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?

A 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/ if it really, really liked wojak comics.

>status?

Evidence gathering FUCKING DONE. The essay is FUCKING DONE. Clean up is 16/18ths done, really needs some images.

>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 a controlled environment where shitposters and GR1 violators could be spotted before they caused any trouble. In 2015, 4chan was arguably at it's peak of engagement if not influence, very few anons imagined the New Yorker at the heart of site would ever leave, not even those that have gone in open rebellion over 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 the cause to themselves. Despite everything the mood for 4chan's future was fiercely optimistic and as the day goes by, nostalgic. Initially, the board was too chaotic to get any coherent threads with intervals between threads measuring in minutes with nearly all the site posting in the a single place. It takes a couple hours after moot leaves for engagement to turn towards anon threads. These come by the hand of emotional anons reminiscing personal core memories, reinforcing site traditions while new posters seize the chance to learn the mysterious website's mostly oral history.

Honeymoon

"I feel like /qa/ has become the UN of 4Chan with ambassadors from each board coming here to post."

The next day is marked by a question. What now? /qa/ was open still - likely kept around to host the stickies and link the stream for those who couldn't be there. A week passes and the board hasn't been locked as expected, 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 now was determining what *exactly* /qa/ represented - As the last stragglers finished up yesterday's nostalgia threads, these culture crafters took inspiration and set their mind on a /qa/ oriented towards 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 where posters revel in the idea of having a direct rapport to the old guard and the ability to share site trivia and anecdotes undisturbed by the dreaded Off-Topic Ban Template. At the same time, gathering content creators led a spur of off-topic threads and Original Content that cements /qa/'s potential as a community in the mind of anon. 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

"Come back, /qa/-tan. The board hasn't been the same since you left."

By the end of March, the inertia of the proto-community is over and only a fraction of culture creators remain. By March, /qa/ had stabilized as one of the slowest boards on the site with little activity to call it's own. Thread participation is sharply divided - Some threads last weeks engaged in hundred post long debates held by a small groups of anons, at times just a couple, while others linger for days with merely a handful replies. This division in activity was 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 - a precious resource. Rarely did either result in flamewars, a lucky thing in hindsight as post-level rulebreaking was rarely moderated. In the spirit of meta, /qa/ gets it's second general, the 4chan Happenings Thread. It's usual life expectancy is measure in months, dedicated to the imageboard equivalent of birdwatching - spotting GETs and the rare modpost.

So gestates the cycle that defines /qa/ from start to end: Stragglers from all corners of the site visit Question & Answer hoping to sate their curiosity regarding site trivia or their regular board's various communities, assisted by a small retinue of regulars with a hunger for news and context. These stragglers, once sated in an oft-positive exchange and sometimes an intense debate, leave to never return. This represent the constant, immutable basal culture - or perhaps lack of culture - that defines /qa/ not only as 4chan's meta board but also one of the comfiest boards.

On the topic of moderation, while /qa/ is perceived by anon to be a laizzes faire "anything goes" place, moderation staff operated in a lowkey manner by way of deleting raids and excessively /q/ threads but also killing then-mainstream jokes such as frogs or baneposting. During this period, memes imported from another board periodically end in the bin in what seemed to be a low effort scheme to shape, or maybe protect local board culture. On February there's a sitewide call for janitor applications that excludes /qa/ as an eligible board, confirming all moderation was done at mod-level and at-will, explaining the visible gaps between deleted threads - mods were limiting themselves purging the catalog whenever they happen to come by.

Enter Nishimura

"i am happy there is 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 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 short retread of the events of January - nostalgic old guards share stories with curious new posters. The one difference is Hiroyuki. After his hilariously - and possibly falsely - inept exchange with 4chan, hiro 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 convinces a chunk of the site that their personal 4chan grievances can be personally handled 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 showcases their most deranged fantasies on /qa/ explaining 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, the 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 speed did not prove fatal and arguably led to a more diverse and entertaining Questions board.

This change also provided reprieve to the off-topic side of /qa/, long afflicted with a chronic lack of attention. The community sees the return of forum games like Quests and the development of ideas such as Nametag factions. A slew of ritual threads and catchphrases - Some good such as the test thread, some strange such as NO. and some just idiotic spam such as Remove (you) and Remove GR15 now mark the frontpage. Threads too non-sensical to be discussed get witty retorts and new catchphrases such as household Do you have a question? join the age old /q/ import /deletepol/ spam. All in all, /qa/ becomes a tad more quirky and depending on who you ask, more engaging.

This community is not without drama. 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. This arrived from -or ended up gathering at- off-site chatrooms due to 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. It is likely some participants followed him to /qa/ from previous mutual hangouts, either way, the harassment of Andy went on for months at end and grew to become a local attraction. This showcases an interesting development: Despite wildly incompatible posting habits, there was enough space to house both metaposters and this circlejerk undisturbed, both aware of each other but never crossing paths, letting the CA crew go run their course unreported and unbanned.

In fact, moderator interest seemed to have waned and no attempts at keeping bad actors out could be found, 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, caused the infamous barneyfag to visit /qa/ and attack his threads, keeping 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.

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) 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, resulting in /qa/'s first general, the aponymous Board-tans thread. For a time, it saw itself gathering artists from every drawthread on the site, and had it's day in the spotlight by organizing the site-wide Winter Ball events of 2015 and 2016. Existing in sharp contrast with /qa/'s stragglers - who generally disregarded them - they were often overlooked but pivotal to /qa/'s identity, being responsible for the vast majority of the early 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 recurring threads. Of note: /a/ posters were a permanent presence in what could be best described as an /a/ meta general. Stomping grounds of local figures such as Fun Things are Fun who partook 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/ - Grand Strategy General, all squatted the place begging for an /his/ - History board for months, up to trying to simulate a /his/ general. Miraculously, Hiro noticed them 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.

October's 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 distract people from 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 with an celebratory article written by notorious anti-4chan activist Brianna Wu. 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 the place. 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's fearmongering was only the beginning. 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 later hiroyuki starts posting again and pushes visibly ugly changes to the UI in a scheme to get people to buy 4chan passes to vote on a referendum, 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 with the increased board speed. New local figures surface such as the asukaspammer, an avatar spammer that would wipe the catalog every week or GR15 Defense Force, notorious tripcode user fighting a war with imaginary bronies. The chaos brought on by both pro-/pol/ and anti-/pol/ threads served as a primordial soup where /qa/'s culture would reform. 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 the remnants of /qa/'s original posterbase split: On one hand metaposters long established and upset their week long debates and history threads were 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 and contribute 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 at the spinoff sites. 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 anything related to other boards' jokes or the age 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 bash script bots were brought into play, crapflooding unapproved 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). The soon to be dreaded bumpbot coupled up with both the clique's own spam and the antics of anime-inclined posters such as the asukaspammer were ad-hoc 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 astroturf /qa/ to hell and back, gathering under the flag of one Sachiko Touhou and one Kemono Musume Serval, 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. Warosus were particularly 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 ritual threads were replaced with Tenshi eating corndogs, Who /homu/ here, touhous, kemono musume and more. [a/jp] memes such as teeth girl and older generals like the CSS thread were seamlessly assimilated. New avatars such as hibikid and satania surfaced and the asukaspammer was elevated to meme status. Catchphrase memes -original and imported- such as the /qa/ meetup, 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 the HWNDU drama 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 who 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. There at #qa the rookies got to rub shoulders with some spinoff legends, mingled with textboard culture, and grew larger.

Getting Noticed

The Warosus weren't the only group with an interest in 4chan's 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 developed out of the communities of 4chan/pol/ and 8chan/pol/ - a wide assortment of cliques & circlejerks spread over several 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 in the hopes they could somehow astroturf the mods into shutting down HWNDU and /diy/-like threads; the icemen encouraged other posters to "ice" these threads by submitting false global rule one (illegal in the US) reports. 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 by annoyed /qa/cks. 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 before getting the hint.

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, as the board had heavy crossposting with both the /pol/sphere and the /jp/sphere. The /b/ personality to show the most interest was avatar, drawartist and short-lived board moderator fugthelug. fug started trolling on there with her personal simp posse in February, coining the term /qa/mblr, months later she has a fallout with /b/ and moved her group onto /srz/ to try a board culture experiment. The experiment fails and the group eventually migrates to Discord another /pol/sphere altchan 8ch.pl, creating an unlisted board with a gibberish name they refer to as [BOARD REDACTED], where they develop into an intense trollgroup roleplaying an ancap-leaning right wing death squad. Fug's posse organized from a secretive Discord - Possibly named either Anti-Goon or Goon Killers - with their general chatroom known as Non Agression Pact Violating Lewd Voyeurs (napvlv). The latter is the name /qa/ came to know them as whne [BR] came knocking. However the community implodes just as fugs prepares to raid the Question board. Thus in June /qa/ becomes the war zone of two separate groups: fug's [BR] working a well planned assault to take down the subversives and schizos banned from BR's whom fug comes to name the [BR] revolt trying to sabotage [BR] and fug. Both groups wing their tactics which include passing off nudes of old 8/b/ namefag spiderchan as fugs', going on multi-post long rants they pass-off as hers, sabotaging each other's threads and more, all while getting the local clique violently frustrated, being unable to either figure out what's happening or even distinguish them from previous raiders, except for hibikid who knew one or two thinks about 8chan. The raid puttered out by itself after an very embarrassed fug came clean on (some) things.

A second /pol/sphere group was an /int/ off-shoot with heavy /pol/ leaning called /intl/, in turn part of their own network of shitpost oriented boards called /int*/, famous for being master astroturfers and an 8chan boogeyman. The /int*/ network, by April 2017, was effectively dead as their ideology was firmly rooted in not having any moderation whatsoever. This led to the obvious conclusion where the original board and all its 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. True to /int*/ culture as soon as they activities leaked they 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 willy waggler and founding member of turkslayer's original Skype group just happened to be browsing /qa/ that day and refutes them. As a second option the group pretends to be freech.net's /intg/ which was at the time nothing but 0-replies botspam threads courtesy of the infamous bui the spammer. /intl/'s entry into the fray threw /qa/ into a "four days war" and one of the most intense flamewars of the board's history. Ironically, the Ruffalos and 8bronies turned out to be prolific content creators and produced several dozen pictures "bronyfying" the Warosus' precious /jp/ heritage and even getting the Cirno general to draw art with them. The Warosus were incensed to the point they almost killed /qa/, replying with their own spam causing a score of 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 entire thing. This nearly kills /qa/, the board gets frozen on April 7 as Warosus resorted to botspamming the report queue with illegal reports. 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 counter-gorespammed and 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 on the corpse of a /qa/ killed in a secret war between a botspamming manchild and literally everyone else.

