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.

>why am I writing this

Personal endearment.

>but why?

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

>well then, what is it?

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

>status?

Evidence gathering done at say, 95%, missing: admin, dev & modposts, plus what happened in late 2015 and late 2020. Follow-up is notes cleanup and writing the actual essay, mostly along the lines of "how the fuck can a single board have so many stillborn communities" ALSO: Cutting the fat on people-related links, this is not about weirdo birdwathcing

Symbols

☼ Unverified aka "i'm the primary source", no primary evidence.

► Source is exclusively anon testimony, no primary evidence.

/qa/ Historiographic Summary

Rough breakdown of periods & core points

Meta Period (2015/01-2016/08)

• Stragglers from moot's big AMA stream reminisce on nostalgic memories and ponder what to do with the board. The /qa/ charter gets drafted.
• Within a couple months the honeymoon period ends and the board slows down, most posters leave, /qa/ becomes a rather dense den of metaposting.
• Hiroyuki's acquisition is announced and the board's activity springs to life. /qa/ coalesces into a small collection of meta aficionados, karens crying to the mods and anons looking for an off-topic board that wouldn't get swarmed with weirdos and porn. Most generals get created.

Off-Topic Period (2016/08-2017/04)

• Sweeping site changes on 4chan's 13th birthday and Hiroyuki's fearmongering, the October Chaos, causes a massive increase in activity that results in a sharp rise in off-topic threads and the destabilization of regular threads, forcing many posters off the board. The problems intensify with subsequent events such as the 2016 US election, the firing of Anonymous-San, an unfortunate April's Fool joke and finally the listing of /qa/.
• By 2017, the forum registers on the map of multiple off-board groups whose origins range from board cliques, chatgroups formed out of generals to the /jp/ Spin Off webring. They discover that /qa/ is, moderation wise, an off-topic SFW board; Raids and angry protests ensue.

Great weeb-frog War (2017/04-2019/08)

• No-fun-allowed rejects from the /jp/ spinoffs warosu and sageru determine to turn /qa/ into their homeboard by aggressively botting up the place and gaslighing all anons who protest. They get fished for bait by an equally intense group of October tourists who adopt /pol/'s smug frogs as their callsign. The constant botting of the clique causes harsh mod intervention. This years long flamewar practically depopulates the board, deteriorating in quality and quantity until both sides were reduced to a couple schizophrenics screaming at ghosts.
• Meta discussion can hardly survive the accelerated thread speed and most porters bunker up in the Happenings thread, that constantly gets harassed by both sides.

Second Meta Period (2019/09-2020/03)

• Mods enact draconic measures that effectively end bumpbots and "/jp/" spam, exiling the #qa clique for good and stopping some of the more aggressive frogposters.
• Crossposters from /bant/ appear as spam culture eats the board. Frogs too settle down into /bant/ or /int/-like posts.
• With bots and most of the frogs gone, meta discussion recovers it's engagement and threads make it to 3 digits on the regular. The happenings thread receives special attention, with multiple mods coming by.

Soijak Raids & freezing. (2020/04-2021/11)

• The lockdowns of the pandemic bring a massive increase of overall activity to 4chan that affects /qa/ by turning a collection of memes derived from /pol/, /v/ & /int/ into a thousands strong community of middleschool kids.☼
• For a brief span, /qa/ reaches a state reminiscent of old /b/ or the Infinity boards. But like all things /qa/, it didn't live long enough to do something of note. The antics of the Soyjaks, enabled by their altchan, turn to interboard raiding and culminate with getting /qa/ frozen.☼

Epilogue

• All of /qa/ is concentrated on the 4chan Happenings Thread, which gets "adopted" by a mod. The general takes refuge on /trash/, later /r9k/ and /bant/. For strange reasons totally not related to their initial choice of refuge, the thread becomes the chatroom of multiple underground IB personalities, spammers and an ever growing corps of avatarfags.
• Soyjak posters migrate to their own imageboard and continue their meteoric increase in size and influence until they implode and collapse into several discord cliques. They have effectively become the face of /qa/ in the eyes of 4chan.
• In 2023, an injoke of an injoke developed from a soyjak thread into it's own website, The Frog Pond, and later The Ribbit Rally. Starting out as ironic roleplay based on the kekistani mythos, somewhere around the line this microculture slash forced meme is "adopted" by an unusually intense anon who attaches references from (by now) old /qa/ history to the already obscure MAGAfrogs and rebrands it /qa2/, turning it all into one grand post-ironic injoke. The culprit behind most of this spinoff's content spends the better part of 2024 raiding /hap/, /r9k/, desuarchive, soyjak altchan and occasionally /a/. The last /qa2/ related site dies on January 2025, presumably because Trump's electoral victory killed the joke. On February 5 the spammer comes clean on /hap/.

