2ch home page.

2channel (2ちゃんねる, pronounced "ni-channeru", 2ch for short) is the largest Internet forum in the world.¹ With over 10 million visitors every day (as of 2001), it is gaining significant influence in Japanese society, approaching that of traditional mass media such as TV, radio and magazines. Download high resolution version (861x571, 92 KB)2ch home page This is a screenshot of a copyrighted website, video game graphic, computer program graphic, television broadcast, or film. ... Download high resolution version (861x571, 92 KB)2ch home page This is a screenshot of a copyrighted website, video game graphic, computer program graphic, television broadcast, or film. ... Gaia Online, the largest English language forum-based community as of April 2005 — powered by a modified version of phpBB. An Internet forum is a web application which provides for discussion, often in conjunction with online communities. ... 2001 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and also: The International Year of the Volunteer The United Nations Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations Events January January 1 - A black monolith measuring approximately nine feet tall appears in Seattles Magnuson Park, placed by an anonymous...

Overview

2ch was opened in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura, known simply as "Hiroyuki" (ひろゆき). Today, most moderation on the forum is done by a voluntary group, self-elected and picked from 2ch users. 2ch itself is non-commercial and run by banner advertisement fees and support from a hosting service company that provides specially priced inexpensive UNIX hosting. 1999 is a common year starting on Friday Anno Domini (or the Current Era), and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... Hiroyuki Nishimura (西村 博之 Nishimura Hiroyuki; born November 16, 1976) is an administrator of 2ch, the largest and most influential BBS in Japan. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Unix-like. ...

What is unique about this forum is its scale and its management style. It has more than 600 "board groups" (Japanese ita) each with its own categorical topic (ex. "Social News", "Computer", "Cooking"). Each "ita" usually has hundreds of "threads", which are actual discussion pages created by users for each detailed topic (ex. "Coming election in Tokyo-- 4th vote", "P4 vs. Athlon-- overheating 51 times", "Best wheat for making Pizza-- 3rd slice").

2ch operates on innovative forum software which is a major departure from 1980s bulletin board systems or 1990s forums software such as vBulletin. Most importantly, nearly everything is done anonymously, and voluntarily. A posting in a thread will either "age" (bump) or "sage" (down) its position in the thread list; "saged" posts have no effect on its position. Threads may be "saged" if the thread is disliked, or to keep it from cluttering the main thread list, or to prevent idle browsers from flooding in and trolling the thread at the top of the list. A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as d--212. ... Jump to: navigation, search vBulletin (sometimes abbreviated as vB or incorrectly as vBB) is a commercial Internet forum package produced by Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. ...

Each thread is limited to 1000 postings at maximum, and must be created again (by some anonymous user, self-elected during discussion) to continue discussion. This prevents the rottening of old threads and keeps active topics refreshed. It also saves bandwidth, which is a major concern on a forum as large as 2ch. Old threads are moved to a paid archive, then eventually deleted.

With the huge popularity of this forum, the style of web forums with anonymity, index, and sage features is now known as "2ch-style".

Anonymous posting

One of the most distinguishing features of 2ch is the complete freedom of anonymous posting. This is a great departure from American internet forums which require some form of registration, usually coupled with email verification for further identification of an individual. On 2ch, a name field is available but seldom used. Entering your name in the field either identifies you as a newbie who doesn't understand the forum, or an administrator, or someone attempting to be a Web celebrity, or you are typing in your name for no specific reason. Gaia Online, the largest English language forum-based community as of April 2005 — powered by a modified version of phpBB. An Internet forum is a web application which provides for discussion, often in conjunction with online communities. ...

From an interview with the founder in the Japan Media Review:

Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user name?

A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.

If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.

Culture

Shift-JIS art is popular on 2ch.

Several important and/or well-known social issues (incidents, social movements, etc) are known to have relation with this forum, and due to early shocking events such as the Neomugicha incident, this forum is somewhat acknowledged as "underground-ish" despite its wide acceptance, especially in the younger generations. On the other hand, these incidents helped 2ch to have huge publicity through mass-media coverings. This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... 2ch Shift_JIS art (AA). An example of American Shift_JIS art. ... The Neomugicha incident put the Japanese bulletin board 2ch in the front of national news. ...