Mounting Opposition

"They got here in February and they won't leave."

During the freeze, half-convinced the Questions board was gone for good, the Warosus first regrouped at [s4s] and desuarchive's /qa/ghost, prompting desumin (also known as this wiki's dear leader) to create the /meta/ - Meta board. Ultimately, the inner circle and the new recruits gathered at the newly created #qa channel in sageru.org's super-hacked Anonymous IRC. In the meantime, !tEEnBROyBk wrote a 2000 words long revisionist History of /qa/ pic while the rest joke that the QA-12 had finally killed the thing after a meta strawpoll threw only twelve results. It's here where the recently revealed originator of the plot, Yotgo, links up with Hibikid who'd go on to become his closest partner.

/qa/ quite literally just unfreezes, with all the flamewars and regulars reappearing as if nothing happened. The clique, now larger, determined to completely own the place. They handed out their spamscripts to the new /qa/ friends and worked a series of infopics telling posters to go to IRC or Feedback instead of making meta threads. 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 felt comfortable enough to make themselves known, chiefly Yotgo, who had been OP of several 2D/Random threads and adopted the CSS thread, started donning the tripcode !QAJP/YOtGo since March for his stream threads and updates to the filter megalist. His status as head honcho went 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 major case happens in March: An incensed anon decides to try and bully the weeb mafia out, following them to their threads calling them out at any opportunity, interjecting meta discussions (specially on the poor Happenings thread) 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/ghost and /meta/, earning him the nickname the freak (but we'll call him February Anon for readability's sake). February was however clueless about /jp/ much less what the spinoffs were, and in the end his posts added more noise than context, specially taking into account that Question & Answer was now practically empty except for pro or anti weeb anons. Mafiosos relentlessly mocked him, making his statement "They came here in february and refused to leave" into a meme that persisted all the way to the end. This harassment-counter-harassment continued for months, well into 2018 - While February anon was the most part harmless, his insistence did remark a trend: Interacting with the Cabal was guaranteed replies.

Little by little, 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 much on old /jp/ catchphrases, particularly offended that teenbro mannerisms, the calling cards of old 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. Non-stop backseat moderation causes many /jp/sies to simply ragequit accusing the clique of being a /jp/ cargo cult. The biggest fallout by far was with the chiru.no spinoff, who had considerable crossover with the Cabal's inner circle. Too different on a cultural level to the /qa/ dream they engaged any poster who'd extend their hand in friendship, even joining forces with /int*/ bronies to create OC . 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 of team4chan with accusations of persecution (just... pretend the botspam never happened) and later of imaginary personalities he named the freak -after february anon- and concernbro after he declared that any /jp/ post criticizing him was a troll.

Weebs and Frogs

Consider the universal rule of Internet Communities: Whoever gets angry, loses.

It became apparent that many posters in the "anime camp" were 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, /quay/ posters realized that the Cabal spent hours cycling out threads manually to "beatify" the catalog. This no-fun-allowed mentality is exquisite to any local troll: Slowly, with the start of May, a troupe of anons took to troll the clique with ugly threads and mocking parodies of their ritual posts. Within weeks they found out that what infuriated the weeb mafia the most was posting the age old Pepe frog, prompting the clique to spam a dozen threads each time. By June this group had built a whole identity around roleplaying a war between frogs and weebs. Arguably a deserved response, yet a literal spam war could achieve nothing but weaken the fragile ecology of /qa/.

Before October, frogposting was moderated out by the few mods interested in /qa/. This changes as mods take leave of absence during the Chaos. The brand of Pepe that informs this posse could then be found on /tv/, /int/ and to a smaller degree on /pol/, representing a sort of "casual blogposting" where posting a specific Pepe serves as a call to make a commentary on anything going on in the board or community. With the realization that merely doing this could make the mafiosos pop a vein, frogposters come up with can be best described as a low effort guerrilla war where they make sure there is always a frog on the catalog while they put out comments on Warosu threads, parodying their OPs, their OC, and making a general nuisance. This was met with open outrage by the hands of specific posters already mentioned, in part because the confusion generated by multiple ongoing raids made identifying these organic trolls particularly hard. 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 an avatar if /int/'s latest meme, Easter the Frog. His unique, sarcastic yet amiable prose made him a popular target, involving him on 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 frogs claimed wanting to bring back meta as their goal, their posts betrayed 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 threads such as the CSS thread -now rechristened CSS/filter- had become venues for the Warosu lynchpins to show off how much they hated other posters, creating an "MD5 Filter Megalist" that 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. In fact, there was palpable bias for removing and even public banning frog posts - with the mods likely assuming from their choice of words that they were ranting against anime and not about a coordinated group of IRC raiders.

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 Question & Answer that they should not make meta threads anymore, redirecting them to the infamous /qa/ Infographic made by the clique to dissuade metaposters, in all likeliness upset that a few weeks before Hiroyuki made waves again with a thread requesting /qa/ to test the new search function (causing many more catalog wipes). Weeks later, 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 convince people to start an exodus from 4chan towards spinoffs. /qa/ became a bit famous for the never ending war, even inspiring a lurking drawartist to depict /qa/ as meidos playing with frog and bot muppets.

The first big upheaval of the "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 the 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/ NeoGAF threads and decides to personally intervene by reversing team4chan's decision, upsetting the mods who were not used to being wrong. 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 of note 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 realizes something was up. The main lynchpin of the clique, Yotgo, had begun to catch too many IP wipes (like from having his browser fingerprinted) 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.

Depopulation

"A TOAST, TO EPIC POSTING AND SPAM"

The disabling of post deletion, while a 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 /qa/ and with them went most unapproved threads. The Cabal'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 candy 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 composed of IRC injokes and blog threads - were kept artificially alive for months, first by anons simulating ghostbumping by manually spamming loli so they'd get IP wiped, later by a modified bumpbot which in lieu of ghostbumping bumped with textless images, making the already cold board feel like a ghost town.

As summer comes around, new faces join the posse. lowercase-kun -oft confused an older sataniaposter- is the friendly nickname of an unhinged mafioso who threw thousand-character-long rants that abuse the term subhuman at anyone who disagreed with him, also earning him the moniker schizoweeb. Somewhere in July, discovering the #qa hangout through their 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 harassing just about anyone he could, including #4chan's 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 the Cabal 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 group, 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 Warosus and falls into a cycle of 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. By this point /qa/ should have slowed down considerably, but the mutual spaming from these personality was forcing the catalog to cycle out threads that should last over a wekk in mere days. Not everything was vitriol however, by the hands of the sageru crew /qa/ got to play on the ancient 2ch-inspired Giko Cafe game, spurring a roaming drawartist catface !!5nDmZtvCOB7 to produce dozens of giko cat portraits and turn them into an image macro.

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, blessed with one of the few evergreen topics on 4chan.. It's at this point where it begins to rise to prominence, even getting attention from team4chan from time to time. Still it existed in a tortured state as board personalities used it as battleground for their flamewars; Whenever Yotgo, February anon or the schizospammer 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 use 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, there's tensions within the sageru community as Warosus complaing that #jp's 'anything goes' attitude is too crude for their taste - creating a rift between #jp and #qa, leading to textboard aficionados trolling the new blood over their no-fun absolutism - at one point, atechan was made owner of #qa so he proceeded to abuse just about everyone until he resorted botspamming both channels 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 of mobile ISPs - most 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 and specially annoyed over the rangebans affecting them, Yotgo and Hibiki -know renamed Verniy- have the idea of (finally) making their own spinoff, citing mod harassment making the board unfun. Announced in November and unveiled in December, kissu.moe - nicknamed pissu by /ota/, arguably better than Yotgo's idea 12chan - becomes the newest member of the /jp/ spinoff family - and the first /qa/ spinoff.

Reductio ad Schitzo

"The tip is in and you're feeling the discomfort, but it's only the beginning of the 12 inch shaft. For years, you were told that you had no actual power in /qa/, but you fed into your own delusions, became overly invested in a board staff always had jurisdiction over and deprived yourself of building a half decent community somewhere else."

With the creation of Kissu most of the Warosu clique moves out of /qa/. At this point, Question & Answer had little to no posting activity outside the Happenings thread and the "war" was reduced to Yotgo and the schizoweeb screaming at a single troll whom they conflated into every antagonist the Cabal had, from the freak to all /pol/lacks and frogposter that ever posted (see why we have custom nicknames now?). While occasionally you could see single posts from people goading either side, by 2019 the bulk of all anti-#qa posts came from the aforementioned schizospammer, who spent his days /qa/ stalking mafia activity through weekly threads. Everyone else had gotten bored or been turned away by Yotgo's worsening behaviour. 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, as other posters leak logs of him casually confessing to molesting his sister. This episode finishes all goodwill between Sageru IRC's locals and the Cabal as Yotgo calls them out for being in line with Atechan, unaware or not caring that Atechan was also spamming #jp. Sageru leadership refused to close #qa, but regulars had grown tired of his endless snide remarks and Yotgo puns had become a popular bullying tactic. Either way, the matter with Atechan spills onto /qa/ birthing multiple 100+ post threads consisting of at best 3 people flaming. At some point, frustration leads to apathy and apathy leads to hate: Everyone involved becomes much more spiteful and aggressive as the year goes by, abandoning all semblance of community activity just to take somewhat creative potshots at each other. /qa/'s fame as a schizo asylum is not helped when, at the same time as the fight club was going on, new personalities were setting up such as the dreaded leto aka unicodefag & foxe, a scourge of /bant/ known to spam zoophilia and wipe catalogs on whim. He took to squat on the Happenings thread knowing that /hap/ could sometimes be a direct rapport to team4chan, meaning he could mock the mods and brag about his ban evasion and harassment of /bant/, /v/ and later /trash/'s /gfur/ - Gay Furries General. At one point Leto tried to recruit the Warosu clique into waging a war with the mods, thinking the site had an automatic botspam service. When he was rejected he decided to wipe /qa/'s catalog in their name, thanking them for the "bumpbot" just to get back at them. 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. By late 2019, the bulk of these posts were located on /qa/, taking advantage of the lack of janitors to shoot out each other while mocking Lee.

