With the exception of my note On Extensions, I haven't published a substantial news post since July 2008. It's certainly been an interesting and eventful four years, and I've written and re-written a number of updates that for one reason or another never saw the light of day (or glow of basement).
Let's begin where we left off.
In August 2008 we moved our servers from Texas to California, which involved me renting an SUV and speeding across the desert with 4chan hurriedly loaded into my trunk. I made the trip with a friend and we managed a respectable 24 hours and 10 minutes from Dallas to Los Angeles. The move upgraded our maximum bandwidth throughput from 100Mbps to 1Gbps (later 10Gbps), and resulted in a noticeably faster site.
As it turns out, fast has a downside. Back in early 2008 I quoted our old server administrator saying "4chan consumes all bandwidth," and that once again proved to be the case. The resulting surge in bandwidth consumption more than doubled our operating costs, and with the wonderfully timed financial meltdown of 2008, 4chan came as close as its ever been to going under. This resulted in the widely circulated $20,000 debt figure reported in a Washington Post profile published in February 2009.
I still have the drafts of news posts I wrote while laying awake in bed at 5:00 in the morning. Whatever I would have published, it wasn't a pretty picture.
In 2008, 4chan was accessed by 30 million unique visitors, and served 2.4 billion pageviews.
Yet somehow we made it into 2009, and things began to look up. Long plagued by an inability to attract mainstream advertising, I partnered with an individual who took over representing 4chan's ad inventory, and for the first time in years the site began to break even.
April brought an amusing twist to an otherwise uneventful year, with the gaming of the 2009 TIME 100 poll. This article goes into what happened in greater detail, but I was proud to represent the 4chan community in the magazine and at the gala. It even spawned an meme.
Towards the end of the year I purchased the first of what would eventually replace the site's aging Dell severs, which were procured following our "DONATE OR DIE 2005" donation drive. I also unplugged the servers from the Internet for fun—sorry!
In 2009, 4chan was accessed by 60 million unique visitors, and served 4.4 billion pageviews.
Lev Grossman of TIME once compared 4chan to Star Wars' Mos Eisley and mused "Spammers don't even bother to spam 4chan." If only that held true. 2010 brought wave upon wave of spam in the form of JavaScript worms and affiliate link spammers, and the state of the boards reached a new low. After months of trying to mitigate the spam through various means, we resorted to implementing reCAPTCHA across the image boards, intending it to be a temporary fix. Fortunately, it was successful in blocking most automated attempts to spam the site, and immediately reduced the number of malicious images being uploaded to our servers. In fact it worked so well that we decided to make its addition permanent. While verifications can be a pain in the butt to fill out, the unfortunate truth is that 4chan represents a lucrative opportunity for spammers and malware authors. Without CAPTCHA and other measures in place, the site today would be completely overrun with spam as it was in 2010.
Another big change came in the spring of 2010. In May I decided to take a leave of absence from school and start a new project, Canvas. I began working on Canvas to answer the question "What would forums look like if they were invented today?" The form, function, and aesthetic of the modern message board hasn't changed much since the days of Usenet and dial-up BBSes, and I wanted to take a crack at doing something new and different. What we ultimately launched is a community site with the concept of remix culture at its core, something I came to love after years of poking around 4chan MS Paint threads, and /b/ when it was still a fountain of original content.
Many people have asked why I decided to start Canvas as a separate project instead of modernizing 4chan. The answer is simple: I, like you, enjoy 4chan the way it is. I thought it inappropriate and incompatible to change 4chan solely because I wanted to work on something new, and so Canvas spun off while 4chan remained the same.
In 2010, 4chan was accessed by 130 million unique visitors, and served 7.5 billion pageviews.
In January 2011, I fucked up. Frustrated with /r9k/ and /new/, I removed them from the site. It took this exchange (continued here) months later with the founder of Encyclopedia Dramatica for me to realize how wrong I was. Shortly after, I re-added them and apologized to the community.
In October I cosplayed Sigourney Weaver at the Web 2.0 Summit and gave a short talk on online identity and video interview explaining some of the history of 4chan. If you're at all curious about my opinion on the modern web and 4chan, those might be a good place to start.