2ch members participate in various distributed computing projects such as the United Devices Cancer Research Project and SETI@home. 2ch is the current leader of the UD project, with the highest results and point total, as well as having the largest number of participants. In computer science, distributed computing studies the coordinated use of physically distributed computers. ... UD Agent The United Devices Cancer Research Project, which began in 2001, is seeking possible drugs for the treatment of cancer using distributed computer power. ... SETI@home logo SETI@home (SETI at home) is a distributed computing project for Internet-connected home computers, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. ...

Frequent visitors of 2ch usually call themselves "2ちゃんねらー" (meaning "2ch'er", pronouced "ni-chan-ne-rah", romaji is "ni channerā). Even though topics vary a lot between each thread or board, 2ch as a whole keeps its unity through its unique cultural backplane. "2ch slang", "2ch AA" (Shift_JIS encoded ASCII art) and "2ch Flash" are examples of such culture. Many virtual characters, such as Mona, and Onigiri have evolved out from these creations, and are now acknowledged as mascots representing the whole community. The now famous Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman parody character was created by members of the 2ch forums, as well as its flash movies. 2ch Shift_JIS art (AA). An example of American Shift_JIS art. ... ASCII art, an artistic medium relying primarily on computers for presentation, consists of pictures pieced together from characters (preferably from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII). ... Mona saying Omae mona Monā (モナー) is the most well-known Shift-JIS art character. ... The Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman (醤油戦士キッコーマン Shō-yu Senshi Kikkōman) — or just Kikkoman (キッコーマン Kikkōman) as most people know him — is a superhero featured in a famous parody flash movie based on the Kikkoman Japanese soy sauce brand. ... Using Macromedia Flash 8 (bundled in Studio 8) in Windows XP. Macromedia Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both a multimedia authoring program and the Macromedia Flash Player, written and distributed by Macromedia (recently targeted for acquisition by Adobe Systems), that utilizes vector and raster graphics, a native scripting language...

Trolling and off-topic posting on 2ch is tolerated and has become a common feature of its culture. In this way it is similar to early Slashdot, where trolls were commonplace, or the modern Something Awful Forums, where bad threads are quickly derailed or "saved" by mocking the original poster and changing the subject. However, 2channel does not tolerate spamming and flooding. Slashdot (often abbreviated to /.) is a popular technology-related website, updated many times daily with articles that are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. ... The Something Awful Forums (usually abbreviated as the SA Forums) are a set of limited-access message boards on the popular humor website Something Awful, with a large userbase (over 60,000, though this includes banned users). ... A KMail folder full of spam emails collected over a few days. ...

Due to its chaotic nature and large size, it is difficult to describe or define this emerging community. Several movements to self-describe it have been running, and so the reader is recommended to visit these materials. For that matter, similarities with Usenet are many. Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ...

Densha Otoko

Between March and May of 2004, an anonymous user posted in a thread for single men to decry their woes. His post detailed an event that had happened that day as he was riding the train. According to his account, he was sitting on the train when he noticed an attractive woman. Suddenly, a drunken man entered the car and bothered many passengers, who did not offer any resistance to his disturbance. This man then began to badger the woman, and seeing no one else coming to her aid, the poster took the risk of telling the man to stop bothering the passengers. The two struggled for a short time while the other passengers used this distraction to summon the conductor, who took control of the situation. Densha Otoko (電車男, literally Train Man) is the story of a Japanese geek in his early 20s who saves a beautiful woman (office lady), Hermès, from a drunken groper on a train, and then chronicles his subsequent dates with the woman and requests for help on the Japanese mega-BBS...

This poster was an extremely introverted, socially inept otaku. Never having done such a thing before in his life, he was amazed to find that the woman was thanking him deeply for saving her from harassment. They exchanged addresses and parted ways. The poster, upon returning home, began talking with other posters in the thread and was nicknamed "Densha Otoko" (Train Man) for his bravery. Fat, unshaven, wearing glasses, a ponytail and fantasizing with an anime girl doll, a popular stereotype of an otaku. ...