Kissu's initial reception didn't feel too hot either. Verniy wasn't well suited to his admin role as newcomers soon find out how moody and ban happy he was, having frequent outbursts on #qa a channel he grew to resent. The site advertising on the (the last remaining) spinoffs was not well received, causing /ota/ to taunt them on both /qa/s from time to time. Dramas happen, Atechan took to harassing them in their turf, and later there was a fight with a friendly discord server called /mahou/ regarding lolicon discussion getting banned that ended up spilling over to /qa/. Another drama involves 10gu of /japan/ - an otaku board exiled from 8chan's successors that temporarily took refuge on Kissu but got booted over a fight 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 Question & Answer kept deteriorating. April's Fool 2019 had some activity, but nowhere near the level the previous year had. In April ccd0 pushes 4chanX to change the board title to /qa/ - 2D/Random and in June makes it so threads moved to /qa/ have their "This thread was moved to..." modpost changed try and dissuade anons from posting. /qa/ was not immune to site fads either: By mid 2019 new forms of spam appear, little by little, new reaction faces and this-is-you posts such as the "soyboy" face started making themselves known and even the infamous /b/ logposters occasionally pay visits. Not all was gloom and doom. /hap/ was now one of the most active threads on the catalog and a source of some of the highest quality meta discussion on the site. With new players and a steady source of migrants, Both frogspam and animespam begins to take a sideline to general, or maybe generic threads - 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 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 and ups the ante with his manual frog spam, harassing the mafia non-stop 'til the end of the year. By now, there wasn't anyone left on Question & Answer - that is, /hap/ and no one else - that wasn't aware of these personalities and they no longer put up with their nuisance, calling them out whenever they showed themselves outside their threads. With relations with the only extant /qa/-related groups 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 sweeps by - an educated guess could attribute the cause to /hap/ getting somewhat popular within team4chan. This time it was short and direct: Tired of the bumpbots, mods impose a 7-day autosage on /qa/, ending all zombie blog threads and ritual posts the clique kept alive for months at a time. Hours later most remaining Cabal threads get force archived and draconic rangebans sweep the board, affecting yotgo, atechan and unrelated anime OPs. This effectively ends the war, causing Yotgo to throw the towel and concede defeat, making a farewell thread where he posts the final version of his filter megalist and accuses everyone not him of "ruining" /qa/, resulting in a cathartic dogpile where every meta, off-topic and even kissu poster left came by to tell him what's what. When he turned off the spambot /qa/'s ppd immediately falls down 1/3rd within a day, astonishing everyone. Of course a graceful exit would be too dignified for the man who spent years whining about people not doing what he liked; and he and his buddy Verniy go on to spend months spam advertising kissu out of spite.

Lull Period

Sep. 2019 to Apr. 2020

With the great botspammer out of the way, /qa/ slows down and reaches a short lived state of serenity.

Modicum of Peace

Just because Yotgo turned off the bot doesn't mean problems end. But things do calm down. Anime spam threads slowly go away, replaced by more inane but workable off-topic shitposts. The effects of kissu's years-long spat left the Questions board desolated and with a markedly different posting culture; It's now firmly a SFW off-topic board, one where threads rarely get replies - /qa/cks now prefer to "chat" indirectly through OPsas the board is so slow one quick glance at the catalog lets you know everything that happened that day. On average organic threads can hope to get 5 replies at best unless something exceptional happens. Truth be, this lull period sees little real movement and a community for the post-Warosu era can only be described in the vaguest sense, albeit it never lacked anons who'd swear by /qa/ even now. This second generation off-topic posters still remember the board's history to some extent, all the classics of the /jp/sies - sachiko, nipa, touhous, bernkastle continue to get reposted from time to time together with frogs and other rarities, do you have a question remains the default catchphrase, albeit /qa/'s board-tan has been all but forgotten. Meta threads are a common but ignored sight, discussion leans less on 4chan history or meta topics and more towards commenting - often complaining - about trends on a 4chan that has once again began to change beyond recognition. Karens continue their cycle of screaming at the wall demanding the poor wall to do something, occasionally getting banned.

/qa/ was not immune to the rise of Discord cliques that dominated Yotsuba's off-topic communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic, plague that coincided with April's Fools to breathe some renewed attention on /qa/. Strewn over the catalog you can see little pockmarks and ritualposts from groups were already present since 2019 and had gotten way more intense between February and March. Some are harmless such as the Trans Rights felix spammer (also known on /bant/ and other boards) while abrasive trends like nu-male / soyboy shitposting and to a much lesser degree sneedposting beach on /qa/ every once in a while. The former makes itself known around August, specially after a raid group forms around the spam one A24 Slow Burn cinema critic who has been trying to convince /tv/ that The Witch sucks since 2017 and had recently fallen off the deep end, spamming /tv/ with soyboys every day, and his pupil Chad, a prolific spammer who crosposted on /qa/ and who by August had garnered a whole clique of copycats. Thus soyboy / Gigachad shitposting goes from a couple threads every other week to a permanent mark in the catalog. By April, Chad's influence starts importing soyduels - A bizarre game of greentext chicken he's been trying to force on /qa/ since May 2019 but only took root in /tv/ two quarters later. His success was such that other off-site groups (whose hangs out were never known) had started to add soyjaks to their raid repertoire, occasionally hitting /qa/ with them. Older /qa/ groups like the troupe of leebaiters (by now known as the leecord) had grown increasingly active as lee was growing increasingly inactive. Noticing his absences they developed a strange performance where they play-act both 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, all this on top of baiting the scarcening appearances of the real Lee - At some point in early 2019 the lion's share of barneyfag posts where by this leebot. Atechan returned one last time to spat with the trans right spammer, promptly causing other anime posting passerbys to troll him turn, but by this time he was too far gone to even notice they were different people.

Meta Thread Neé Meta Board

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

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 all kinds of groups. In recent months it became apparent moderators were routinely lurking as rulebreaking crosslinks get axed minutes from being posted. After anons point this out, the mask is off and multiple mods show their face to mock or help posters out through captionless modposts or their old trips. With such unique popularity come problems, moderator presence encourages the much derided practice of using /hap/ as a personal report button to experience a surge in activity, leading to stints of personalities causing no end of grief when they get punished for it. Dramas from /jp/, /vp/ and /trash/ spillover into /hap/. This is in turn made worse by the presence of certain mod stalkers such as leto, acting out and sniping OPs on a quest for attention from the staff. /hap/ experiences an unique phenomenon: A steady stream of new posters aligned with /trash/'s culture begin making it their home, blogposters escaping a board getting asphyxiated by personalities, to not say raging schizos. This is not initially well received by locals but little goes in the way of resistance beyond refusing to use threads by tripcodes such as ῏ᵩᵟŁἐἅϝἓὅἣᵟᵩ῏ !XndHGnsd42. As the months go by, blogposting becomes another face of /hap/.

/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-19 quarantine led to a site-wide increase in posting speed and affected posting habits in manners few imagined, it's ramifications leading the Question & Answer board to have a very particular outcome.

Age of the Soyteen

May. 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.

Soyboy Wojaks

Starting March 2020, 4chan's posting rate - more or less static since the last great migration of 2016 - undergoes a noticeable acceleration when the Corona Virus pandemic turns every house into a bunker. The Questions board is affected and sees a perfect y=x lineal growth of its posts-per-hour starting April, even higher than the 4chan average. The cause can be discerned: In the third week of April a somewhat prophetic, massive soyjak crapflood wipes several pages of the board, formally marking the starting point of a funposter migration to /qa/. Prior, Soyboy Wojaks were posted casually by a few anons since 2019, with /qa/ being used as a lounge of sorts by one "Chad" of the Slow Burners, head honcho of a spam group that was wrecking /tv/ in late 2019. The Slow Burners alongside /int/ OC makers inspired by the Swede had managed to impose a sitewide Wojak trend akin to /r9k/'s reinvention of the Feels Guy in 2014. Prior to this, in 2018 and early 2019, soyboys and their wojak variants where limited to greentexts on /int/ and spam on /tv/, outside the confines of these boards they were known for nothing beyond being an extension of /pol/'s nu-male rhetoric.

The impact of the Pandemic had a clear influence in the development of this trend. While 4chan was already having a bit of a troll problem in 2019, the quarantine put many of these personages on overdrive. By the second quarter of 2020 several raid groups roamed 4chan, from the politically motivated thread killer to the simple funposter, all were looking to get their kicks by dogpiling innocent threads - and they found an excellent weapon in the soyjak pushed by /int/ and /tv/. This inevitably prompts a reaction when spam becomes so frequent it can be seen even on slow boards like /his/, /ck/, /lit/ and more, causing mods to respond with liberal deletions and even rangebans - The soy face now gets you banned everywhere except the oft-overlooked /qa/, which didn't even have a janitor to cull bad threads.

Consider: With 2020 /qa/ being a forum experienced through OPs with little in the form of replies, reporting rulebreaking posts is rare. Most Soyjak threads go undetected as they pile up in the bottom of the catalog. In the months following April they can fill as much as two pages by the sheer inertia of daily threads. For an outside observer, it is as if the nu wojak is thriving, an accidental source of attraction for funposters who correctly surmise they found a haven. By May a critical mass occurs with the reinsertion of /tv/-brand soydueling and even a visit by it's creator Chad: Little by little, the joke was creating a community. Soyposters try to maintain their presence on /qa/ to the best of their ability (which is not much, as the board is still a reply-wasteland and they could never quite cycle out other threads). In these months, the soyface glass-bottom populating the catalog combined with the growing intensity of the Discord Wars lends a sort of notoriety to /qa/ in a time where a temporarily overpopulated Yotsuba looks for venues of venting excess anxiety. Thus a trickle of new posters turns into a linear sustained growth that shows no sign of stopping.

