Imageboard Meta Communities

From Bibliotheca Anonoma
Revision as of 22:55, 31 October 2025 by THRUSTVECTORING (talk | contribs) (→‎JDigital's 4chan Pages)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)


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[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

Jdigital had a pseudo-wiki with a POV centered on Something Awful and Raspberry Heaven's experience with 4chan.

0037's world2ch Wiki[edit]

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[edit]

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

Nameless Rumia's Wiki[edit]

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

Meta Communities[edit]

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[edit]

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

The Yotsuba Society[edit]

JKid's personal wiki slash community.

Vyrd.net[edit]

Personal website of vyrd, an early mover in the "4chan history" revival scene. It had a short lived meta imageboard.

Biblotheca Anonoma[edit]

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

Community Wikis[edit]

Imageboard culture was such a source of fascination the phenomenom itself might as well be given an article. Many websites tried to explain 4chan and it's offspring surfaced and for a time they were influential. But tragic closures almost erased them from the map, being Bibanon's wiki the last extant general purpose one looming over many single-board microcommunities hosted on free Wiki services.

Wikiworld's 4chan Page[edit]

Est. 2004-2006


The first attempt to record a 4chan anything. well, Wikipedia's was first but that was killed early on and it took years before an admin was convinced to resurrect it. Killed in august 2006 as the culture went against the wikiworld's TOS. It's the original source of the 4chan Timeline and the GET Encyclopedia

Etherchan's WikiChan[edit]

Est. 2006-2007

The first major site to explain the culture of 4chan and other IBs. "WikiChan" was started by Etherchan, an early chanverse site of 4-ch.net textboard pedigree, as little more than their injoke repository. In the span of a year it grew active enough to become the first real community wiki of the chanverse. It got so popular it overloaded the servers and etherchan's admin decided to freeze the wiki 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)[edit]

Archeology[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]
Categories[edit]
DQN Threads[edit]
Weird Shit[edit]
Pages[edit]
  • 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[edit]

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.

Lurkmore Wiki[edit]

Est. 2006-2023

The successor of Wikiworld's page. lurkmore.com was the personal website of Kyriu, who ran chanchan, a camgirl-oriented IB (think of it as an early streamer / e-celeb thing) that grew to become the LURKMORE Group. When the Wikiworld page was deleted, Kyriu decided to host a wiki around November 2006 with the dual purpose of acting as a camgirl wiki and a successor to the Wikiworld 4chan editors. Lurkmore wiki failed to keep an active userbase (that was interested in meta and not just camgirls), however what few information it had was of a higher quality (being one of the only IB wikis with actual citations) and it remained online for a whooping 17 years, closing in 2023.

Луркоморье (Lurkmore.to)[edit]

Est. 2007-2022

Lurkmore.to was a Russian Wiki inspired on Lurkmore, first created to document the culture of Dvach, but it grew to take the role of the premier Russian language informal encyclopedia (in the line of Uncyclopedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica). Being the ED to Dvach's 4chan, they developed an equally symbiotic relationship and pioneered some features in the Wiki world such as anonymous editing (IP hiding). It had an userbase large enough to get it's own cross-language wikipedia page and somehow get excluded from the archive.org Wayback Machine. It closed in 2022 due to the Ukraine war.

Wikichan.net[edit]

Est. 2007-2008

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

Wikichan.org[edit]

Est. 2008-2011

Immediate revival of Wikichan.net. Terrible servers and constant downtimes. But it died of inactivity years before it actually died in 2011.

Tannassin.org[edit]

Est. 2008-2019

The actual successor of WikiChan in it's original "the textboard scene's injoke repository" purpose. By the end of the 2000s it became the only community wiki with an active editorbase, thus once again textboards played host to all the chanverse's annotated lore. It died in 2019.

Encyclopedia Dramatica[edit]

Est. 2005-2025

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

The original incarnation of ED was killed unexpectedly in 2010, a major tragedy that resulted in the loss of a large number of images. A mostly-complete copy of the wiki was recovered and rehosted a few months later. Several deaths and resurrections ensued, and the community shrank and revived, then shrank again. In 2025, the wiki was made read-only.

Others[edit]

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

Board Archivers[edit]

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

4chanarchive[edit]

The first and only. A scrapper service that would save threads in full, with their original html/css, if enough users voted on it.

foolz.us[edit]

Popularized the FoolFuuka script as the primary means archiving imageboards

archive.moe[edit]

The first "kitchen sink" archive, and for a time, the go-to place for anything archive-related. It's death was a bona fide crisis within archivists circles.

Many more[edit]

anton halp pl0x

Retrieved from "https://wiki.bibanon.org/index.php?title=Imageboard_Meta_Communities&oldid=36163"