chan's Niijiura boards and old /jp/ (which got them accused of cargo cultists by actual /jp/ dinosaurs). This group, calling each other /qa/ friends and the cabal, existed in mostly an ad-hoc form - a few bot running lynchpins leading on unwitting posters and encouraging them to attack unwelcome threads, until the temporal freezing of /qa/ led them to reorganize as a community within the sageru #qa channel. The opening salvo of this secret war was a series of invitations to the spinoff boards to raid /qa/ around February, going on to childishly attack meta threads deemed "/q/" or "/pol/", which involved basically all threads that had an "ugly" OP in their eyes. Coached by the Janny war veterans at #jp they developed thread spam scripts to bump off these threads, while protecting threads they approved through a bot hooked to a whitelist and an API reader so it could bump threads when they hit page 10. Other posters handled tidbits like image dumpers and post-copying algorithms, or more traditional CAPTCHA-bypass crapflood scripts and manual airplane mode spam - and a bit of creative trolling. Initially they'd squat publicly on the Happenings Thread trolling the locals, then had a brief stint on a Discussion thread split where they'd brag about their spam. After the April freeze, Discussion thread, ghostposting and the creation of Desuarchive's /meta/ acted as a recruitment points. Post-freze they were successful in making the board unfun to other raiders, but locals and crossboarders who saw their honest threads get attacked for no reason began to "fight back", eventually taking the form of frogposting threadbombers. The clique even had unwitting mod support, unaware of the spam they assumed the growing anti-weeb sentiment on /qa/ were just generic trolls. Yet this turns sour in late 2017 as, while most members kept some manner of opsec behind the sageru veil, they failed to keep the more emotionally unstable spammers in check (Notably, Verniy and Yotgo) creating enough negative attention to incite a growing number of equally unhinged anti-mafia spammers. The war heats up and reaches a permanent state of spam/counter-spam and mutual stalking, with the more public personalities getting their casual posts constantly IP wiped. The clique later makes a second IRC, #qa @ rizon.net, to serve as a front for the real one and as both were trolled non-stop, a third invite-only IRC. When mods upped the ante with rangebans, the mafia created their own spinoff at kissu.moe. By mid 2019 most clique members left /qa/ for kissu or left entirely coexistence proved difficult, the remainers saw the tables turn on them as their constant backseat moderation and threadbombing, the latter specially in the by-then established /qa/ hub, the Happenings thread, caused a new spurt of mod attention and a wave of anons capable of identifying them and tell them off. The final nail in the coffin came in the form of mods a placing 7 day autosage, killing necrobumping. All in all, the Warosu clique was responsible for several thousand of botposts over the span of 3 years; at least 10% of all posts between 2017 and 2019 was a bot, where most threads that made it to 100 posts on archive doing so through scriptspam. Their presence was the singular reason behind the enactment of draconic moderation decisions on /qa/.
  • Unknown - At least two or three Warosu spammers ran some minimal opsec or contributed to the creation of the cabal, such as Neo the creator of the #qa rizon & sageru IRCs and {}{}{}{} plus whoever wrote the bumpbot. with no identifiable /qa/ posting history or links to botting beyond minimal references. According to Verniy, the writer of the original bumpbot stopped spamming by the second quarter 2017.
  • yotgo / !QAJP/YOtGo / cool guy --> American, self-described hikki and lolicon. No-fun-allowed, passive-aggressive spammer fixated on removing anything that isn't /jp/-derived from /qa/, but also a prolific producer of OC. An emigré from mid 2016 (making him the only confirmed clique member to have known old /qa/), he lurked, occasionally doing manga dumps and a couple threads. Claims to have been on /qa/ since 2015. No evidence has been found. He sparks into activity mid February 2017. Created large quantities of OC and promoted community projects with the intent to align /qa/ with /jp/, he also contributed edits and the 4chanX MD5 filter megalist for the CSS thread; Was a permanent fixture on the happenings thread. He was eventually made owner of sageru.org #qa channel and later OP of Rizon #qa, ran a weekly anime stream and became a mod at Kissu where he began advertising that site's seasonal stream. One of the brains behind the /jp/ colony. Spent hundreds of posts demanding people who didn't post /jp/ culture to get out of the board and other hundreds trying to convince anon that "/jp/" and user moderation was only good for /qa/ - Or rather, his personal use of /qa/. His mental state increasingly deteriorated over time, usual tells are rants about user/self-moderation, 8gag slacktivism, /qa/ having always been 2D/random, ludicrous accusations of being an instigator or a concern troll / concernbro to anyone who didn't play ball, refusing to acknowledge his actions and describing his clique as the "good posters" of /qa/. When he started getting regularly IP nuked for his antics and ban evasion he fell into a cycle of accusations of being targeted by an obsessed mod; his paranoia and resentment grew until he was convinced every shitpost he saw was a targeted harassment campaign aimed to "destroy" /qa/, either by frogposters or enabler mods that "hated /qa/". In March 2019 had a fight with another clique member, Atechan, that caused a mental breakdown leading him to around the board accusing everyone