Soyjak posters develop a distinct culture, characterized by a penchant for assaulting threads and boards in a way not too different from 2012's ironic shitposting era. This eager group doesn't identify itself as anything more complex than run off the mill funposts until June, when one anon takes to blogging his antics uploading soyjaks on Know Your Meme until he got banned, inspiring a posse of imitators to flood KYM by uploading every single variant they knew of - which at this point numbered easily on the four digits and had new ones posted every week. This is unarguably the point where Soyjaks coalesce into their own identity, one focused on two things: Collecting 'jaks and raiding. The success of the KYM raid further serves as a source of advertising both in-site and off-site for the tentative subculture, reaching a peculiar synergy in this time of Quarantine where the Internet was getting used full-time by all demographics. Two months later, soyposting goes from mascara smear at the bottom of /qa/'s catalog to a solid third of it. By September anons had already made a soy oriented Imageboard, soyjak.party, and a Booru. Created on little more than a whim those sites become the safehouse of the now rechristened 'jakkers looking to repeat the glory of the KYM raid.

Their impact on /qa/ is palpable: Question & Answer becomes the fastest off-topic board by an order of magnitude not in posts but in sheer quantity of created threads - and unequivocally one of the youngest. Soon the board grows beyond 'jaks and becomes the hotspot of a new generation of posters that set their eyes on carving the abandoned board into a place of their liking - and have to take care to not take things too seriously if don't wish to have their threads relentlessly mocked with numale spam. Soy purists on the other hand divide their time between developing their culture in the jokingly nicknamed Sharty's /soy/ board and testing it in 4chan, while local injokes that grow popular end up imported to their own /qa/ clone. By the time the now commonplace Cobson variant is introduced, Soyjak Party culture had fully distinguished itself from the Kway and goes on to evolve in a parallel direction, even having the creator of the Soyjak, the famous Swede, come by. A curious development occurs in March 2021 with the creation of a Soyjak Wiki that sees the Sharty turn towards an overarching creative endeavor, documenting their own history and the shared mythos for all their OCs. A definite sign of the average age of the community being sub-16, but at the same time it managed to persist and become a cherished tradition within the soysphere. The interplay betweem the two forums never truly ends: By the turn of 2020 the fledging website had popularized dozens of variants and "breeds" of wojak from the troonjak (and the Chud appropiated from /pol/) used by obsessive spammers to the whismy fruitjak, providing a non-stop flow of soy macros that populate the catalog and remix with homegrown trends.

/qa/ - Question/Random

"There's Deinotherium Winkerbean! Over here, Deino!"

With the establishment of the 'jakkers comes renewed attention to /qa/ and once again to the fact that it's an empty SFW off-topic board just there for the taking. Summer 2020 /qa/ sees the open season posts of the October Chaos make a comeback as the modern era's funpost mainstays take the reins. A carnival of Pepe, Sneed, Gigachad, Trans Rights Catgirls and more parade around the catalog openly challenging the (non-existent) jannies. In the third quarter of 2020 /qa/ sees a transformation in all possible directions, first and foremost seeing a return to form in terms of replies (when they are not taken to bump limit by soyduel spam) and a new batch of ritual posts. That trident of infamy - Discord Wars, the KYM raid, the Pandemic - made /qa/ a bit of household name as anons, attracted first by widespread bouts of 'jak raids and later by high effort OC such as the mysterious and liberally reposted Soy grotesques - as the Party turns to increasingly complex, high effort content reminiscent of /r9k/'s Princess Points and Scatological Pepes of 2015 - discover the forum and become enamored with the freedom provided by /qa/'s anything goes atmosphere. In short, it is immensely attractive to a generation of young 4channers drowning in their own free time.

By mid 2021, /qa/ had by all intents and purposes become a miniature version of old /b/, brimming with board culture. A new batch of ritual threads, homemade memes, community games, catchphrases and a growing catalogue of Original Content were redefining the Kway landscape. Word of mouth attracts new groups of posters such as an entire K-Pop general focused entirely on a single woman, /pol/ stragglers reposting stonetoss, memes imported from other boards and a repertoire of lolicon, trans and anime posting (you) farmers. By far, catchphrases are the most prevalent and beloved activity within the new culture with several dozen attempts at creating and twisting new variations.

Unlike previous "/b/-lites" such as /pol/, [s4s] and /r9k/; /qa/ was much closer to /b/'s description as a "Lazy swamp of creativeness" than a modern cabal or identity dominated board. There was no such thing as approved or unapproved content, and anyone was free to post whatever they wanted albeit always side by side with the -again rechristened- soyteens who represented the lion's share of activity. Within this interaction, who'd often creatively reinvent or subvert jokes to screw with other locals. Other events helped /qa/'s growth, one such the fact that all other off-topic boards and even some that weren't off-topic were being held hostage by chatroom cliques, little servers on Discord waging literal turf wars against each other as they try to dictate how their board's culture should look like. Attempts by these groups to force themselves into the board generally failed, trying to force /qa/ to think a certain just didn't work - like pissing in an ocean of piss. Yet by the tail end of /qa/'s life, almost by Winter 2021, relations between soyteens and the somewhat waning 4chan discord sphere - specifically femboy / trans ritual posters - turn sour when the former ends up producing Cabals of their own with heavy influence from the latter, leading to Soyjak Party kids growing convinced they were being subverted by "tranny pedos" and star a micro civil war where they burning through several threads spamming memes on both sites.

Sharty Raids

"There's a decent, I hope, guy left, the one who's made the trio edits (singing trio, etc.) but besides him, most of it is just some shitspam for attention, propaganda and even posts encouraging schizophrenic people to hurt themselves. Don't be surprised if soon it will be the only type of soijak posts left."

The seed planted by Chad's Slow Burners had germinated - Within the safety of the 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 threadbombings by soyteens spread throught /qa/ and 4chan. While initially just pathetic - little more than children manually spamming with their phone and declaring their bans an act worthy of history books, their notoriety - and some early successes - encourages larger and larger crapfloods. The /jp/ & 8chan spheres and their bloated, abandoned forums become the target of multiple catalog wipes. Sometimes raids are announced post-fact, performed by a single kid desperate to fit in with the crew at /soy/. Most successes however should not be attributed some sort of soyteen wit, but to the increasingly decrepit state of imageboards in an Internet that no longer has a need for decentralized hangouts; The tread of time and lack of activity saw these forums fossilize with even their owners forgetting about them - IBs that aren't hit by 'jakkers had simply bled to death as illegal content spambots tire the owners out. By summer 2021, 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, coupled with the prevalence of raid groups adopting soyboys, summer 2021 saw /qa/ become the "soyjak raid board" in the eyes of 4chan, with every subset of the site having more than one reason to despise them.

Moderator response occurs sooner than people imagine. By February 2021 even making a soyjak thread on /qa/ was motive for deletions and bans despite /qa/ never having any set direction beyond the global rules and meta discussion sticky. Soyteens who had no knowledge of the earlier 2020 wave of rangebans or why Wojak posts could end up deleted engage the staff for answers, who just argue it's because of spam bumping out meta threads. After the intial shock of moderation, the prospect of getting banned merely adds another veneer of excitement for the 'teens who would just fall back behind the safety of their altchan. The new moderation effort putters out fast, compared to summer 2020, mod presence on /qa/ way less prevalent save for a couple formal capcode replies and the rare prank on /hap/. The culture cultivated by soyteens was left to grow ripe and soon every anon that could find entertainment in internet warfare was filling the ranks of the Party. With only a handful of mods, team4chan could scarcely afford the time and interest to properly rinse Kway culture.

Trying to stop it through mere thread deletion was no longer enough. While recent implementations of browser fingerprint bans and anti-flood detection - popularly attributed to the harassment of a certain unicode-using furry spammer - never quite let the sharty wipe any 4chan boards, neither did it stop them from trying. Worse: At no point did /qa/ ever stop growing, it had reached an historical peak of around 8000 PPH, a speed that let it compete the lower rungs of the 4chan ecosystem. This state of affairs hasn't been sitting well with the upper echelons of team4chan at all; fixing a several pages board wipe attempt requires manually restoring the board from archives manually, translating into an increase in moderation workload. In the end, team4chan's refusal to acknowledge /qa/ as a potential off-topic board and delegate janitors played once again against them. By Fall, management's patience had finally ran out. 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 & Deletion

Nov. 2021 - Apr. 2025

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

Stragglers Again

The death of /qa/ was a shock to the Sharty. An immediate attempt at colonizing /bant/ occurs while a payback raid is in the plans. Both buckle fast with the raid going the way every other 4chan crapflood by the sharty had gone: 3 pages of manual spam then banned. Soyteens swear revenge. While just empty words by teenaged shitposters, the November Massacre or Great Soyset as they took to name it became one of the cornerstones of the ever growing post-ironic mythos collectively developed by soyteens. Outside the soysphere, Kway locals mourn. Threads lamenting the board surface all across the site only to be rebuked by anons still upset at the laundry list of slights. Effectively homeless and with no group in 4chan willing to tolerate them over their association with 'teens, the reformed /qa/ culture dies another early death as most posters disperse and the more headstrong of the group bunker up in the Soyjak Party. There, it quickly becomes apparent that having to share a site with all the off-topic posters of Question & Answer was not going to work. The site's old guard, already showing hints of a Purity Spiral after the debacle with the 'cord cabals, denounces all /qa/-tier ritual threads as NAS aka Not a Soyjak, a term used for determining what content was allowed on the booru, and convinces Soot to quarantine them to /qa/. This signals the beginning of a sharp division between off-topic and on-topic posts that becomes a staple 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/. 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.

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, had somehow found itself in yet another rollercoaster of incomprehensible bullshit.