A bit later, Densha received a package from the woman he had saved. This package, originally thought to be a generic thank-you gift such as one would buy in a drugstore, turned out to be an expensive tea set. Flabbergasted, he turned to the 2channelers for advice; he was soon convinced that such a gift was too expensive to be a mere thank-you gift. Densha contacted the woman and began meeting her regularly, all the while posting updates and conversing with other posters. Following their collective advice, he got a haircut, purchased new clothes, and began to come out of his shell. After a while of seeing her, his personality had changed for the better and this culminated a few months later in his confessing his love for her. She accepted and when the 2channelers were informed of this there was a mass celebration; posts began flowing in congratulating the new couple, extravagant ASCII art pictures were posted.

Because 2ch has an enormous impact on net culture in Japan, this story quickly spread throughout the media and became an instant hit. Its almost fairy-tale-like simplicity and emotional power drew people in, and a copy of the original threads was successfully published in a printed book. Since then, there have been four manga adaptations of the story, as well as a feature film which reached #1 in the box office upon its release, and there was a hugely popular TV live-action drama aired during the year 2005. According to Densha Otoko and Hermes (the nickname of the woman, so named for the brand name of the tea set she sent him), they are still together.

Terminology

These terms are used both on 2channel and on its Japanese and American spinoffs.

• AA - Abbreviation of "ASCII art", usually referring to common Shift-JIS art characters.
• Aborn (Jp. あぼーん (abōn) ) - "To delete a post". Posts are deleted in two ways: Normal Aborn and invisible Aborn (Japanese 透明あぼーん). Any posts deleted as normal Abon are replaced by a special post, whose subject, date, and body are all "あぼーん".
• Age (pronounced "ah-geh") - From Japanese ageru (上げる "to raise"), refers to replying to an especially noteworthy or neglected post in order to move it to the top of the topic list (equivalent to the English bump)
• Capcode - A special, custom tripcode used by website administrators and especially famous people chosen by the webmasters; in Japanese, simply "cap".
• Fixed Handle - An online nickname (as opposed to anonymity); in Japanese, Kotehan, from Kotei Handle Name
• Mona - An ASCII art character
• Giko Cat (Giko neko) - Another ASCII art character
• Off Kai - An offline meeting by anonymous posters
• Sage (pronounced "sah-geh") - from Japanese sageru (下げる "to lower"), refers to replying to a post using the word "sage" in the email field in order to increase the number of replies without age-ing the post. This can be used as a courtesy, allowing one to quietly add comments that may not be interesting enough to warrant pushing the thread to the top. It can also be used as a way to show displeasure with the post being replied to.
• Tripcode - A cryptographic hash created from a password, used to allow a user to "sign" their posts while remaining anonymous; in Japanese, simply "trip"
• ">>" - Often followed with the numeral of the intended post to mean reply or follow up. 2ch automatically makes a link.
  • >>1-san (>>1さん) - An ASCII art character, representing the poster who started the thread it appears in.

ASCII art, an artistic medium relying primarily on computers for presentation, consists of pictures pieced together from characters (preferably from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII). ... 2ch Shift_JIS art (AA). An example of American Shift_JIS art. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Mona saying Omae mona Monā (モナー) is the most well-known Shift-JIS art character. ... Giko Cat or Giko neko (ギコ猫) is a character-based Japanese fictional cat. ... Tripcodes are a unique and simple way to verify your identity while still maintaining anonymity. ... In cryptography, a cryptographic hash function is a hash function with certain additional security properties to make it suitable for use as a primitive in various information security applications, such as authentication and message integrity. ... >>1-san (>>1さん) is a common Shift_JIS art character on the popular Japanese BBS 2ch, usually standing in for the user who started a given thread. ...

