Imageboard Meta Communities

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2chan and it's copycats, 4chan and the chanverse all 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.

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

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

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