of being Atechan. The most abusive spammer of the clique. Early on he'd attack any dissenter by scriptspamming pictures of concern brands. Ran instances of the bumpbot, and personal scripts where he'd crapflood threads with images, copypasta and posts copied from the archives. Forced the boson meme, and after post deletion was disabled, started bumping threads with image spam. Over time, his hostility, lack of boundaries on the Happenings thread and general condescension towards everything not /jp/ saw him become the most well known and most reviled poster of /qa/. Inevitably, he got rangebanned and announced he was leaving the board in August 2019... only to be seen doing his daily gaslighting a couple days later, now pretending /qa/ was depopulated without him. For a couple months after being ran out he'd ad-spam Kissu links hidden among bumpbot imagedumps. Determined to stay here forever.
  • Verniy / !HibikiZODI / hibikid / ECHibiki / ECVerniy --> Canadian developer. Tripfag & avatarfag of character Hibiki from Kantai Collection. Earliest appearances can be traced to March 2017. Dropped/lost his trip by 2018 but can be identified by being one of the very few /jp/ posters with 8chan encoded filenames.. By August he wrote some of the spamming tools used by the clique, at least one bumpbot replacement (the spellcard bumpbot?) and more; Made an alternate 4chan ban logger, several extension scripts and ultimately the Kissu spinoff, whose UI had an option to mark threads to be reposted on /qa/. Spiteful spammer known to gorespam and target the mods via report spam, after this got him rangebanned a couple times the proceeded to spam advertised his site.
  • ccd0 !!Bu9nPEv33rQ ---> Maintainer of the 4chanX extension since v1.4.2. In August 2017 started modifying 4chanX to help the Warosu clique's colonization albeit they didn't agree in all matters. His interferences were such as adding popups discouraging meta threads, planning on exodus then the disabling of reCAPTCHA v1 was announced. Expanded 4chanX's scope by integrating tinychan powered spinoff imageboards. In 2019 he forces changes on /qa/ to present it as a spin-off related board later advertising Kissu.moe on the extension as a pop-up on /qa/ saying "Stay in touch with your /qa/ friends" earning an blanket ban on every mention of him on /qa/.☼ Later that year used 4chanX to advertise captcha evasion methods and other spinoffs.
  • Atechan / Rin --> Brazilian, severely deranged. Running a dual persona as the schizospammer, he'd discuss anime on their IRCs while taunting them on /qa/ and manually spamming threads. He also had access to IRC spam bots which he used to spam the #4chan and #qa Rizon.net and the entire sageru server. On March 2019, he was discovered to be the schizospammer, having a fallout with the clique and botspammed the #qa sageru IRC to the point it crashed the entire server. When discovered, Yotgo basically went nuts and he and the schizoweeb started a multithread flamewar that lasted months, accusing him of being the freak, 8gag, the horsefucker and every other schizo to ever post in /qa/ before ultimately doxxing him in June. Managed to get the boson meme banned by spamming #4chan @ Rizon.net. After being ran out of #qa, he retained the schizospammer persona for the rest of the year, then disappeared around late 2020. According to tokiko, owner of sageru, he passed away in an accident in 2024.
  • lowercase-kun / schizoweeb --> The angriest poster on /qa/. Earliest attestable appearances date to October 2017, known for pottymouth lowercase posting, mild satania and marisaposting, and generally unhinged rants made infamous over calling everyone subhuman. His usual calling cards are flowery combinations of schizo, freak and subhuman marked by his namesake lowercase paragraphs. Oscillates wildly between being genuinely angry and performing elaborate stream of thought shitposting sprees that confused frog and weeb alike. He was widely confused to be a fellow lowercase poster, the Satania avatarfag. His abrasive demeanor got worse with time, eventually getting him disowned by his enablers in the clique. By 2019 he became obsessed with the schizospammer, who he mistook for "the freak" and hunted him down on every thread, attributing every frog ever posted to him. By the end of the flamewar he and the freak became the laughingstock of the /qa/
  • !tEEnBROyBk / !NadekoX7Mo --> Exactly what it says on the tin. First appeared around April, posted only for a couple months. Made the Tenshi "Suck My Cock Dude" macro and spammed it everywhere. Later made the history of /qa/ revisionist post. Eventually dropped the trip and continued to post as anon.
  • Kissu Hardliners --> Post-exile, even though verniy and most of the clique was happy on Kissu, anons remained on /qa/ occasionally chiming in to convince everyone their clique has only been good for the board. Few believed their tale, even among spinoffers.
• Frogposters --> is a group that was 100% homegrown really a raider? As /qajp/ took the bait every single time, /qa/ developed a community of frog posting trolls inspired by the antics of the Easter Frog poster, who in turn adapted his posting from /int/'s Easter Frog meme. His copycats were generally less creative and more shitpost-y; Their tactics shifted towards spamming to 404 threads protected by the clique's bumpbot, on top of their own brand of necrobumping and various hijinks up to including classic trolling. Most frog trolls posted in spans of 2-3 months before getting bored and leaving, with the bulk of them claiming an early victory and calling it quits when the board got listed October 2017; An unhinged minority remained all the way to the exile of the Warosu posse. The constant attention from the clique essentially kept the group alive up to the point their posting was normalized into an everyday thing, making /qa/ join the ranks of casual frog boards such /tv/, /int/ and /bant/.