Common abbreviations and phrases

• Burakura (ブラクラ) - "Browser crusher", one who posts links to sites designed to crash users' web browsers.
• Chu or Chubou (厨 or 厨房) - An intentional misuse of kanji for "中坊" (a middle school kid), it refers to those posters who post without reading any rules, also to those who engage in flaming and spamming.
• Natsuchu (夏厨) - Someone who appears in the summer break and makes ridiculous posts, acting like Chu
• Fuun (（ ´_ゝ`）ﾌｰﾝ ) - a kaomoji for indifference; the word 「フーン」 is the Japanese equivalent of the English "hunh." The fuun face is the basis of the Sasuga Brothers AA.
• Fuyuchu (冬厨) - Same as natsuchu, but for posters appearing in winter.
• Haahaa ((*´Д`)ﾊｧﾊｧ) - a kaomoji indicating that one is breathing heavily. Generally due to masturbating, but it may also indicate nervousness (for an example of the latter usage, see Densha Otoko).
• Kami (神 or ネ申) - A person who is considered a "forum god" for especially useful posts or an interesting ID hash; see Kami
• Kita!! (ｷﾀ━━━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━━━ !!!!!) - Literally, "I/It came!", it is generally used as a big exclamation mark. The face in the center is named jisakujien.
• Kopipe (コピペ) - Copy/paste. A text passage or piece of AA that is frequently recycled and reposted.
• Nullpo (ヌルポ) - A parody of the Java output "NullPointerException". Usually followed up with "GA(ガッ)!", the sound of a hammer hitting the "nullpo" poster, because of a meme started in this thread.
• Uhho! (ウホッ) - Originally from a gay manga, used somewhat like Haahaa and Kita!! but when the post is macho
• ｗ - A single letter substituting for "warai" or "laughing", added to mean that the poster is joking or thinks he made a funny remark, basically the equivalent to "LOL"; putting "ｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗ" at the end of something is the same thing as saying "LOLOLOLOLOLOL". Also warota (ワロタ) from the Kansai-ben past tense of warau. Warosu (ワロス) is one of the recent derivatives of warota, from the threads (ワロス のガイドライン, Guidelines for warosu), where endless word-chanting of warosues is going on.

Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 Category Kanji (   漢字[?], literally Han characters) are Chinese characters used in Japanese. ... Flaming is the act of posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting, usually in the social context of a discussion board (usually on the Internet). ... A KMail folder full of spam emails collected over a few days. ... Kaomoji (顔文字; literally, face mark) is the Japanese version of a emoticon, written vertically. ... Kaomoji (顔文字; literally, face mark) is the Japanese version of a emoticon, written vertically. ... Jump to: navigation, search Masturbation is the manual excitation of the sexual organs, most often to the point of orgasm. ... Kami (神) is the Japanese for god. The word is used to indicate any sort of god, beings of a higher place or belonging to a different sphere of existence. ... Java is a reflective, object-oriented programming language developed initially by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. ... It has been suggested that wild pointer be merged into this article or section. ... The term meme (pronounced in IPA; from the Greek word μνήμη for memory) first came into popular use with the publication of the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in 1976. ... Jump to: navigation, search Since its coining, the term homosexuality has acquired multiple meanings. ... Rurouni Kenshin manga, volume 1 (English version) Manga (漫画) is the Japanese word for comics and/or cartoons (not necessarily animated, this includes print cartoons); outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. ... Being macho is overconforming to traditional male gender roles or hypermasculinity and often implies misogyny. ... Look up LOL and lol in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Japanese language, in addition to to Standard Japanese, based on Tokyo speech, has dozens of geographic dialects. ...

English Offsprings

There have been some attempts by various internet communities to form their own, more English or internationally-oriented message boards in the style and tradition of 2ch. The first and most notable has been the now defunct world2ch, administered by Taichirou Kosugi ("RIR7") and abandoned in late 2003. Two boards have been put up to replace world2ch, but neither has become anywhere as popular.

• 4-ch, historically following world2ch, is an English website with discussion boards for English speakers and also contains a board where Japanese 2ch users can talk in Japanese.
• 4chan, an English website based largely around Japanese content, now also has anonymous message boards similar to 2ch: world4ch.

