Imageboard Meta Communities: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 06:00, 2 October 2025

4chan and the chanverse made waves of unprecedented size, transforming Internet culture to a point where it was difficult to find a place anonymous-created content had not colonized. However, it's ephemeral nature was a source of much confusion and even some urban myths. Many websites surfaced with the intention of explaining imageboard history, from personal wikis run by early movers in the scene, anonymous community projects and eventually archive websites. In turn, they helped ossify what imageboards were in the anonymous zeitgeist.

This was a source of some derision from moot and team4chan as, under an interpretation of anonymous posting culture sponsored by the likes of Anonymous-San and shii, they grew convinced that ephemerality was a vital promoter of content creation and a keystone in the prevention of creative stagnation. As in all things, they weren't 100% wrong, but neither 100% correct. They drew their conclusions from the information at hand and time revealed that the social necessities satisfied by imageboards were more intricate.

Nevertheless, recorders of imageboard activity were not discouraged, and they efforts have grown to the point even they may be recorded.

Personal Wikis

A prime source of "I was there" information. But as all personal accounts, everything must be parsed through a de-bias filter before being taken as fact.

Everything Shii Knows

shii's "insider knowledge" was the source of much information but also many misconceptions, but he may have been, arguably, one of the actual pioneers of the concept of Personal Wiki.

JDigital's 4chan Pages

Usually remembered for providing the only extant scrape of late 2000s /b/, he also had a pseudo-wiki with a POV centered on Something Awful and Raspberry Heaven experience with 4chan

0037's world2ch Wiki

Wiki made by 0037 entirely because he was upset over world2ch being memory holed. Provided a lot of content on the first days of 4chan. N. 1 shii hater.

Xiongnu's Compendium of Personal Ignorance

Textboard dinosaur who recounts what he knows of 4-ch.net and Wakaba.

Nameless Rumia's Wiki

Voracious researcher focused on asian IB scenes. I wanna write something more descriptive but I'll likely just make him upset :(

Meta Communities

The houses of timelines, chronicles, archives, nostalgia for internet eras you didn't actually experience and all manner of weird fixations

Society For the Study of Study of Modern Imageboard Culture

Intentionally pompous. A single imageboard and technically the first meta anything ever, WaHa was an early mover of the chanverse and had a hand in many pies.

The Yotsuba Society

JKid's personal wiki slash community.

Vyrd.net

Personal website of vyrd, an early mover in the "4chan history" revival scene.

Biblotheca Anonoma

Antonizoon's attempt at preserving and curating the highly elaborate personal anecdotes fad known then as greentext stories. It became a fully fledge internet archiver group focused on imageboards.

Community Wikis

Imageboard culture was such a source of fascination it might as well be given it's own article. Many websites trying to explain the phenomenon surfaced and for a time they were influential. But tragic closures almost erased them from the map, being this wiki the last extant general one looming over many single-board microcommunities.

Wikiworld's 4chan Page

The first attempt to record a 4chan anything. well, Wikipedia's was first but that was killed early on and it took years before any admin was convinced to resurrect it. Killed in late 2006 as the culture went against the wikiworld's TOS.

Wikichan (Etherchan)

The first major wiki to archive data from 4chan. It actually called itself "WikiChan", but everyone referred to it by it's URL name.

Etherchan closed on January 2007. Here are some archived pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060620134250/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Popularpages

(anton's findings)

Archeology

In this thread, the EtherChan sysop announces the closure of Etherchan. Much of the content made it to Wikichan and Tanasinn.info, through the work of Halcy.

1,500 Snapshots Archived by Internet Archive - Unfortunately, most of these are failed snaps.
Main Page - States that there were 1,095 articles by the time of it's closure :( . Some of it may have made it into Wikichan and Tanasinn.info though.
Popular Pages - 50 of the most popular pages.
4-ch Pages
NPoV Policy
Anime Episode Announcements - This page loves Haruhi just as much as /a/ used to.

Scraping

Since most of the pages are just short definitions, we should probably put together a scraper to grab a list of all pages from the API, download the pages, then scrape out the article body data out of it, which would turn it into little quotable fortunes. Hell, it could be a single serving site: ether.bibanon.org

Get a list of all pages here from the Internet Archive API.
Search for all <div id="content"> using Python's BeautifulSoup. Dump them into <article> .html pages.
Enumerate a list of all article titles.