Epilogue: 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 funposting 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 when the community attracts local board personalities who trip themselves trying to turn the general into their porn blog. The thread becomes dominated by an avatarfag and namefag circlejerk, 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 who raid the place as if possessed by some ancestral memory - however post-raid, the place appeals to them and some choose to stay as incessant dramas within the Party had tired them out. The turn of 2023 comes hanh-by-hang with avatarfag blogs, soyteen funposters and Leto's discordian cabal, the influence of these group sees the /hap/ community find 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 one 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/. Despite some moderation interference, the move is ultimately succesful. 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 /hap/ 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 the community 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 posterbase 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 within a soyjak spinoff called the Jarty into it's own webstite, The Frog Pond. Soysphere frogposting is heavily informed by a strange cultural memory of Atechan's brand of insanity and the long forgotten Kekistani mythos. Armed with this, the Pond roleplays a guerrilla war with the Sharty up to the point of CSAM flooding the imageboard and successfully getting the .party domain taken down. Somewhere around the line this microculture slash forced meme is adopted by an unusually intense poster who attaches references from actual old /qa/ history to the already obscure MAGAfrogs and rebrands it /qa2/, affirming that RapeApe was rebooting /qa/ with Trump's support, turning it all into one grand post-ironic injoke. The culprit spends 2024 raiding /hap/, /r9k/, /a/, desuarchive, soyjak altchans and even Kissu, enough to gather a reputation and attract a small number of copycats - who are however not even a fraction of the total post count of the /qa2/triot. Eventually things run their course and the last /qa2/ related forum 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 believed there was an entire community behind the act. While a minor sequence, this deranged frogposter is effectively the last great roleplayer of the Spam War. His retirement signals the end of what's arguably the last link 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 remaining 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 founding triumvirate 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 taken a leadership role among it's peers, becoming the home of a small but budding community. Yotgo, now cool guy continued to be rarely harassed by Atechan until his tragic death in 2024, and kissu occasionally gets raided by soyteens with distant memories of this site being /qa/ related.

Re/quay/iem

"/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 untouched for a decade. Claiming to have gotten in since 2024, he announces his hack to 4chan in April 14 2025, opening /qa/ and redirecting the whole site there as he heads to the Sharty to dump screenshots of the admin toolkit and database, leaking the site sourcecode and emails and IPs 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, while a dozen out-of-touch journalists make headlines about an otherwise typical hack somehow marking the end of an era. Hopefully this doesn't result in actual harm to any staff member, who out of frank spite opt to delete /qa/ when the site returns on the 25th, with /f/ and /j/ frozen as additional casualties. As for the Party, every soy-not-so-teen comes back in awe that almost 5 years of non-stop writefaggotry have been validated and the culture's founding myth was 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-running sequence of injokes coined 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 of mocking the emasculated male stereotype that's been plaguing the lower spheres of Internet culture and social media through the 2010s - Taken so far out of it's own context it became a subculture in and on itself.

The roots of this genealogic funpost tree stem from /v/ and /pol/ -boards then mingling together over the culture war's encroaching on the video games community- as they mocked infamous social media posts by men claiming to be "male allies" of the SJW feminist bandwagon, identifying themselves as new males and often ending up victims of cancellations - a source of great schadenfreude. The idea of the New Male was a fad whose few public defenders got relentlessly mocked until the very word was a buzzword. From there on /v/ and /pol/ took this nu-male in different directions: On /v/'s half, they first relate it to vidya culture, remixing them with ironic references to an ongoing Soy milk advertising campaign (as a vegan replacement for milk) that was making waves due to the stunts of one deranged speedrunner and one Soylent company's infamous scam advertising campaign where they pandered to the "new male" phenomenon. The joke kept evolving and saw itself references in a plethora of nintendo manchild jokes, specially after the Nintendo Switch releases in 2017 and made everyone cringe with embarrassing unboxing videos. Later that year, /pol/ starts digging up social media and streaming screenshots of the stereotype and takes to call such people soyboys, drawing dozens of MSPaint parodies 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. Soyboy mockery eventually turn synonymous of this-is-you posts - typical 4chan fare where you, you quote another anon's post and attach a mocking reaction pic to it. 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.

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 keen on remixing wojaks - oldheads fondly remember it as board heritage given it's origins as a Krautchan meme. Around the turn of 2018 the International board was having a shitposting streak, 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 remixer who had been on a year long streak of new content remixes the nintoddler meme with the soyboy face and promptly forgets about it, moving on to his new 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/ as part of the ever eveolving repertoire of anon reaction faces. A bit later, around the third quarter of 2018, it gets unburied and turned a popular meme on /int/ where anons roleplay conversations between one Gigachad and one soyjak via greentexting, which later gets refurbished as "soyquoting". 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. /int/ in particular becomes home to a group of content creators inspired by the Swede who spend a good half of 2019 churning out wojak remix after wojak remix.

2019 is also the year 4chan goes through an ironic shitposting revival, this is the point where our soyjak macro takes protagonism: All across the site anons take to post 'jaks in order to mock current trends and contrarian opinions alike. In /qa/ and /tv/, specially retarded anons take to quoting the soyjak posts mocking them and reply with another soyjak. This soyduel has it'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 thing. A trend that would find a home in /qa/ by April 2020 as /tv/ started getting moderated via liberal application of rangebans.

The Slow Burners and Other Raid Groups

A closer look on the posts tells things a bit different. Soyjak spam was spread by a handful of off-site cliques and ultimately turned into a forced meme by force of site-wide raids. These groups were in turn influenced by a specific set of spammers operating in /tv/ and /qa/ who managed an almost year long streak of imposing their injokes through catalog wipes. This posse, led by one Gigachad roleplayer simply named "chad", was behind all the cornerstones of early soyteen culture - Soydueling, parodying cinema tropes, raiding, variant collecting, and of course gigachad posts. In essence it's responsible for the largest forced meme since that anon who came up with the 30yo boomer. Without the influence of these groups, soyjak shitposting would have likely lived and died contained to /int/ like many memes before them.

The /int/ gang of swede imitators developed the soyboy roleplay persona in late 2018 as part of a game where they'd creatively contradict or subvert OP arguments. Eventually this took off in a big way as they inserted Gigachad roleplay -that Chad adopted later- into the mix and proceeded to make several dozen threads with the duo's interactions. It should also be noted that International had a years long tradition of wiping it's own catalog to get back at the janitors, a reason why nobody batted an eye when a bunch of randoms started filling the place with threads. Whether this group was coordinated off-site is unknown, it wouldn't be much of a surprise if it's found out most content creators were communicating, but in the end that group didn't quite leave /int/. Almost simultaneously in /tv/ another anon takes up Soyboy posting in a campaign to convince everyone that A24 and The Witch were terrible horror cinema, complete with infographics dissing no-jumpscares movies as "soy horror". He becomes in 2019 the most prolific ban evader in /tv/.

Chad takes inspiration from both groups to craft his persona. The earliest traceable activity that can be attributed to Chad can be found on /qa/ around May 2019, where the first attempts at double quotes or soyduels took shape. It didn't quite work out, those first forays into /qa/ came and went unnoticed as the final stage of the Atechan/Yotgo drama dominated the wasteland of a board. and jumps in on /tv/ to aid the soy horror spammer, outposting him in a matter of months. Together, they cause the growing contrarian sentiment towards the late 2010's horror revival explode into a several months long self-raid as they get the entire board to shit on A24. By August 2019 he dominated the group, filled the frontpage with the James Youniverse soyjak macro for weeks at a time and even garnered a small group of copycats. In essence, he has successfully organized the first Soyjak raid. It's here where he manages to carry soyduels to term - mind that much later he admits he was essentially the only person doing it. In August 2 Chad makes his first namefag post, writing the rules of soydueling, and on August 15 makes a Discord server called "The Slow Burners", but he never gathered more than handful of posters. For months it was little more than his roleplay blog.

In November he takes easy, falls out of raiding but occasionally promotes a MEGA collection of over 500+ soyjaks in all 3 boards. Yet he made a lot of noise. Enough that an horde of imitators had piled up on many boards, some of whom likely interacted off-site as their writing styles and filenames could be traced in tandem through raids on /his/, /lit/, /fit/ and more. By the end of January, these copycat groups had ran out of steam, most posters dispersed to their usual hobby boards or limited themselves to posting daily soyjaks and unique variants on /qa/ and /int/. But the damage was done. The abject seething that the initial wave of raids caused on /tv/ taught local raid groups -fringe chatrooms that only saw 4chan as a (you) factory such as the infamous sneedcord- that soyboy wojaks were prime trolling material. In winter 2020, exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, soyjak crapfloods flare up all across 4chan in numbers enough to be noticed by both regular posters and the younger newcomers that were currently forced to spend all day in their room due to the quarantine. The meme has been forced, there's now a group of anons who plainly identify as "soyjak posters".

Soyposting reaches it's peak in March 2020 when Chad returns to the fray and gets /tv/ slapped with a renewed spamwave. This time team4chan would have none of it: Chad gets counter-slapped with a rangeban and any attempt at soyposting is answered with IP nukes. Faced with a sitewide purge, both amused recent adoptees and the slow burners gang end up gathering on /qa/, whose lack of janitors makes any sort of mod response very limited. It's at this point where the joke spirals out of their control and takes a life of it's own. By May /qa/ has having dozens of threads interjected with soyduels while Chad anonymously "leaks" his discord on /tv/ causing a stir. Days later deletes it and comes clean on /qa/ happy that Question & Answer had become "the soyduel board" he wanted /tv/ to be. He had grown bored - or worried his obsession was becoming detrimental to his mental health - and was now going to retire from the game. For good or ill, his activities and his copycats' carved the cornerstone that would create the Soyjak Party community.

Soyteens as a Community

Actually pointing down when a coherent community formed and distinguished itself from the site-wide habit of numale allegories by turning towards collecting 'jaks 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 culture from that board being inexistant in soyteen circles. Even the famous Swede only resurfaced months after soyjak.party was created, amazed his one-off shitpost created a whole trend. The Slow Burners and Chad can be argued to have set the grounds for it's development with raids, manufacturing site-wide notoriety for soyjak-variant soyboys. 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's winter went by - yet in the eyes of most anons it was still indistinguishable from /pol/'s usual soyboy verbal assaults and other 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- when we can find the inflection point that sees soyjaks go from "forced meme" to "meme" and the Slow Burner's injokes are taken off their hands by an horde tweenaged anons. Still, there's the matter of how the soy identity formed.

