3 major imageboards: Futaba Channel, 4chan, and iichan, along with the Overchan index.

An imageboard is an online bulletin board system that revolves around the posting of images. Imageboards are often a host to both original artwork and images taken from other websites. Popular imageboards can be hit with bandwidth consumption reaching up to two terabytes per month. Download high resolution version (1024x768, 255 KB) This is a screenshot of a copyrighted web page. ... Download high resolution version (1024x768, 255 KB) This is a screenshot of a copyrighted web page. ... 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. ... // Analog For analog signals, bandwidth is the width, usually measured in hertz, of a frequency band f2 − f1. ... A terabyte is a unit of measurement in computers. ...

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 userbases. 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 anime. In Japan, where imageboards are many times more common, topics vary widely, including trains and news. A scene from Cowboy Bebop (1998) Anime (アニメ) is Japanese animation, sometimes referred to in the Western world by the portmanteau Japanimation. ... This article is about trains in rail transport. ... News is essentially new information or current events. ...

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 allow anonymous posting and use the 2ch system of tripcodes instead of registration. Anonymity is considered to be one of the plusses of an imageboard, with the logic that it discourages drama, holding grudges and the overdevelopment of one's own self-importance, making internet trolls less likely. If a user wants to reply to a thread but not bump it, they can put the word "sage" in the email field. It is considered polite to sage when replying to your own thread, but rarely followed. Imageboards coupled with discussion forums usually use a 2ch-like system which also allows anonymous posting. 2CH is a commercial radio station in Sydney, Australia, at 1170 kHz AM. They broadcast easy listening, with occasional soft rock music, and is aimed to a middle to older age demographic. ... Tripcodes are a unique and simple way to verify your identity while still maintaining anonymity. ... Drama is a term generally used to refer to a literary form involving parts written for actors to perform. ... In the context of the Internet, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory messages intended to cause a disruption in discourse. ... Look up BUMP and bump in Wiktionary, the free dictionary To bump a thread on an internet discussion forum is to post a reply in order to raise the threads profile by returning it to the top of the list of active threads. ...

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. The Something Awful Forums (usually abbreviated as the SA Forums) are a set of limited-access highly-modified message boards on the popular humor website Something Awful, with a large userbase (over 60,000, though this includes banned users). ...

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

List of Imageboard software

• Futaba, the original board script. (Japanese)
• Futallaby, derived from Futaba.
• Wakaba, backend coded from scratch.
• gazo-ch (Japanese)
• Joyful Note (Japanese)
• Thorn, a flexible new script written in PHP.

Futallaby (a. ... Wakaba is a widely-used imageboard system. ... PHP is a popular open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. ...

Futaba Channel

Main article: 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 image boards 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. 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. ... Computer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. ...

4chan

Main article: 4chan

4chan (Japanese: Yotsuba, lit. "four leaves") is an English language version of the famous Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel. It was first announced in the Something Awful forums, but soon attracted anime fans from around the world. On 4chan, many pictures (often from anime and manga) are posted and critiqued. It opened on October 1, 2003. 4chan (Japanese: Yotsuba, lit. ... A critic (derived from the ancient Greek word krites meaning a judge) is a person who offers a value judgement or an interpretation. ... October 1 is the 274th day of the year (275th in Leap years). ... 2003 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

5chan

5chan was another imageboard, notable for its non-anonymous discussion and image boards (all posts on the imageboards 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 HentaiKey. Altogether, it lasted about three months. August 6 is the 218th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (219th in leap years), with 147 days remaining. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... September 17 is the 260th day of the year (261st in leap years). ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... October 23 is the 296th day of the year (297th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 69 days remaining. ...

Currently the 5chan URL points to the HentaiGroup homepage.

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. 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A maidservant or in current usage maid is a female employed in domestic service. ... Miko in Japanese shrine Miko (巫女) are young women in the service of Shinto shrines of Japan. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ...

iichan has created memes of its own, including Wakaba-chan, the Wakaba frog, and Kareha-sama, who were mascots/memes for the Wakaba image board and Kareha message board software used by iichan. Born in the iichan oekaki boards, they are entirely unrelated to the other *chans and are some of the few genuine non-photoshopped art-based memes that english-speaking image boards 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 acount. Kareha is an anonymous message board script written in Perl. ... Adobe Photoshop is a bitmap graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) published by Adobe Systems. ... Oekaki is Japanese for scribble or doodle. On the Internet, an Oekaki is a message board system that revolves around computer art created by a local art program. ...

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. Scanlation, sometimes referred to as scanslation, is a term used for manga which has been scanned and translated by fans from its native language (usually Japanese or Korean) to a Western language, commonly English, French or Spanish. ... Fansub - short for fan subtitled; a copy of a foreign movie or television show which has been subtitled by fans into their native language. ... Kaoru Mori - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ... Emma (manga) - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ...

Other

There are a few other imageboards scattered around the internet:

• 1chan is a site devoted to pictures of trains. It also hosts the Overchan index.
• Fchan is a board for furry artwork and pornography, often a taboo on other sites.
• GUROchan is a board for Ero-guro, one of the only English language ones in existence due to Terms of Service and content limitations on most servers.
• onechan is a German imageboard similar to 4chan. It is one of the few non-English/Asian language imageboards.
• Burichan is another imageboard dedicated to shota, hermaphroditic, and furry material. The name comes from Bridget, a young boy character from the Guilty Gear series who dresses as a girl.
• WTFux is a small community, populated mostly with former members of other imageboards. Its most well known board is the camwhores board.

Fox versions of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, from the Walt Disney Robin Hood, a major example of the predominant character design style of Furry art Furry is a colloquial term that indicates a fictional anthropomorphic animal or a fan of anthropomorphs. ... A picture of a suitcase girl, one form of ero-guro Ero-guro (エログロ) is a genre of Japanese pornography and hentai involving blood, gore, disfiguration, mutilation, urine, enemas, or feces. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... In computing and telecommunication networks (including of course the Internet) terms of service or ToS is an agreement under which a service provider agrees to provide services to the users of the service. ... ... The 1st-century BC sculpture The Reclining Hermaphrodite, in the Museo Palazzo Massimo Alle Terme in Rome In zoology, a hermaphrodite is an organism of a species whose members possess both male and female sexual organs during their lives. ... Bridget, as shown in Guilty Gear XX: The Midnight Carnival Bridget is a character in the Guilty Gear fighting game series, first appearing in Guilty Gear XX. Despite the name and appearance, Bridget is actually a male. ... The Guilty Gear series is known for its unique graphics. ... Cam whore is a derogatory term for males or females who expose themselves on the internet with webcam software for fun or in exchange for goods, usually via enticing viewers to purchase items on their Amazon. ...

External links

• Overchan (a full directory of English-language imageboards)
• The Society for the Study of Modern Image Board Culture

Please note that many of the following links may include pornographic content on some of their pages, however, the entry pages should be worksafe. NSFW is Internet slang or shorthand for not safe for work. Typically, the NSFW tag is used on interactive discussion areas (such as internet forums) to mark URLs or links that may be pornographic or shocking, so that the reader can avoid content that may be objectionable. ...

• 4chan
• iichan - includes WAKAchan
• zero channel (a site dedicated to archiving imageboard content)
• wtfux