Important Discoveries

2006 4chan Board Guide
Linksys Support Raid - An early 4chan raid. Might also be extant at ED, and I might have a copy.
Category: Chatlogs
Incest-chan - Newly rediscovered story!
Etherchan Copypasta Archive - June 2006 Snapshot.
Copypasta Instructions
Halcy's Snapshot - November 2006 snapshot.
4chan Copypasta
Who the hell do you think I am
Tentacle Rape Article - Informative, I guess?
4chan Party Van - LOL JK
Cockmongler Image Archive - A massive archive of this classic man.
Macrochan - I'll suck your - Amazing that macrochan is still around after all these years. Good thing we archived it.
Macrochan - Cockmongler

DQN Threads

DQN Category
Really Long Song - Crowdsourced lyrics at 4-ch.net.
( ´ω`) - A grandfatherly face that sagely answers all your questions. Has an associated thread at 4-ch.
under the moon loli to issho - A strange phrase that has something to do with this weird emoticon family.
Mittens

Weird Shit

Pages

Etherchan's Imageboard Listing - Might be the only extant reference to many imageboard sites.
Category:Imageboards
/a/ - On 4Chan, the /a/ (for Suzumiya H/a/ruhi) imageboard hosts discussion about Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu, but since /a/ users are quite tolerant about off-topic threads, you can also talk about any other anime or manga you want. (Sometimes, there are actually more off-topic threads than Haruhiism-related threads)
/b/ is a popular imageboard on quite a few websites, including 2Chan, 4Chan, IIchan, and WhateverObscureWebsightNobodyHeardAboutEndingWithChan. It is about posting random pictures of various things. On 4Chan's /b/, there is an unusual amount of faggotery, furries and peMySql Connection Failure
Halcy's Kopipe - Contains important archives of much of Etherchan's best important pages.
Stalking Haruhi Suzumiya - Where were the background scenes in Haruhi modeled after?
List of Notification Boxes - These are the most hilarious notification boxes ever. Inherited by Tanasinn.info.

Closure

Etherchan is succeeded in name by Tanasinn.info, a wiki apparently kept alive by Halcy and other textboard enthusiasts. The owner of the etherchan.org domain apparently owns the modern Tanasinn.info.

Wikichan.net

Kirk's Wikichan and the direct (self described) successor to Etherchan. It had a large section dedicated to guides, infographics, and turned men into Well Cultured Persons.

Wikichan.org

Immediate revival of Wikichan

Tannassin.org

Wikichan but for textboards. By the end of the 2000s it became the only community wiki left.

Encyclopedia Dramatica

DeGrippo and the original inner circle never liked being known as the "4chan wiki", yet imageboard culture and it's influence on the writers was palpable (and so was ED's influence on imageboard culture in a curious feedback loop). Many articles ended up doubling as imageboard history articles, and many memes and urban myths come from here.

Others

Many, many board-level and general-level wikis that we need to ARCHIVE BEFORE THEY FUCKING DISAPPEAR DO SOMETHING AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Board Archivers

Purely utilitarian projects focusing on scrapping everything that goes on a single board, they've managed to not just persist but grow comprehensible to the (according to Anton) they are some of the easiest-to-search repositories in the Internet, short of Google's USENET archive. Not even Twitter or Reddit can compare.

4chanarchive

The first and only.

foolz.us

Popularized the foolfuuka script as the primary means archiving imageboards

archive.moe

The first "kitchen sink" archive, and for a time, what seemed to be the central platform for everything 4chan. it's death was a bona fide crisis.