  • "Easter Frog" --> An October tourist that made himself known through the /int/ Easter Frog meme (not to be confused by the Groyper Toad (Fuck you nick fuentes)) in the second quarter of 2017. Never pseudonymous, but identifiable by filenames, prose and his interest in spinoff antics. While not the first frogposter, he managed to set the tone and context for most frogposters to come. Essentially an avatarfag of the Easter Frog best known for his unusual, flowery vocabulary and politeness and occasionally playfighting with spinoffers, mostly the satania avatar. His MO consisted of trying to bait the cliques by waging a low energy guerrilla war where he ensured there's always couple frog threads on the catalog. The tactic was an overarching success that inspired multiple copycat trolls. May have coined the term weeb mafia. Dropped off the board after /qa/ got listed, but has sporadically visited all the way to 2021, extrapolating arguments from what 2017 /qa/ was like.
  • schizospammer / frogposter / Atechan --> Mythological poster that may either be the board's most prolific frog spammer or a boogeyman existing entirely in one spinoffer's head. Often accused of the February spammer known as the freak by an increasingly unhinged Warosu, he has clear tells that distinguish him. In actuality, the schizoweeb was a persona ran by Atechan playing both sides of the "war" for kicks, giggles and mental illness. Appears around second quarter 2018 but goes on overdrive in the first months of 2019. His MO consists of heavy /pol/ lingo and self-made terms like weaboid. He later develops elaborate gonzo-like rants accompanied by clown and suit frog variants where he paints exaggerated fantasy scenarios of a war with the clique. Harassed the clique's Rizon IRC and was the only anon on /qa/ to have independently discovered the sageru channel, where he'd post screenshots or insider info. Popularized referring to the mafia as "weabs". Around March, he's was discovered and later doxxed. By the third quarter 2019, frogposting had mostly died down and adapted into stalker threads that blogged on the antics of the #qa clique and related posters. Short stealth generals where they'd (mostly just him) narrating clique activity in second person & crosslink their posts; Trying to id posters without directly calling them out. Remained on /qa/ until the the tail end of 2020. schizopammer-like posts got rangebanned in the Aug 2019 purge.
• Local Resistance --> Early on /qa/ regulars spoke their mind on the damage done to the board but were unable to pinpoint who was responsible. Their efforts usually ending up mocked by teenbro shitposts when not bumped off by October spam. Faced with an impossible situation - raiders raiding raiders - the old guard left and those that remained slowly arranged themselves into a "resistance" (of mostly angry kids) looking for ways to bait the spinoffs into flamewars, chiefly in the form of counter-spam and frogposts. Later on, as the war slowed down and some mafiosos went too hard on backseat moderation on board hubs like /hap/, most of /qa/ learned to smell their antics immediately and call them out.
  • "/jp/" Dissenters --> /qa/'s meta side had a sizeable /a/, /jp/ & Spinoff presence and not all February newcomers saw things the same way the Warosu clique did. Starting in April as the more aggressive thread spam bots entered play, some /jp/sphere posters concluded that the spam was damaging the community beyond repair, they made their opinions known to little effect beyond basically predicting how the whole thing would go down. Their efforts often got them singled out as concern troll or instigators by other others.
  • "February Spammer" / concernbro / the freak --> A purported /qa/ OG horrified at the spinoff clique bots. Waged a one man attrition war with the clique since April, spending all 2017 and early 2018 trying to flame their threads and following their activities on Desuarchive's ghost/qa/ and /meta/; Generally getting into fights with his equal yet opposite clique member Yotgo, not because he'd seek him out but because Yotgo was physically incapable of not replying to a post he didn't like. Completely ignorant on /jp/ and spinoffs, he never quite grasped what was happening. Famous for singling out GRXVDF's failed GET as the start of the spinoff raid making an infamous post summarized as "They arrived in Febrary 2017 and refuse to leave". He repeated that mantra so often it became a meme. Early on he was identifiable for his astroturfing threads where he'd explain to himself that there was a spinoff raid going on, a source of oddly successful bait. Further tells were the lack of images, large posts and the February rant argument, as that became a meme, he switched tactics having a brief stint with frogposting and likely popularizing the term 'weebspam', which together with the Warosu counter 'schizospam' became the biggest meme of 2018. His constant presence on spinoffer threads often created great confusion and it got him accused of being every raider and problem poster under the sun, eventually netting the catch all term the freak. Likely to have ragequit second or third quarter 2018, but his impact traumatized some of the mafia who'd continue accusing people of being him well after his departure.
  • Small Skelly !!RAjBw+iGH/Y --> Tripfag from /r9k/, with some [s4s] and /jp/ knowledge, but not enough to know of spinoffs; arrived mid 2017 and quickly ID'd problem posters from /jp/ and called them out then spent the rest of the year pointlessly picking fights. with weebs