To recap: It's undeniable that the COVID-19 pandemic was an influence in the development of soyjaks by encouraging a sharp rise in shitposts and off-site chatrooms. It's known that Yotsuba underwent a period of heavy moderation to "purge" soyjaks from the board in March, April & May after a renewed period soy shitposting - a direct consequence of the pandemic. These actions cause the then biggest soyposting band to move to /qa/, already known as a bit of a soyjak-friendly hanging ground thanks to the habitual crossposts of Chad and others proto-soyteens. The point where it can be affirmed to have already occurred can be found in April 20 when an unknown group botspams and wipes /qa/. By this point, soyjak enthusiasts observe there's a much laxer moderation reaction, noting the lack of /qa/ janitors cripples the mods' ability to react to run-of-the-mill shitposts. From here on there's arguably more copycats than movers, these anons go on to turn the soyjak towards a zeitgeist independent from the reactionary culture war insult it started as. /tv/+/qa/ crossposting is notable and soydueling returns in full force accompanied to occasional threadbombings and SLOW BURN HORROR references, joining together with new developments in the jakker lexicum.

In August 2020, the culture has it's founding myth with a wildly popular, months long raid on Know Your Meme, also the first soyteen off-site raid. Here they carve the basic identity of collecting soyjaks like stamps, while attracting a considerable number of new posters product of the simple advertising tactic of filling the new submissions page of KYM with /qa/ references for two months straight. By September a site and a booru for 'jak OC come by and the soyteen zeitgeist finds it's formal starting point. 2020 ends with a highly motivated band of marauders running a community dedicated to raiding while the notoriety of 'jak threadbombing had made waves large enough that most newly created 4chan-influenced chatrooms had soyjaks in some way or form. Widespread adoption by local Discords in turns creates a feedback loop of free advertising for /qa/ - the growth of this phenomenon is truly explosive, causing /qa/ to visibly outpace 4chan's pandemic induced growth with a perfect y=x linear function. At this point, it's little more than a statement of fact to say that /qa/ had become the soyjak board. Chad makes one last appearance on October 2020 in one of his old threads, brimming with pride at what the board had become.

Demographic Summary

Basic /qa/

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

/qa/'s initial use as moot's goodbye stream set the nature of the board in stone. From its creation to its end, it occupied the space reserved for meta forum in the zeitgeist of Yotsuba channel. Meta discussion had more value to your average anonymous poster than it would have most forums given that the lion's share of 4chan history is shrouded in hearsay and urban myth. The prospect of having a space to discuss all things 4chan is a very attractive one for people fascinated by the aging site's history.

On average, in an "on topic" /qa/, we can divide the forum in three types, each corresponding to a way people carry of meta discussion on imageboards.

• Meta Posters

The "locals" of /qa/. People who'd prefer to spend their browsing hours discussing the past instead of engaging the present, albeit occasionally commenting on the present too. An activity that can be described as the forum equivalent to birdwatching, their numbers divided between the 4chan equivalent to geriatrics feeding the birds and newer posters fascinated by the imageboard giant. Occasionally, metaposters will get really technical about their interests, becoming a source of infographics, statistical and graphical analysis, their topics may go beyond 4chan and onto other imageboards and the history of the Internet. Among these, Bibliotheca Anonoma members have been known to belong and some embassies where tried, however leadership opted to minimize engagement given the possibility it may create a hatefandom.

• Stragglers

A "straggler" is little more than an random anon with a question. This question could be about their favourite boards, mysterious injokes they could not lurk out the meaning of, or questions about the site's actual structure and function. Many came with good-willed but unworkable solutions to the problems plaguing their hangouts. They represented the essential motor of activity for early /qa/, their threads being the concrete filling of the catalog.

• Complainers

What passes for Karen on 4chan. Emotional, to say the least, and more than willing to let others know. In short, a useless straggler that has been hurt by moderation or another anon in their regular boards and has decided to take it out on someone else. More often than not their assumptions are completely off the target and resistant to any sort of correction. Truth is, they don't come here for explanations, merely to vent at someone's expense and if no one comes they are content to scream at the void of an empty catalog. Only a fool would give them the satisfaction. However, they were not entirely useless: It's also complaint threads that frequently get subverted and used as conversation starters for many a 4chan history and meta debate.

By 2020, almost all meta posters were bunkered up in the Happenings thread and the threads by stragglers and karens mattered less and less as the off-topic elements of /qa/ came to dominate the forum.

Off-Topic /qa/

The many communities that tried to carve a culture out of /qa/

By fiat, /qa/ was also an off-topic board. Owed to the simple fact it never had a defined set of rules. Early on when there were multiple active off topic boards, this side of /qa/ was ignored. As the site changed and the old off-topic hangouts ossified, people started eyeing /qa/ as potential playground. It was soon discovered that the board had no janitors, making it a prime target. Many communities tried making Question & Answer their home, but all their attempts where short lived, cut before their prime either by accidents of luck or another community running them out of the board. By the final two years, a semblance of a board culture formed, but it had share board space and poster base with an spinoff raid site that grew too fast and uncontrollable, causing /qa/ to get frozen.

Early Period

The initial throngs of /qa/ had some attempts a forming a culture centered around meta. This didn't last very long, but it did produce a number of long standing rolling threads. Arguably /qa/ was at it's most diverse in the beginning, having attracted posters from all ages and all of 4chan's constituent communities. A smaller, younger subgroup took to make personal connections that ended up creating the board's only native circlejerk.

• Happenings Thread

Originally a mix of GET spotting and commenting on high profile events (ie: stickies, raids), it slowly became the lounge 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 ultimately ended being the only extant artifact of /qa/'s original culture. The /hap/ experiment was one of the more successful ideas to come out of the original /qa/. The general became self-sustaining as the notion of 4chan gossip ended up capturing one or two anons from every group that visited /qa/. By the time Soyteens arrived, it was in practice the board's hub and chatroom, to the point it was the source of more than one Happening by itself. It brandished the dubious award of being the only general in 4chan history known to have mod-level regulars in it, which in turn attracted a large number of migrants of questionable quality such as /trash/ posters, /q/ karens and infamous ban evader Leto. It is the only community to not only have survived all of /qa/'s history, but also it's death, migrating to /trash/, /r9k/ and currently /bant/.

• CSS Thread

4chan UI customization threads. In some ways a /jp/sphere colony on /qa/, as almost all screenshots were heavily /jp/ related. It was naturally taken over by raiders from the spin offs where it essentially became a filter thread for a certain Yotgo to complain how much he hated everything not /jp/. Here they developed the MD5 filter megalist.

Middle Period

An invisible demographic, the anons that arrived with the advent of Hiroyuki's October where the dominant posterbase on 4chan - And they were going to let everyone know. Having roots in /pol/'s posting culture, their use for /qa/ was indistinguishable from their use for well, every other board: All engagement grew out of commentating real life events or people commentating real life events. Their culture, catchphrases and original content, was all made with referencing that in mind. They rarely acknowledge the potential uses of the boards for activities not related to this practice. Described as invisible because they arrived at the same time as a dozen different raid groups and ultimately were ran out in a few months by the Warosu clique's effort to cleanse the board of anyone not them. Warosus are also one facet of the other half of middle /qa/'s population. Tech-acquainted, college aged anons who likely posted on /a/, /jp/ and /g/ at some point in their posting tenure, their threads where often NEET and otaku related and their content was hopelessly in love with ritual threads. The type of poster the clique tried to foster, but never could quite retain.

• Sageru

Sageru is a distant descendant of 4-ch.net, 4chan's rival in the yore days of 2005. Unlike Yotsuba, the 4-ch tradition is firmly rooted in textboard culture and the history of BBSs has always been a source of great interest to them. By the days of Question & Answer, most of the scene hung at IRC network sageru.org, an anonymous chatroom ran by former /jp/ poster Tokiko. Given the culture, it was natural that members would find their way to /qa/. Overlap between the /jp/sphere and textboards led to Sageru members inviting the Warosu clique to their network and accidentally end up playing second fiddle to an overbearing community. Despite this, they sometimes snuck in their own threads sandwiched between bumpbot spam, with topics rooted in internet, history or internet history. As the clique caused no end of trouble, Sageru posters lost interest and disappeared from /qa/ by the turn of 2019.

Late Period

It is not out of place to call /qa/ post-pandemic a kindergarten. The average age in the board was at best highschool, with some exceptions. And so all the typical behaviors found in young communities can be found. Fixations over relatable situations (hello, Ongezellig), shame and shyness over their guilty pleasures even in an anonymous community, headstrong attachment to identity, shock at common internet occurrences and more are all the markings of a young /qa/.

• Not a Happening General

The majority of /qa/'s new blood between the period 2019 and 2020 consisted of one-line bloggers, 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. They found refuge in /hap/ during that interim between Warosu dominance and soyteen dominance. Eventually the situation became unsustainable and the /nah/ thread was created, before rejoining with /hap/ during the exile to /trash/.

Board Colonies on /qa/

The forum's nature as an SWF off-topic board made it into a safehouse for small groups that found themselves run out of their home boards or discovered Question & Answer had enough space to house their niche. None lasted for long, usually being kicked out by marauding raid groups.

• Board-tans General

Board-tans as site culture arguably peaked around 2014. As the larger drawthreads moved on to other flavours-of-the-month, 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 board-tans fandom, the thread managed to encourage the tradition site-wide and eke out a good 2 years worth of OC: Around a five hundred illustrations if not more and two cross-board events in form of 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 crippled the Winter Ball 2017, marking the end of the subculture.

• [s4s] - Shit 4chan Says

Both types of esfores - Classic [s4s] brand funposting & the cuteness obsessed troupes inspired by [a/jp] were keen crossposters on /qa/. Their 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. Contempt for [s4s] grew over time as swaglord ran out of engagement ideas and took to raid other boards, creating a hatefandom all for himself.

• /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. Being the cultures closest to the staff, they also had a considerable interests overlap with meta discussions.

• /his/ - History

Before /his/ was a board, it was a lobby on /qa/. Anons from /lit/, /pol/ and even specific communities like /gsg/ - Grand Strategy General have been campaigning for an /his/ board since the days of /q/, something moot curtly dismissed because he was certain it would just end up becoming "/pol/ with dates". Time proved he was 100% correct. Still, the change of management gave History aficionados renewed hope and cause to spend several threads around 2015 and 2016 begging for a new forum, going as far as to roleplay what it would look like in a couple threads. To everyone's surprise, one of Hiroyuki first decisions as administrator was personally addressing their request and agreeing to create /his/.

