Milestones
4chan Milestones
2003
Late September, Beta test of /b/.
October 1, 4chan opens. The following days saw constant changes (and fluctuation of the rules to accommodate) including:
- The progressive addition of the first boards /h/ - Hentai, /c/ - Cute/Anime, /d/ - Alternative, /y/ - Yaoi, /g/ - Guro, and /s/ - Sexy Beautiful Women.
- The navigation bar implemented.
October 16-17, Word gets out on 2chan and traffic doubles, with the exception of /c/. /c/'s traffic decupled. The site is shut down due to lack of money for hosting. It returned on October 28.
November 20, Shut down due hosting changes. The following days ushered a lot of down time due to site changes/problems.
December 17, Japanese domains blocked for the first time. The following is quoted from the news page.
- "After reviewing the newest logs, almost half of the bandwidth transfer was to .jp domains, which accounts for about 650GB in a little over two weeks. This is way too much for about the fifty posts I've seen from our foreign friends. I may consider undoing this in the future, however it is not likely due to the fact that I highly doubt it would stimulate any new posters."
December 29, The /l/ (Lolikon) board is removed for the first time due to a CP flood.
2004
February 11-16, 4chan.net domain is suspended without notification. The site moves to it's .org domain. At the time it was expected that they would eventually return to their .net domain.
March 1-8, moot declares he will abandon 4chan. A flood of donations come in and keep it alive.
June 20, Shut down due to lack of money for hosting. The long period of downtime served to flesh out many of the other imageboards such as IIchan and 5chan; as well as create new ones. While the new company was not always welcome (especially on 5chan), this played a large role in diversifying imageboard culture.
August 7, 4chan is resurrected and walks among the living for the fifth time. It's also under new administration in addition to Moot.
August 15, Many of the current features are implemented, including replying with an image and post hiding.
2005
July 1, A scare for the site's users and a majority of the boards were closed. A message from "moot's secretary" stated on the news page that site's owner "moot" had abandoned the project and that 4chan would close in a few days due to lack of funds. It turned out this announcement had been made without moot's knowledge, and within a day all boards returned to normal.
- "tl;dr:, 4chan lives. Majnen gets lynched. moot knocks back a Corona while dining out in Mexico. Typical 4chan..."
August 28, DONATE OR DIE 2005 begins. The goal was to cover the costs of the beast-server machines they were purchasing. This time however, 4chan received donations directly instead of being screwed over by PayPay, YowCow, etc. While they fell short of their $20k goal (by a little over $5k), they did surpass their "realistic expectations," and so was deemed successful. Also (and more importantly), it gave rise to a plethora of camwhores (whoring for a just cause). Anonymous rejoiced.
December, Moot implemented 'Janitors' who can delete posts but cannot ban users, as to reduce the workload of the moderators. Janitors were made active on only several boards for the time being.
2006
February, 4chan's "orz" server encountered a hard drive failure, while cgi's hosting was allowed to expire. Among the boards hosted by these servers were /gif/, /h/, /s/, and the secret /5/ board. orz was restored; however, /5/ was not.
February 17, The three servers purchased during the DONATE OR DIE 2005 campaign were successfully brought online, momentarily putting an end to slow page loads, broken images, and general latency issues.
April 4, BAD END. Moot was eaten by a shark. ~fin~
April 5, A new set of boards is created including /co/ (Comics and Cartoons), the first board other than /b/ where Western cartoon pictures are allowed. Other new boards include /cgl/ (Cosplay and EGL), /ck/ (Cooking), /mu/ (Music), /n/ (News), /sp/ (Sports), and /tv/ (Television and Film).
April 15/16, Almost all of the old wordfilters are gone, and some new were implemented.
June 7, 4chan returns after nearly a day of downtime. There has not been any honest answer in regards to the cause, some claim it was due to 4chan's bandwidth provider, Cogent, and the image flood to reach the 10000000 GET; to reports of the FBI seizing the hardware in search of CP.
July 16, Moderators make a sticky of a girl known as Ban-Chan, knowing full well that it is 'CP.' Later that day moderators inform 4chan that there will be less tolerance for posting illegal things (like CP).