Post-War

(2020-2021)
The pandemic drove many people insane. And turned /qa/ into the playground of one massive group of shitposters.

• Soyteens / Soyjak.Party / the Sharty --> Wojak remixes of the numale meme become a sitewide phenomenon in the second quarter of 2019, attached as "this is you" flourishing to /pol/-derived ironic shitposts. The presence of soyjaks on /qa/ can be seen infrequently as early as May 2019 with a small spike in activity in August However these stragglers aren't enough to outpost the local cliques operating during the peak of weeb/frog autism. It isn't until March 2020, date when the COVID-19 pandemic puts the entire planet in quarantine, that /qa/'s soyjak posters see their numbers grow on a practical linear function; reaching by April a critical mass that sees them become site-famous. This new board culture explodes in popularity and develops into a complex irony culture that is, with some exceptions, completely disconnected from /qa/ proper. Soyjaks quickly grow too large for /qa/, spreading to other boards and even create their own imageboard. Early on, the rest of 4chan can barely notice a difference between the /qa/ soyteens and soyboy spam proper, that is until soyteens posting in the Party bunker fall into the practice of interboard raiding. By February 2021 mods begin a pushback, but to no avail, Soyjaks have achieved board culture status and are impossible to moderate. Jaks effectively displace all other posters of /qa/ and by November the mods to freeze /qa/.☼
  • "/qa/ Archeologists" --> Anime and frogs were always background noise in /qa/ Jak shitposts. In early 2021, after a wave of botspam ravages every thread on /qa/ with ancient images, a group of jak posters develop an interest in old /qa/ and started browsing desuarchive for tidbits, ghostposting along the way. jaks managed to reconstruct a crude timeline of events, lists of names and phrases, enough to integrate then into the Party's ironic sense of humour. Many images and phrases used by older personalities saw themselves reposted by these sleuths. The extent of the act went to such extent jakkers produced OC in tune with years old frogposter and weeb mafia content.

TEMP

fat sack of loot: some will be used for the Timeline.

extremely important evidence: https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/qa/image/1496/55/1496556790721.png

note: trifpags are a surprisingly informative resource on presence of other boards.

fun things are fun -> /a/fags ;

fuwafuwa -> /a/jp/ / spinoff

Punky Brewster !GRG1IWogTk / Punky Brewster !!3KOUpWS64nD -> oldschool [s4s], /a/jp/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/username/Punky%20Brewster/order/asc/page/12/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/username/milkless%20cereal%20/order/asc/

early threads

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/82176/#q82176

/qa/ meta

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/133633/#140088

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/756933/#q757731

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/3390941/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/351615/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/4331618/#4348772

/jp/ meta

one of the best meta threads ive ever read https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/469585/#