Many more

anton halp pl0x

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-[[4chan]] and the [[chanverse]] made waves of unprecedented size, transforming [[Internet Culture | Internet culture]] to a point where it was difficult to find a place anonymous-created content had not colonized. However, it's [[Content Ephemerality | ephemeral]] nature was a source of much confusion and even some urban myths. Over the years many community projects oriented to explaining imageboard history, from personal wikis run by early movers in the scene, anonymous community projects and eventually archive websites.
+[[4chan]] and the [[chanverse]] made waves of unprecedented size, transforming [[Internet Culture | Internet culture]] to a point where it was difficult to find a place anonymous-created content had not colonized. However, it's [[Content Ephemerality | ephemeral]] nature was a source of much confusion and even some urban myths. Many websites surfaced with the intention of explaining imageboard history, from personal wikis run by early movers in the scene, anonymous community projects and eventually archive websites. In turn, they helped ossify what imageboards were in the anonymous zeitgeist.
 This was a source of some derision from moot and team4chan as, under an interpretation of [[Anonymous Internet Culture | anonymous posting culture]] sponsored by the likes of Anonymous-San and shii, they grew convinced that ephemerality was a vital promoter of content creation and a keystone in the prevention of creative stagnation. As in all things, they weren't 100% wrong, but neither 100% correct. They drew their conclusions from the information at hand and time revealed that the social necessities satisfied by imageboards were more intricate.
@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 Nevertheless, recorders of imageboard activity were not discouraged, and they efforts have grown to the point even they may be recorded.
-== Operation Payback ==
+== Personal Wikis ==
-Began as a small crack team that worked on AnonOS/Cherimoya/Newfag's Guide to Anonymous.
+A prime source of "I was there" information. But as all personal accounts, everything must be parsed through a de-bias filter before being taken as fact.
-Another branch went to revive the Encyclopedia Dramatica.
+=== Everything Shii Knows ===
-=== Insurgency Wiki ===
+shii's "insider knowledge" was the source of much information but also many misconceptions, but he may have been, arguably, one of the actual pioneers of the concept of Personal Wiki.
-== Shii's Wiki ==
+=== JDigital's 4chan Pages ===
-== Etherchan ==
+Usually remembered for providing the only extant scrape of late 2000s /b/, he also had a pseudo-wiki with a POV centered on [[Something Awful]] and [[Raspberry Heaven]] experience with 4chan
+=== 0037's world2ch Wiki ===
+Wiki made by 0037 entirely because he was upset over [[world2ch]] being memory holed. Provided a lot of content on the first days of 4chan. N. 1 shii hater.
+=== Xiongnu's Compendium of Personal Ignorance ===
+Textboard dinosaur who recounts what he knows of [[4-ch.net]] and Wakaba.
+=== Nameless Rumia's Wiki ===
+Voracious researcher focused on asian IB scenes. I wanna write something more descriptive but I'll likely just make him upset :(
+== Meta Communities ==
+The houses of timelines, chronicles, archives, nostalgia for internet eras you didn't actually experience and all manner of weird fixations
+=== Society For the Study of Study of Modern Imageboard Culture ===
+Intentionally pompous. A single imageboard and technically the first meta anything ever, WaHa was an early mover of the chanverse and had a hand in many pies.
+=== The Yotsuba Society ===
+JKid's personal wiki slash community.
+=== Vyrd.net ===
+Personal website of vyrd, an early mover in the "4chan history" revival scene.
+=== Biblotheca Anonoma ===
+Antonizoon's attempt at preserving and curating the highly elaborate personal anecdotes fad known then as greentext stories. It became a fully fledge internet archiver group focused on imageboards.
+== Community Wikis ==
+Imageboard culture was such a source of fascination it might as well be given it's own article. Many websites trying to explain the phenomenon surfaced and for a time they were influential. But tragic closures almost erased them from the map, being this wiki the last extant general one looming over many single-board microcommunities.
+=== Wikiworld's 4chan Page ===
+The first attempt to record a 4chan ''anything''. well, Wikipedia's was first but that was killed early on and it took years before any admin was convinced to resurrect it. Killed in late 2006 as the culture went against the wikiworld's TOS.
+=== Wikichan (Etherchan) ===
 The first major wiki to archive data from 4chan. It actually called itself [https://web.archive.org/web/20060622084839/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/WikiChan &quot;WikiChan&quot;], but everyone referred to it by it's URL name.
@@ Line 23: / Line 65: @@
 https://web.archive.org/web/20060620134250/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Popularpages