• /kr/ - KPop General aka /yegi/

Due to unknown reasons a whole group of /mu/'s /kr/ posters split from the main general, choosing /qa/ as their new home. They were immediately swarmed and hunted down, but not even soyteens could get rid of 4chan's most obsessive fandom easily. /kr/ endured half a year of terrible threads in an unsustainable environment until it eventually dispersed. However it remained on /qa/ memory as yejibugs became a meme.

Personalities of /qa/

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

If you considered yourself a regular poster 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 and botspammed the Remove GR15 schizo's threads with broken text and images from various anime, being he is best remembered for his dumps and eventual avatar of Pikari from Amanchu!, later for making 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 did manual crapflood via mobile-evasion (the classic plane mode move) to wipe /qa/ then gloat after he gets nuked and 3/4ths of the board go with him, attempted to run a bumpbot of his own by bumping threads with "rolf". 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. Eventually, coordinated spam with with the Warosu clique - but likely never joined rank, at least not identifiably. Publicly banned in December 2017, becoming less active, with the #qa clique 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 spent all his time flaming with the /intl/ spammers convinced they were bronies; 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 a gallery of trolls that tested his (likely script aided) image identification abilities. His most active period was around 2017, same year he got doxxed due to his spam visibly affecting 4chan usage on his university. By the turn of 2018 he was getting harassed non-stop by a group of trolls usually called leebaiters. Unlike previous barney trolls, this group knew each other through private chats and were harassing barneyfag off-site. Lee's will was slowly chipped away as his posting habits slow to a trickle by 2019, and he stops posting entirely by 2020.

• Anti Crack-Kun / Crack-Kun / ACK

Infamous personality from /a/ and /u/. Formerly a popular scanlator, he was a high functioning autistic with serious hang-ups about shipping. He came to fame around 2014 when he appended unhinged rants to his translations declaring that any non canon pairing "degrades" the characters involved. When some manga websites such as Dynasty Scans removed the rant, he completely lost it and shifted to dedicate every waking hour of his life to harassing the perpetrators. In 4chan, local ritual threads had him fixate and stalk a number of posters, causing a retinue of /a/ trolls such as I_love !Akemi7npFA and warosushitter !!dApALfIDywS to goad him on. His condition deteriorated into paranoid delusions, coming to believe he was being gangstalked by people who where secretly both tripcode trolls and 4chan mods. He arrived to /qa/ around September 2015 making wall of text threads calling out staff and ritual posters, eventually moving on to harass the #4chan IRC and squatting ghost/qa/ for years.

• leto / unicodefag / foxe / furnigger

A creature out of old /b/'s nightmares. Developer, botspammer, homosexual, zoophile, pedophile, and furry. Arguably, as of 2025, the most infamous spammer 4chan ever saw. His earliest appearances date around late 2017 on /qa/ and /bant/ as an avatar of Nick Wilde from Zootopia. He later moved onto fursonas, one black/red and one white/blue, drawn by FA artist letodoesart. Other signatures included emojis for filenames and invisible unicode characters in his name. leto cut his teeth by botspamming /bant/ on 2018 with a residential proxy list of unprecedented size from Luminati. On occasion, he attempted to bait the #qa clique claiming to have a copy of their bumpbot code, but wasn't picked on - thought he eventually coded his own. He later appropriated /trash/, specially the /gfur/ general, and spammed that community to high hell. Post-/qa/ he hung out with the 2chen /cumg/ crew and by late 2022 ran a fork of the [CENSORED] ban evasion tool that he started spamming 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 both a shitposting spree with some hints of payback over perceived slights originating from the also pervasive /deletepol/ threads. Attracted by the noise of HIroyuki's October announcements, the presence of anti-/pol/ threads riled up election tourist /pol/lacks who never heard of the board before. /qa/ then joins the ranks of the /leftypol/ boogeyman in the eyes of the culture war aficionados. Post-elections, in 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

A handful off-site liberal activists began sharing links to /qa/ around January 2017, coming to /qa/ with the idea that they could convince the mods to shut down /pol/'s He Will Not Divide Us trolling campaign. Their goal is little more than disrupting /pol/ activities by reporting technically rulebreaking posts as GR1 violations and encouraging anyone they came across to "ice" /pol/ threads by reporting them as illegal as the mods would ban the false reporter but delete the thread anyways. This was noticed by /pol/lacks who proceeded to accuse them of everything on earth, sparking thread long flamewars. Initially passing unnoticed on the mod's radar, they were put down by February. One of their more intense posters, nicknamed Chris and Icefag by locals, refused to leave for months making anime OPs calling out /pol/ raids or otherwise campaigning and confusing Warosu threadbombings for an anime /pol/ cabal.

• /jp/ Spin Offs - ota-ch, 4taba, himasugi, merorin, kakashi nempo & GNFOS/no-you

In February 2017, 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 try to landscape /qa/ to their liking. The pretense of /qa/ being a spinoff board held on, and /qa/ became "/jp/-related" in the zeitgeist of the spinoffs. Over the coming years, many /jp/sies (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 Warorus, 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 around 2017. Mostly playfighted with the frogposter clique who nicknamed them Trevelyan after confusing them with Trevor. He'd go around /qa/ rating threads and generally funposting. Left by third quarter 2017.

• Cirno General & Touhou Posters

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 appears in a site-wide wave of Cirnoposting caused by the announcement of Touhou Project's Hidden Star in Four Seasons, starring the Ice Fairy. This nets multiple cirno rolling threads all over /jp/, /a/ and /qa/, accompanied by a handful of drawartists. Some set shop in /qa/ where they remain all the way to the freezing of the board. Post-unfreezing, they coalesce into a single thread and make an earnest effort to fit in; 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 /jp/ Radio spinoff chiru.no with it's admin and Yotgo of the Warosu clique being prominent posters. As a general however, they remained by far the best behaved of all /jp/sphere groups, albeit this resulted in some grumbling from Warosus. 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

October's 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 stemming from 8chan. While /pol/ forgot about /qa/ by the the turn of 2016, much like an earthquake's creak, subsequent ripples may be felt. A number of Infinity-related cliques appeared on /qa/ months later, 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 4chan 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 in April 4 and the weeb mafia opts 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/ cabal. 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 a drawfag and avatarfag of Hatsune Miku, and the female lynchpin of an 8chan clique tracing membership all way back to the Cat's Cradle group, related to the /b/ clique ran by Board Owner Dysnomia. She developed an interest in /qa/ after /pol/ raided it during the elections and linked it on occasion, in /quay/ she experiments with trolling a bit in February 2017 and does a bit of drawing. Months later, her clique opened to a Discord server named Goon Killers and specifically to a chatroom known as Non Aggression Pact Violating Lewd Voyeurs, or napvlv; and moved from 8chan to an unknown, unlisted gibberish board on 8ch.pl they referred to as [BOARD REDACTED]. Months later, in a very confusing episode, her clique imploded and the drama somehow moves to /qa/, making several threads between May and June astroturfing fug and [BR] as masterminds of some internet right wing death squad. 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 posing as fug. While a relatively low impact event, 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. Posters from 8chan /b/ and the /int*/ sphere would be seen from time to time through the next year.

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 / "/jp/" / kissu.moe

Initially, /jp/sphere posters were just another group among the endless crossboarders, gathering in /jp/ meta threads to discuss spinoffs, /jp/ history, spinoff-adjacent scenes like textboards or just requesting a "2D/Random" forum in-tune of the old Niijiura boards of Futaba Channel. After October's Chaos, with moderator Anonymous-san's activity in November, a new stock of /jp/sie was attracted to /qa/. Enamored with early 2010s /jp/, warosu.org's recently disabled ghost posting culture and the /jp/ spinoff scene; with some members overlapping with /jp/'s touhou and 2AM threads and 8chan's /jp/. Asan's firing caused these anons to despise all meta through association with /pol/. In essence, what likely started as an idea while discussing Asan & /qa/ within /jp/sphere back channels -private chats and IRC, the exact origin is unknown, likely related to 8chan circles, but some of it happened on sageru.org's IRC channel #jp- 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/ heritage threads began to appear.

By March, it's clear an eclectic mix of teenbro shitposters and no-fun-allowed neurotics had determined to take over /qa/ force it to turn into 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 mostly in an ad-hoc form - a few bot running lynchpins with a plan leading on unwitting allies who haven't realize the board culture wasn't natural. The lynchpins encouraged them to attack unwelcome threads and make every disproved poster feel unwelcome. 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 harass threads deemed "/q/" or "/pol/", which involved basically all threads that had an "ugly" OP in their eyes. The circlejerk behind Warosu coded bash scripts hooked to a whitelist and 4chan API reader to selectively bump approved threads while "cycling out" unapproved ones both manually and with the aid of thread-making scripts. If a thread particularly infuriated them, lynchpin Yotgo would start up CAPTCHA-bypass scripts with image dumpers and posts copied from archives that's crapflood it 'til it hit bump limit - plus a bit of creative trolling.

Early on they'd squat publicly on the Happenings Thread trolling locals then had a brief stint on a Discussion Thread where they'd brag about their spam. After the April 2017 freeze, the Discussion thread, ghostposting and the creation of Desuarchive's /meta/ acted as a recruitment points. Post-freeze 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, 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. This turns sour in late 2017 as the lynchpins were not sufficiently emotionally stable to not attract trouble (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 IP wiped. The clique later makes a second IRC, #qa @ rizon.net, to escape problems in 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 members left /qa/ for kissu or left entirely as coexistence proved difficult, the remainers - namely the lynchpins who refused to let /qa/ go - saw the tables turn on them as their backseat moderation and threadbombing led to 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. The clique official leaves /qa/ from this spoint on, spending a couple months shilling Kissu before dispersing.

All in all, the Warosu clique was responsible for several thousand botposts over the span of 3 years; at least 10% of all posts between 2017 and 2019 were by bots with 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 more Warosu spammers ran some minimal opsec or contributed to the development of the cabal, such as Neo the creator of the #qa rizon & sageru IRCs and {}{}{}{}. with no identifiable /qa/ posting history or links to botting beyond minimal references.