/a/ meta

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/261522/#263640

https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/username/Fun%20Things%20Are%20Fun/order/asc/page/17/

[s4s] <3 /qa/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/828021/

spinoffers in s4s https://archive.4plebs.org/s4s/thread/5297429/

brief discussion on [s4s] influence: https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1248942/#1248942_396

/pol/ raid

people debating asukaspammer -> https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/833874/

sageru raids:

classic that started it all: https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/image/5XOGOo6Y78jgow5f5t%2FYhw%3D%3D/page/82/

pre jp board wipes https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/836969/#q837077

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1134747/#1135235

anon explains what teenbros are https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1562225/#1562237

early spin off presence https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/text/%22suck%20my%20cock%20dude%22/order/asc/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1153551/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1368463/#1368866

2019 anons aware of spammers https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2554646/#2554739

clueless anon discuss raids: https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1365400/#q1366364

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1673519/#q1673716

eta about raids https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1363253/#1363627

qa native adressing asuka, frogs and ghost raiders PLUS early schizoweeb mentions: https://www.archived.moe/qa/thread/1374236/#q1374294

/qa/ getting absolutely destroyed https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/type/op/start/2017-08-03/end/2017-08-05/order/asc/page/1/

anime posters and meta posters have an argument regarding the bumpbots https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1423884/ meta bunker https://desuarchive.org/meta/thread/742/

meta thread that starts of well then gets spammed to death https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1441460/

bumpbot selections

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1418437/

kissu/weeb mafia gaslighting:

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1934751/#1935668

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1934170/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/5180231/#5183023

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/3015707/

kissu infighting

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2838188/

weeb/frog meta arguments

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2560610/#q2560636

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2554646/#2554677

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2680044/#2680430

possibly atechan? *likely* https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2702454/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2955587/#2956266

trevors qa review

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1634875/

mods taking sides and switching sides

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1634019/#1657021

schizoweeb

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2554646/#q2554704

late /qa/ frogs:

https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/image/Q9O6tpu_l_Qg_Iuklay3ZA/

kissu & ota rivalry

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2513058/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2830464/#2830721

anons talking board personalities:

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2554646/#q2554739

happenings caught in the crossfire

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1836697/

Statistic tidbits

old qa deleted posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/end/2016-08-01/

old qa total posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/end/2016-08-01/

old qa deleted ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/type/op/end/2016-08-01/

old qa total ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/type/op/end/2016-08-01/

october chaos deleted posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/type/posts/start/2016-08-01/end/2017-02-01/

october chaos total posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/type/posts/start/2016-08-01/end/2017-02-01/

october chaos deleted ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/type/op/start/2016-08-01/end/2017-02-01/

october chaos total ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/type/op/start/2016-08-01/end/2017-02-01/

weeb/frog war deleted posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/start/2017-02-01/end/2019-09-01/

weeb/frog war total posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/start/2017-02-01/end/2019-09-01/

weeb/frog war deleted ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/type/op/start/2017-02-01/end/2019-09-01/

weeb/frog war total ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/type/op/start/2017-02-01/end/2019-09-01/

soyjak delete posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/start/2019-09-01/end/2021-11-03/

soyjak total posts https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/start/2019-09-01/end/2021-11-03/

soyjak deleted ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/deleted/deleted/type/op/start/2019-09-01/end/2021-11-03/

soyjak total ops https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/type/op/start/2019-09-01/end/2021-11-03/

Generic info on non #qa raiders

• unicodefag https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/5210481/#q5215928

• unicodefag https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/4781883/#q4782056

• unicodefag https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/text/foxe/deleted/deleted/type/op/

• bui raid https://archived.moe/bant/thread/5829585/

jaks churning oc like its a goddamn job

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/3730452/

frog datamine

apu frenposter from q2 2017

https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/image/4bJ4WIfEkF7jfoyDC8Xa-A/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/search/image/y7JSz4zshH4L-ZRAuGs5yw/

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1471879/#q1471879

/bant/ meta threads / migration linsk

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2987271/#q2987271

Clique refugees:

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/2007664/

rare reasonable posts

https://desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1832586/#1834742

curia:

>Mass download every image hash uploaded to 4chan in the first two months of this year.

>Calculate the similarity of boards based on how their share image hashes

>Build a chart that shows overlapping userbases

-threads limited to 3 per IP instead of 5 - when= -certain IP ranges banned from saying certain words - ??? -phrases triggering autoban - SMCD? -10m cooldown placed on image md5 - when?