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An imageboard is an online bulletin board system that revolves around the posting of images. Popular imageboards can be hit with bandwidth consumption reaching up to eighteen terabytes per month and beyond.

Characteristics of imageboards

Imageboards could be most simply described as a bulletin board focused on pictures instead of text posts; they share many of the same structures, including separate forums for separate topics, as well as similar audiences. However, imageboards are much more transitory with content—on some boards (especially high-traffic ones) the thread deletion time can be as little as 24 hours. The most popular English-language imageboards tend to revolve around Japanese culture such as CG artwork of anime. In Japan, where imageboards are many times more common, topics vary widely, including trains and news.

Imageboards are also different from online galleries in that most of the works posted are not made by the poster, but instead are taken from other online sources—galleries, other imageboards, and edited pictures. Content is rarely original to the imageboard.

Most imageboards and 2ch-style discussion boards allow (and encourage) anonymous posting and use the 2channel (2ch for short) system of tripcodes instead of registration. Anonymity is considered to be one of the advantages of an imageboard, with the logic that it discourages holding grudges and the overdevelopment of one's own self-importance, making internet trolls less likely. Some boards, notably /b/ on 4chan at various points in time, institute a ban on names altogether (known as 'forced anonymous/anonymity').

If a user wants to reply to a thread but not bump it, they can put the word "sage" (Japanese: 下げ) in the e-mail field. "Ageing" can refer to either bumping a post or putting the word "age" (Japanese: 上げ) into the email field. It is considered polite to sage when replying to your own thread, but rarely followed. Saging is often seen as a sign of disapproval, as threads with multiple sages are more likely to be deleted automatically as they fall down the board.

The first English language imageboard was 4chan, which was founded by a small group of members of the Something Awful Forums, and has been in a state of perpetual flux since that time, due to financial, bandwidth and hosting issues. After 4chan shut down for around the third time, iichan was created to replace it. 5chan was also launched at around the same time. 4chan eventually returned, only to fail again, with iichan buckling to a lack of income at the same time. 5chan had been taken down by its webhost only a few weeks before. Currently, the two major boards are 4chan and iichan.

In Japan, the imageboard is a much larger cultural symbol, with one guess putting the total number of posts for Futaba's five /b/ boards (four of which are no longer linked to by the main site) at 56,000,000 and rising. 1

List of Imageboard software

Futaba Channel

Futaba Channel (ふたば☆ちゃんねる), or "Futaba" for short, is a popular, anonymous BBS and imageboard system based in Japan. Its imageboards usually do not distinguish between pornographic and "clean" content, but there is a strict barrier between two-dimensional (drawn) and three-dimensional (CG and photographic) pictures that is heavily enforced and debated.

4chan

4chan (Japanese: Yotsuba, lit. "four leaves") was intended to be an English language version of the famous Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel. It is by far the most popular English language imageboard website. 4chan was first announced in the Something Awful forums, and attracted many fans from the website along with anime fans from around the world. 4chan is best known for its infamous /b/ ("Random") board, a virtually lawless zone of trolling, comedy, memes and inside jokes.

iichan

iichan (formerly idlechan) was a replacement for 4chan when 4chan shut down, but when 4chan was revived iichan stayed up. It developed its own following of a small group of people who preferred iichan's slow pace and other differences from 4chan.

On 24 October 2004, iichan was closed due to lack of funds and "Wakachan", a distributed network over many servers, was set up in its place. Wakachan is notable for providing many boards that cater to niche interests, such as maids and miko. On 16 April 2005 Wakachan was merged into a newly revived iichan.

iichan has created memes of its own, including Wakaba-chan, the Wakaba frog, and Kareha-sama, who were mascots/memes for the Wakaba imageboard and Kareha message board software used by iichan. Born in the iichan oekaki boards, they are entirely unrelated to the other imageboards and are some of the few genuine non-photoshopped art-based memes that english-speaking imageboards have created. Tophat or the monocle dog was also developed on iichan's oekaki boards. This cartoon-style dog says "Pip Pip" on his morning constitutionals. Also, the demand of "$540", often quoted in discussions about 5chan, is the amount Thock, iichan's owner, lost due to PayPal locking his account.

A few members of iichan have banded together to form iitran, a small, loosely organized manga scanlation and anime fansub group, focusing on the works of Kaoru Mori. Their current projects are the ongoing Emma manga and anime and Maid In Akihabara.

Other English boards

There are a few other English-language imageboards scattered around the internet. Most have only a few dozen to less than a hundred users.

  • 1chan is a site devoted to pictures of trains. It also hosts the Overchan index.
  • 420chan, a somewhat popular imageboard noted for its drug boards and hidden child model board, popular among users banned from 4chan.
  • GUROchan is a board for Ero-guro, one of the few English language ones in existence due to Terms of Service and content limitations on most servers.
  • koChan is a small imageboard that features boards referencing 4chan and Bridget. In addition to a 4chan-like variety of sections, it added shota sections after the Burichan shutdown.
  • Fchan, an erotic furry imageboard that eventually arose from the ashes of 5chan's furry board. Though popular, it has become notorious among the furry community for its seemingly-unceasing drama over picture content, art distribution, and administrators that are considered at times either too strict or lax in policies. The board is most infamously known for the Do Not Post List, a list of furry artists that requested that their work is not posted on fchan in accordance with the DMCA.
    • WTFux is a community populated mostly with former members of other imageboards, especially those who were banned from 4chan's Random board. It is most well known for the camwhores board and for having noticeably more "registered" (tripcode) users than other boards. WTFux was also notable for being one of a handful of popular English-language cat imageboards. The site was shut down in November 2005 by the company hosting the boards. WTFux reopened, only to be shut down again in March 2006 due to a legal dispute filed by webmasters Jeremy Bernal of sexyfur.com and David Parenteau of playmouse.com concerning copyrighted images covered under the DMCA. It came back up the next day.

    Lolicon/Shota Boards

    Boards devoted to lolicon and shota are often shut down by their hosts, typically due to their violating Terms of Service requirements. Privately owned servers avoid this, but are still often subject to trolls, morality arguments due to the questionability of the material, and seizure of donations from Paypal or other sources.
    • Not4chan was created by Saber to avoid the Terms of Service of 4chan's donating services. It hosts loli, shota, and straight shota imageboards.
    • Renchan is a site containing both imageboards and required-registration forums, devoted to lolicon/shotacon. Its imageboards were recently closed for "re-development" and members were told to post on the forums instead.

    Dead Boards

    • Burichan was an imageboard dedicated to shota, hermaphroditic, and furry material. The name came from Bridget, a young boy character from the Guilty Gear series who dresses as a girl. It shut down in September 2005 due to lack of resources, the admin being completely fed up with his users, and mod apathy.
    • 5chan was another imageboard, notable for its non-anonymous discussion and imageboards (browsing the archives beyond a certain page required an account with HentaiKey.com; the discussion boards required registration). It had roughly 40 different subcategories, most of which were for pornography. It was shut down on 6 August, 2004 due to a personal conflict between its administrator, Zabadab, and the maintainers of iichan. On 17 September, 2004, it was revived for a short period of time, but on 23 October of the same year it was shut down permanently because of a misunderstanding between Zabadab and the server owner, Numbus. Altogether, it lasted about three months.

    External links

    Imageboard Reference and Utilities

    Major imageboards

    Internet forums

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Imageboard".

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