Jump to: navigation, search 4chan (Japanese: Yotsuba, lit. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

Masashi Tashiro

Tashiro was chosen as Person of the Year.

In 2001, many 2ch users voted for Japanese TV performer Masashi Tashiro as Time Magazine's Person of the Year. An act which chooses Tashiro as Person of the Year by 2ch users is called "Tashiro Festival" (Tashiro Matsuri, 田代祭). Tashiro was infamous in the Japanese media for committing several crimes, including peeping up a woman's skirt using a camcorder, using stimulants twice, peeping in a male bath and causing a car accident. 2ch programmers developed many scripts such as "Tashiro Cannon" (Tashiro-hō, 田代砲), "Mega particle Tashiro Cannon" (Mega-ryūshi Tashiro-hō, メガ粒子田代砲), 25 repeated blows Tashiro Cannon" (Nijyū-go renda Tashiro-hō, 25連打田代砲) "Super Tashiro Cannon" (Chō Tashiro-hō, 超田代砲) to be able to vote efficiently. (Since "Super Tashiro cannon" was especially powerful, it shut down Time's server. Afterwards, "Satellite Cannon -Tashiro-" was developed, but it was restrained) Due to the votes of 2ch users, he got to the No. 1 position temporarily in on December 21, 2001. However, Time's staff realized that something was unusual, and Tashiro was removed from contention. This work is copyrighted. ... Jump to: navigation, search 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... Television is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound over a distance. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Jump to: navigation, search (Clockwise from upper left) Notable Time magazine covers from the dates May 7, 1945; July 25, 1969; December 31, 1999; September 14, 2001; and April 21, 2003. ... Person of the Year is an annual issue of U.S. newsmagazine TIME that features a profile ostensibly on the man, woman, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year. ... A skirt is a tube- or cone-shaped garment which hangs from the waist and covers all or part of the legs. ... Before the camcorder. ... A stimulant is a drug which increases the activity of the sympathetic nervous system and produces a sense of euphoria or awakeness. ... Male symbol Male is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces sperm. ... A bathtub A bathtub (in the UK simply bath) is a plumbing fixture used for bathing. ... A car accident in Yate, near Bristol, England, in July 2004. ... Jump to: navigation, search December 21 is the 355th day of the year (356th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ...

IRC@2ch

There's also an IRC network called 'IRC@2ch', whose main IRC and web server are both hosted on irc.2ch.net. The network is rather small with two servers, no services, and relatively few users. The chat in most channels is in Japanese, using the ISO-2022-JP encoding. The network maintains a list over what channels are currently the most active on its web page. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. ... IRC services is a common name for a set of features implemented in most modern Internet Relay Chat networks. ... ISO 2022, more formally ISO/IEC 2022, is an ISO standard (equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35) specifying a technique for including multiple character sets in a single character encoding. ...

See also

• Shift-JIS art
• Mona Font
• Imageboard
• Masashi Tashiro
• Futaba Channel

2ch Shift_JIS art (AA). An example of American Shift_JIS art. ... Mona Font is a Japanese proportional font for X Window System. ... 3 major imageboards: Futaba Channel, 4chan, and iichan, along with the Overchan index. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Jump to: navigation, search Futaba Channel (ふたば☆ちゃんねる), or Futaba for short, is a popular, anonymous imageboard and bulletin board system based in Japan. ...

External links

• 2ch.net - The 2ch site (in Japanese)
• 2-Ten ("ni-ten") - 2ch reference (also available as a book from Amazon.jp)
• English list and navigation of 2ch boards at 4-ch.net
• The Dynamism of 2channel - a sociological study by Naohiro Matusumura et al. presented at the "Social Intelligence Design International Conference 2003"

Special characters

Footnotes

Note 1: At stats.2ch.net one can view the number of posts made every day. Currently there are 2.3 million posts made every day. This is two to three times larger than the biggest Internet forum on big-boards.com.