Bibliotheca Anonoma/History/2014-2016

Until early 2015, the Bibliotheca Anonoma was a one-man operation: full of potential, but lacking staff to make things possible and keep projects motivated.

However, certain events, such as Moot's Final Livestream and Hiroyuki's Commencement, caused that to change, bringing in many more staff members, creating an active IRC channel, and significantly increasing our influence and outreach.

Membership

The organization would contact many people and future members during this time period, including:

• Daniel Oaks - Developer, co-created the BASC-Archiver.
• jKid - Imageboard historian, Founder of Yotsuba Society and long time supporter.
• ThrustVect - Independently wrote the 4chan.doc, later joined the team.
• vyrd's admin - Provided one of bibanon's first gathering hubs. Sadly, MIA in 2015.
• Akaibu - Field Researcher, became a member interested in archiving 2b2t.

The BASC-Archiver

One of the most important members of the Bibliotheca Anonoma is Daniel Oaks, an Australian web developer skilled in Python.

He was using our BA-4chan-thread-archiver, a script that I had produced that leveraged the 4chan API to archive the entire site to static HTML+JSON dump, with all full images and information about the thread.

Due to my inexperience with Python at the time, it had some issues in implementation. Daniel Oaks offered to work together with me to produce the BASC-Archiver, a rebuilt version that would significantly increase performance.

As a result of this, he became closely associated with our team, and built a new website for us with a domain at bibanon.org, along with an IRC channel (though I was not experienced with IRC and did not come in often at the time).

We still jointly maintain the BASC-Archiver to this day, adding in new improvements such as multithreaded archival, possible py8chan/py420chan/py8chan integration, and a possible GUI.

The Reformed Bibliotheca Anonoma (2015 - Today)

In 2015, three major events supercharged this organization and drove significant expansions of our roles, staff, and influence. This is where our history truly begins.

Moot's Final Livestream (January 2015 - September 2015)

The 4chan Board /qa/ became an unlisted board for discussion about all of 4chan and it's history for only a few people who knew about it. In addition, it's membership is bulked up by those who came to listen to livestream Q&A sessions, such as with Hiroyuki's Commencement.

Moot's departure led to structural changes that led to the need of a direct communication hub for the Bibliotheca Anonoma. Different proposals were made and ultimately and IRC channel at Rizon as chosen.

Hiroyuki's Commencement (September 2015)

In a drunken visit to Japan, Moot met Hiroyuki Nishimura in person and then decided that he would be the best candidate as the next admin of 4chan. Hiroyuki founded 2channel back in 2001, a major website for anonymous discussion in Japan.

However, Hiroyuki had a sordid reputation among the 2ch users who saw their own site collapse under the weight of crippling scandals over the past decade. Thus, there was a high degree of apprehension among the 4chan userbase about the future of their site.

However, to break the ice, Hiroyuki would be launching a Q&A session on 4chan's /qa/ to answer questions posed to him from 4chan.

To coordinate operations again during Hiroyuki's Commencement, I set up a Google Hangout with the core team of the Bibliotheca Anonoma. However, one user, ThrustVect, was apprehensive about joining up in a Google-backed social network. Instead, he recommended that I try to contact via IRC.

For some reason, I, Antonizoon, was unable to work efficiently via IRC. Group chat on mobile (such as Line, Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger) was perfectly fine. But I had been experimenting with a special IRC Bouncer service that modernized it and recorded all chat logs: IRCCloud. The only issue was that to idle for a while, you had to pay $5 per month. I deemed this a small price to pay for pseudoanonymous conversation that would be more receptive to 4chan users, and I jumped back in.

Archive.moe Divestiture (September 2015 - October 2015)

A significant increase in our organization's population and responsibilities occurred in the aftermath of the shutdown of Archive.moe

We partnered up with Desustorage to rehost backups from Archive.moe. We also worked to ensure that all the boards were distributed among the other archivers.

The Kanban Board

The Kanban Board (used in Trello) has revolutionized the organization of the Bibliotheca Anonoma, and is used to provide a transparent workflow for the workroom of the core teams.

For now, Trello requires an account to post cards, and requires us to authorize users to add cards. However, anyone with an account can post comments.

Note that the Kanban Board is not a textboard! It is a project folder for sharing and assigning notes for core team members.

Unfortunately, by early 2016 it was bogged down by static content as we began to lean towards this as a substitute for the Github Gollum wiki, which failed to meet our needs.

New Infrastructure - Hetzner Servers

In 2015, Jordan lent Bot.yui.cat for use by the Bibliotheca Anonoma (primarily Gazlene) for large archival jobs that required 3TB of space. This functioned as our own ArchiveBot, though without irc bot access (direct SSH access was used instead). Eventually, Jordan moved off of the server and the Bibliotheca Anonoma took over the full lease. By October 2016, the Bibliotheca Anonoma had put together a full dedicated server to put in Jordan's datacenter rack, and we moved to that one for good.

Our first dedicated server was also obtained, jointly owned by the Bibliotheca Anonoma and the Yotsuba Society. It replaced the Dreamhost VPS which had 2TB of space, but had removed root access. It is now primarily used to run Eikonos.org.

Itabashi - Discord Bridge

On 2016-01-23, Antonizoon and Daniel Oaks developed Itabashi, an improved Discord + IRC bridge that syncs messages between these two channels together.

This way, a modern group chat client can be used by today's generation of internet users, giving them a better Interface, low barriers to entry, and push notifications, without the need to think about losing chat history or maintaining a bouncer.

We also avoid the stifling walled gardens created by company oriented group chat such as Slack, which was designed to reduce collaboration and visibility from outsiders.

This tool is also useful to the rest of the community as a high performance alternative to discord-irc, which used node.js and ate a lot of RAM.

The Realms Wiki (Early 2016)

Unfortunately, due to the inadequacy of the ol' Gollum wiki, we started to lean on the Trello board as an ineffective substitute for a wiki. This led to stagnating cards that could not be easily edited by members.

Thus, we set up the Realms Wiki as a significantly improved alternative. However, it had limitations when it came to information organization and user management, as well as severe slowdowns in th editor, so ultimately we left it for Mediawiki. However, much of the reform of the old wiki occurred during this period.