Demographic Summary

Regulars

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

old /qa/

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

late /qa/

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

Personalities of /qa/

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

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. Or really just one angry sperg. In late 2016 he attempted to ask the mods for help with ponyspam and got rejected then took the nuclear option botspammed Remove GR15 threads with broken text and images from various anime, but he is best remembered for avatarfagging Pikari from Amanchu!, several "fix /pol/" and around the CSS and happenings threads. His antics resulted in a minor resurgence of the old /a/ Pocari Sweat meme thanks to detractors/circlejerks.
• asukaspammer ---> Avatarfag of character Asuka Kurashina from Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, first spotted by early 2016 but only active as a spammer from third quarter 2016 onwards. He utilized a crapflood script to wipe /qa/ then gloat after he gets nuked and 3/4ths of the board go with him. Initially well received for fighting off the October /pol/ spam, he ran out of goodwill by 2017 after it became he clear he wasn't going to stop. Ran the earliest instances of the bumpbot (rofl variant). Eventually, coordinated spam with with the /g/+sageru raiders - and most likely was part of the clique himself. Publicly banned in December 2017, becoming less active, with the #qa clique likely enacting copycat asukaspam. Stayed around till early 2020.
• GR15 Defense Force / GRXVDF !!mQybBQsWzGP --> /qa/'s first problem tripfag. Donned the name in late 2016 in order to argue with the Remove GR15 spammer. Fell in with the #qa clique and spend considerable time flaming with the /mlpol/ IB spammers; His claim to fame is the failed GET that unexpectedly became an infamous reference point for the start of the spin off raids. Got his trip permanently banned in December 2017 and dropped off public posting soon after.

Dreadful outsiders ruining our fun

• barneyfag / Lee Goldson --> Infamous /co/ spammer; an autistic who despised Barney & Friends and associated it with cartoons My Little Pony and Steven Universe. From 2012 onwards he imposed a reign of terror that spread to several boards including /v/, /vg/ & /qa/. Spent considerable time on /qa/ hunting down the local pony spammer ‼; He got doxxed in 2017☼ and likely stopped posting soon after.
• leebaiter / leebot --> After Lee got doxed and allegedly stopped posting, the troll clique that formed around him kitbashed a leebot spamscript with image recognition capabilities hooked to the derpibooru website. 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. The leebaiter persona was the collective mask clique used to make their threads. This persona became heavily active in /qa/ between 2020 and 2021 where it became an avatarfag of Don Turtelli from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with pictures taken exclusively from an obscure My Little Pony fetish porn comic. They steadily upped the ante, making several threads a week, paying a Barney voice actor to perform stealth injokes, making elaborate posts such as pretending to be barneyfag such as making a "surrender" post and an infamous feet fetish post.
• Anti Crack-Kun / ACK - Infamous personality from /u/. Formerly a guerrilla scanlator, he was a high functioning autistic with serious hangups about shipping. His condition deteriorated into paranoid delusions of targeted trolling, leading him to blame Team4chan for his woes. ACK turned to spamming both #4chan, /qa/ and Desuarchive at several points in the board's life; a drama retinue of /u/ personalities such as !Akemi and warosushitter !!dApALfIDywS followed him around.
• leto / unicodefag / foxe / furnigger ---> A creature out of old /b/'s nightmares. Arguably, as of 2025, the most infamous spammer the site ever saw. Developer, botspammer, homosexual, zoophile, CSAM dumper, and furry. His earliest appearances date around late 2017 on /qa/ and /bant/ as an avatar of Nick Wilde and other characters from Zootopia. He later moved onto fursonas, one black/red and one white/blue, taken FA artist letodoesart. His signatures were also using emojis for filenames and invisible unicode characters in his name. Cut his teeth by botspamming /bant/ on 2018 with a combination of premium proxies, 2captcha keys and a residential proxy list of unprecedented size stolen from Luminati, allegedly thanks to a /r9k/ spammer he befriended. On occasion, he attempted to bait the #qa clique claiming to have a copy of their bumpbot code, but wasn't picked on. Later appropriated /trash/, specially the /gfur/ general, and spammed that board to high hell with an independently written bumpbot. Fell in with the 2chen /cumg/ crew and by late 2022 ran a fork of the [CENSORED] ban evasion tool that he started adspamming the poor /hap/ thread with.

Raiders

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


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

October Cliques

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

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

Spam War

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

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

Post-War

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

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

TEMP

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

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

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

fun things are fun -> /a/fags ;

fuwafuwa -> /a/jp/ / spinoff

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

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

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

/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/

/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?