-=== Archeology ===
+==== (anton's findings) ====
+===== Archeology =====
 In this thread, [https://web.archive.org/web/20070113181447/http://etherchan.org/dis/read.php/all/1167886249/1-40 the EtherChan sysop announces the closure of Etherchan.] Much of the content made it to Wikichan and Tanasinn.info, through the work of Halcy.
@@ Line 34: / Line 78: @@
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20060621050121/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/%EF%BD%B7%EF%BE%80%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%28%EF%BE%9F%E2%88%80%EF%BE%9F%29%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81%E2%94%81!!!!! Anime Episode Announcements] - This page loves Haruhi just as much as /a/ used to.
-=== Scraping ===
+===== Scraping =====
 Since most of the pages are just short definitions, we should probably put together a scraper to grab a list of all pages from the API, download the pages, then scrape out the article body data out of it, which would turn it into little quotable fortunes. Hell, it could be a single serving site: <code>ether.bibanon.org</code>
@@ Line 45: / Line 89: @@
 <li>Enumerate a list of all article titles.</li></ol>
-=== Important Discoveries ===
+===== Important Discoveries =====
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20060513072032/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Beast 2006 4chan Board Guide]
@@ Line 62: / Line 106: @@
 * [https://macrochan.org/search.php?tags=Cockmongler Macrochan - Cockmongler]
-=== Categories ===
+===== Categories =====
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20060511013057/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Gay_stuff
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20060513034351/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Cute Cute]
-=== DQN Threads ===
+===== DQN Threads =====
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20070117060338/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Category:DQN DQN Category]
@@ Line 75: / Line 119: @@
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20060517195446/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/%28_%EF%BE%9F_%E3%83%AE%EF%BE%9F%29 Mittens]
-=== Weird Shit ===
+===== Weird Shit =====
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20060514013957/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/C
@@ Line 82: / Line 126: @@
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20060518024254/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Man_train
-=== Pages ===
+===== Pages =====
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20060616071531/http://etherchan.org/wiki/index.php/Imageboards Etherchan's Imageboard Listing] - Might be the only extant reference to many imageboard sites.
@@ Line 92: / Line 136: @@
 * [http://halcy.de/kopipe/Template:List_of_notification_boxes.html List of Notification Boxes] - These are the most hilarious notification boxes ever. Inherited by Tanasinn.info.
-=== Closure ===
+===== Closure =====
 Etherchan is succeeded in name by Tanasinn.info, a wiki apparently kept alive by Halcy and other textboard enthusiasts. The owner of the etherchan.org domain apparently owns the modern Tanasinn.info.
-== Wikichan ==
+=== Wikichan.net ===
+Kirk's Wikichan and the direct (self described) successor to Etherchan. It had a large section dedicated to guides, infographics, and turned men into [[The Well-Cultured Anonymous | Well Cultured]] Persons.
+=== Wikichan.org ===
+Immediate revival of Wikichan
+=== Tannassin.org ===
+Wikichan but for textboards. By the end of the 2000s it became the only community wiki left.
+=== Encyclopedia Dramatica ===
+DeGrippo and the original inner circle never liked being known as the "4chan wiki", yet imageboard culture and it's influence on the writers was palpable (and so was ED's influence on imageboard culture in a curious feedback loop). Many articles ended up doubling as imageboard history articles, and many memes and urban myths come from here.
+=== Others ===
+Many, many board-level and general-level wikis that we need to ARCHIVE BEFORE THEY FUCKING DISAPPEAR DO SOMETHING AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
+== Board Archivers ==
+Purely utilitarian projects focusing on scrapping everything that goes on a single board, they've managed to not just persist but grow comprehensible to the (according to Anton) they are some of the easiest-to-search repositories in the Internet, short of Google's USENET archive. Not even Twitter or Reddit can compare.
+=== 4chanarchive ===
+The first and only.
+=== foolz.us ===
+Popularized the foolfuuka script as the primary means archiving imageboards
+=== archive.moe ===
+The first "kitchen sink" archive, and for a time, what seemed to be the central platform for everything 4chan. it's death was a bona fide crisis.
-Kirk's Wikichan.
+=== Many more ===
-== The Yotsuba Society ==
+anton halp pl0x
+[[Category:Imageboards]]
 [[Category:Draft]]
-[[Category:Bibanon Brainstorms]]

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