July 22, /v/ gets its 1 millionth post. While boards other than /b/ usually pay no attention to GETs, 1MGET's picture of Pong, the original video game; is considered by most /v/tards to be an ideal GET for /v/. However a small group of users believe that the GET was staged, citing an overload of Final Fantasy VII pics as the reason.
August 12, The 4chan :CODES: are released to the public causing mass spam on /b/. Images and .gifs of "eng101", "w00t", "SAGE" (the classic blue Sega image edited to spell sage), "owned", "iceburn", the classic flashing "5", the green 4chan "cone", "sweatdrop", and "Hard Gay" were posted in large amount, often causing threads to be derailed in seconds.
August 23, Moot and the mods enforce a blanket policy stating that starting or replying to any illegal content-related thread, including jailbait, CP, personal information, or even raid threads; will lead to a global two week-ban. Such extreme measures taken to protect 4chan have never been seen anywhere before, especially on /b/.
- Later (at about noon), a sticky from moot announces anyone posting in a thread with illegal content will be banned. He warns of a new "ban this thread" option. Rage breaks out. CP/JB is posted, multiple "WTF IS THIS SHIT," Hitler references, then there was a sudden universal reset. /b/ had no posts, and the sticky was gone. A new and softer sticky was posted, only to be destickified and a repetition of the previous sticky with new information re-stickied. This pattern continued until 4chan crashed.
- Civil war began, old order vs. new order. A mass exodus of /b/ to other imageboards such as iichan, 2Chan and 2ch.ru begins, most being accepted with hesitant yet open arms. /a/, /an/, /b/, /c/, /cm/, /g/, /k/, /m/, /o/, /p/, /r/, /v/, /s/, /w/, and /t/ are left inaccessible after img.4chan.org is taken offline. /b/'s death is officially posted on /n/.
- "jumbo.4chan will be down for the next day due to a disk failure. Expect things to come back online within 24-48 hours. If actual downtime exceeds the estimate, temporary boards will be put up."
August 25, /b/ returns inciting floods by those who oppose the new 4chan policies. Later this day AnonIB's Invasions board is flooded (presumably) by 4channers with desu and images of Suiseiseki, leading to the board crashing and all of the content being deleted. Debates and flamewars are sparked across /b/ between both opposing sides. In addition, /b/ in general had been divided into two factions of /b/tards with the original /b/ claiming the majority. Many /b/tards trolled both sides and managed to spark a few debates over which board was better. One side saying the other had gotten boring while the other side claiming the others weren't real /b/tards. Eventually the threads burned themselves out and the people went to bed.
August 26, Despite all of the Internet drama; 4chan /b/ is online and back to running as normal. Floods by those angry with the more vigilant enforcement of long-standing rules against illegal content have mostly subsided. The only remaining conflicts have led to meme wars and a competitive "Who's better than who?" flood war. However, it slowly calmed and the major populace of both 7chan and 4chan grew tired of it. What was left were threads developed with the hopes of cultivating peace, harmony, and friendship, but ultimately things ended in bitter separation.
November 07, moot doesn't pay the bills and 4chan's servers are taken offline. In its stead, a temporary message it put up saying "OH NO THE SERVERS ARE GONE. Somebody forgot to pay the server bills on time. Expect things to come back online in the next [strikethrough'd]24-48 hours[/strikethrough'd] FIFTY-BILLION YEARS."
- Soon after, 7chan goes down due to overflow from /b/tards and 12chan takes the biggest hit from invading /b/tards.
December 08, Only 19 days after /b/'s 16 millionth post, /b/ reached the 17 million mark late December 8th. This marks the shortest time it has ever taken to get another 1 million posts in all of /b/ and 4chan's history.
December 24, Taking /b/ by surprise on the eve of Christmas, Anonymous posts a story no truer than that of the wildest fantasies of /b/tards and surprisingly, admits it's wrong. What's even more amazing is that Anonymous sympathizes with Anonymous. This day is the birth and story of /b/man: A Christmas in the life of Anonymous.
2007
February 03, 20M GET is achieved, 16 days after 19M GET.
March 26, moot announces a re/b/oot. Heralded by a seizure-inducing background, "Cotton-Eye Joe" music, and 3 stickies, he turned off forced anonymous and promised greater mod involvement in the future. 23milGET is achieved, 15 days after 22milGET. This beats the record previously held by 19-20milGET as the fastest time to get another 1 million posts in the history of the Internet.