• yotgo / !QAJP/YOtGo / cool guy

American, self-described hikkimori 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. Known to post touhous and participate in /jp/'s 2AM threads, he became a /qa/ emigré around mid 2016 (making him the only confirmed clique member to have known old /qa/), limiting himself to lurking and doing manga dumps and trivia threads. Often claims to have been on /qa/ since 2015 and seen the /jp/ golden/dark age. No evidence has been found. The brain behind the "/jp/" plot to colonize /qa/ which he described early on as a "terraforming project". He sparks into activity in January 2017, stating he wants to turn /qa/ into 2D/Random as he fears the thread he'd like to make could get him banned on /jp/.

He created large quantities of OC and promoted community projects with the intent to align /qa/ with his idea of /jp/ culture, he also contributed edits and the 4chanX MD5 filter megalist for the CSS thread; Was a permanent fixture on the happenings thread, if only to backseat moderate it. 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.

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 deteriorated over time, going into rants about user/self-moderation, /qa/ being threatened by 8gag slacktivism, /qa/ having always been 2D/random, ludicrous accusations of being an instigator or a concern troll to anyone who didn't play ball, refusing to acknowledge that his actions where detrimental and describing his clique as the only "good posters" of /qa/. When he started getting IP nuked for his spam and ban evasion he fell into delusions of persecution, claiming he was targeted by an obsessed mod; his paranoia and resentment inflamed until he was convinced every shitpost he saw was a targeted harassment campaign aimed to "destroy" /qa/, either by boogeyman called "the freak" or enabler mods that "hated /qa/". In March 2019 had a fight with clique member Atechan that caused a mental breakdown that saw him to around the board accusing everyone of being Atechan.

The most abusive spammer of the clique. He wrote the first bumpbots and thread crapflood scripts with captcha bypass features in bash. He'd crapflood any thread he didn't like to bump limit with images, copypasta and posts copied from board archives, even threads he made but went in directions that disappointed him. He'd attack any dissenters by scriptspamming pictures of concern brands. 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 on /qa/. His antagonism made him the object of fixation of an equally deranged spammer that infiltrated Warosu and taunted him for most of 2019. Eventually his spam tired the mods out and they set a 7-day autosage on /qa/, causing him to meltdown and announce 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. Initially an avatar of character Hibiki from Kantai Collection. Earliest appearances can be traced to March 2017. Dropped/lost his trip by 2018. He can also 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, coded and hosted kissu.moe the third /qa/ (trevor sniped the second in gnfos) and first /qa/ spinoff. He later created qa.booru.org and formed a /qa/ webring with the 4taba.net and wakabb.net admins, albeit both sites shut down within a few months, the formed he briefly revived. Spiteful spammer known to gorespam and target 4chan mods via report spam, after this got him rangebanned a couple times he proceeded to spam advertise his site. He also included a special option on kissu.moe to mark threads for reposting on /qa/.

• ccd0 !!Bu9nPEv33rQ

Maintainer of the 4chanX extension since v1.4.2. In August 2017 took up to 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 an exodus then the disabling of reCAPTCHA v1 was announced. He later expanded 4chanX's scope by integrating tinychan powered spinoff imageboards into the code framework. 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". Some of his final guerilla changes were using 4chanX to advertise captcha evasion methods and other spinoffs.

• Atechan / Rin -Also- schizospammer / frogposter

Brazilian. Notorious personality that ran a dual persona as both a Warosu and the dreaded schizospammer boogeyman. He was known to post on ota-ch around 2018. His earliest /qa/ posts come circa June 2018, likely after discovering the clique through their stream threads. There he'd discuss anime on their IRC channels while taunting them on /qa/ and manually spamming threads with frogs, gradually becoming more fixated on them until he was posting practically everyday by first quarter 2019. As the spammer, he'd post IRC screenshots and insider info under the mask of a frogposter; his vocabulary consisted of heavy /pol/ lingo and coined popular terms terms like weaboid / weab. He later develops elaborate gonzo-like rants accompanied by clown and suit frog variants where he paints exaggerated roleplay scenarios of a war with the clique. He also had access to IRC spam bots which he used to spam everyone, from #4chan and #qa Rizon.net to the entire sageru server. Most of his exploits happened inside Sageru, where he was known to have been OP at #jp and #qa, obsessing over and torturing Yotgo for months.

On March 2019, he was found out to be the frogposting boogeyman, causing a fallout with Yotgo that resulted on him botspamming the #qa sageru IRC to the point it crashed the entire server while waging a multithread flamewar that lasted several months, where Yotgo accused him of being the freak, 8gag, mlpol brony and every other schizo to ever post in /qa/ before ultimately doxxing him in June upon discovering his old /ota/ selfies. 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, making threads titled "let us not forget" and narrating kissu's attempts at sliding it, trying to id posters without directly calling them out. Ultimately he outlasted Yotgo and lowered his posting frequency until disappearing 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 bewildered frog and weeb alike, ultimately coining him the nickname schizoweeb. He was widely confused to be a previous lowercase poster, the Satania avatarfag from early 2017. His 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. Do not confuse him with run-off-the-mill /g/-brand satania posters.

• !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 as far as 2019.

• Kissu Hardliners

Post-exile, even though Verniy and most of the clique were happy on Kissu, some Warosus remained on /qa/ occasionally chiming in to defend the clique. Few believed their tale..

• Frogposters

As /qajp/ took the bait every single time, /qa/ developed a short-lived community of frog posting trolls who'd spend their /qa/ time baiting Warosus for (you)s. Their posting habits where mostly inspired by the antics of a prolific Easter Frog poster, who in turn adapted his vernacular from /int/'s eponymous meme. His copycats were less creative and quite more crass but a source of great stress for the colonizers. The earliest appearances of frogposters dedicated to troll local /jp/sies can be traced to post-freeze /qa/ in the first weeks of May 2017. Come end end of the year, their tactics shifted towards spamming threads to 404 those protected by the clique's bumpbot, on top of their own brand of necrobumping and various hijinks up to making their own OC parodying Warosu ritualposts. Most frog trolls has an activity span 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. Their influence was however quite a bit longer lived as the frogposter persona was taken up by Atechan in 2018 to wage a one man war against Kissu, in turn inspiring a few copycats of his own. Even after the clique abandoned /qa/, the tale of the "frog-weeb war" was taken up by Soyteens who had it assimilated into their zeigeist and reenacted the events in elaborate roleplays .

• "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 the bulk of the frogposting trolls. Essentially an avatarfag of the Easter Frog best known for his unusual flowery vocabulary, politeness and occasional 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 Warosu nickname weeb mafia. He called it quits in October 2017 when /qa/ got listed, but has sporadically visited all the way to 2021, extrapolating arguments from what 2017 /qa/ was like.

• 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 when the more aggressive thread spam bots entered play, some /jp/sphere posters concluded that the spam was damaging the community beyond repair and they made their opinions known, to little effect beyond predicting how the whole thing would go down. Their efforts often got them singled out as concern troll or instigators by Yotgo and the rest.

• "February Spammer" / concernbro / the freak

A purported /qa/ OG horrified at the spinoff clique bots. He 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/; All he could achieve was get 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 going on. Became notorious 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 anime 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 argument. As the latter 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 Warosu threads often created great confusion and got him accused of being every raider and problem poster under the sun, eventually netting the catch all nickname the freak. Likely to have ragequit in the second or third quarter 2018, but his impact traumatized some of the mafia who would 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

Pandemic Gangs

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

• Soyteens / 'jakkers / soyboys

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 by the hand of a few stragglers and a couple crossposters from /tv/ which was getting harassed at the time.. These stragglers aren't enough to outpost the local cliques during the peak of weeb/frog flamewars. It isn't until March 2020 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 creating their own imageboard.

• The Slow Burners

Widely believed to have been the first soyboy raid group. /tv/ raid group named after a blog/discord server made by an anon known as Chad. Inspired by an infamous soy horror spammer he terrorized /tv/ during the third quarter of 2019, netting himself a retinue of copycats. Slow Burners are responsible for popularizing raiding among soyposters, and Chad personally came up with the concept of soyduel. Chad and some other soyposters who followed him around were known to post on /qa/ from time to time. It's their activity that caused widespread adoption of soyjaks by raid groups across 4chan and thus indirectly responsible for the ban waves that ended up moving soyteens to /qa/.

• soyjak.party / soyjak.us / The Sharty

/qa/'s second spinoff and a community that developed in parallel and in tandem to post-pandemic /qa/. 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 start raiding other boards. While the Sharty likes to pretend they alone invented /qa/ culture, it's no wrong to say that /soy/ and Question & Answer were inherently entwined, with catchprahses and memes from both forums finding themselves crossing website lines. As the two grew in size the Party's raiding habits start growing out of control. By February 2021 mods begin a pushback against their raids but to no avail, ultimately opting for punishment-by-association and freezing /qa/ in November 2021. In 2025 the Sharty actually hacks 4chan and doxxes the entire staff. Mods again punish /qa/ instead and delete it the frozen board as payback.

• "/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 Meta and Off-Topic era 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.

• Raid Groups - Sneedcord, Trans/Femboy Spammers, logposter, Generic Soyboy Spammers, Official /qa/ Discord & others

The Discord Wars is a popular term to describe the immediate consequences of the Pandemic on 4chan. A large number of off-site cliques materialized and went on brigading campaigns against several boards, chiefly the off-topic quartet (/bant/, /trash/, [s4s] and /r9k/) but also funposting-heavy boards such as /tv/, /g/ and /vp/. A number of these occasionally turned their attention to /qa/, being the force behind a number of ritualposts and memes in 2020 and 2021. Their reputation collapsed site-wide when some of the most prevalent Discord groups, Reiko's clique and the Pinkpiller servers, were revealed to be involved in child grooming and sextortion. By the turn of 2021, interactions between Discordians and the Soyteens turn sour and the latter falls into a purity spiral where they'd crapflood any thread they suspected was made by "tranny groomers", fight that continued all the way to the freeze.

• leebaiters / leecord / 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 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 activity and develop an entire set of phrasing and injokes around baiting lee. By 2020 they 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 kept 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. Eventually, the /qa/ of they soy era adopted them as part of their culture, and leebait became a meme.

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

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?