November was a rough month. No stranger to distributed denial of service attacks, we were hit by one of the largest we've seen to date. This prompted the transition to using CloudFlare. I've already explained a bit about what CloudFlare does and does not do, but to recap, CloudFlare helps 4chan primarily in two ways: it caches and serves our images via a CDN that is distributed around the world, making the site load faster and reducing strain on our servers, and helps defend us against the aforementioned DDoS attacks.
The transition was relatively painless, although we did experience a number of hiccups as we brought the site back online. Many of you encountered "Website Currently Unavailable" errors during this time, and have periodically since then. I want to be clear that almost every time you see these errors, the problem is on our end—not theirs. Since 4chan is run on a shoestring budget and with the help of few volunteers other than myself, things can and do go wrong. Believe me, I am just as lost as you are when the site is down, and always do my best to get it back up and running as soon as possible.
In 2011, 4chan was accessed by 190 million unique visitors, and served 7 billion pageviews.
2012 got off to a good start. In May we re-wrote the image boards to be valid HTML5/CSS3—the first major change to the HTML in almost nine years. This was done to improve client-side performance and allow for the easy creation of user scripts and extensions, and enabled us to serve a pretty nifty mobile site too. We also added support for secure browsing via SSL, SPDY, and have made a number of improvements on the backend to make the site run faster than ever.
On the heels of those improvements, last week 4chan crossed 1 billion total posts. Never in a million years would I have predicted reaching this milestone.
This year, 4chan has been accessed by 134 million unique visitors, and served 4.5 billion pageviews.
Since 2008, it has been visited by more than 500 million people.
Which brings us to the present. Where do we go from here?
The most pressing issue facing the community is a lack of consistent moderation and communication from myself and the team. Sound familiar? That's because it was the same story four years ago. Before reading on, I highly encourage you read the linked news post.
If you've been paying attention to the statistics woven into this post, you'll have noticed the site has grown considerably over the years. That growth has strained us in every way imaginable, and it shows. Four years ago, I proposed doing a sort of "Prime Minister's Questions," where users would have the opportunity to submit questions to be answered by myself and the moderators. Unfortunately it never came to pass, but the idea always stuck with me. After all, any thread I post in as "moot" tends to immediately devolve into an impromptu Q&A session.
Today I'm pleased to announce /q/ - 4chan Discussion. Our earliest users will remember the "/q/ - Questions" image board from back in 2004, and the "/sug/ - Suggestions" discussion board from 2005-2006. Both served as a place where users could discuss the site amongst themselves and with the team, and in that spirit, I plan to host regularly scheduled Q&A sessions (think PMQs) and use /q/ as a venue to interact with and collect feedback from the community.
In addition to launching /q/, we'll be re-opening janitor applications in the coming weeks. For those who don't know, janitors are users who can access the reports queue and delete posts from their assigned board(s). They cannot ban users and are not full moderators. We debuted the janitor program some years ago to give dedicated members of the community the ability to clean up the boards they care about and visit frequently.
I hope this news post is the first of many to come. While they can be daunting to write, you all deserve to be updated more than once every four years, and there are a few more things I look forward to announcing in months ahead.
Before I end, I want to explain why I still do this.
I founded 4chan in 2003, when I was 15 years old. As of today, I've been running the site for almost 9 years, which represents more than one-third of my entire life. I have used 4chan daily since its inception and cannot imagine a life without it. As I said earlier—when 4chan goes down, I'm just as lost as the rest of you.
I think of 4chan as a hobby and not a business. To that end, I don't operate it in a way that any sane business person would. I am proud of the fact that I've been able to provide the site free of charge, with minimal advertising and without annoying donation campaigns for almost seven years now. As I've said in the past, we do a lot with very little, and despite being constantly resource constrained, the site has flourished. None of this would have ever been possible without the thousands of hours of time generously given by our dedicated volunteers, and support of our loyal community.
I have met countless people and made great friends through 4chan—Hell, I've even dated a few. For as bad a rap as 4channers can get from the outside world, my experience has been the exact opposite. While posting on the boards can sometimes be a crapshoot, every single person I've met on the street, at a meetup, conference, or for bubble tea has been awesome.
This community has accomplished remarkable things. You have all impacted the Internet, mainstream culture, and history in a profound way. It has truly been a privilege and great honor to be a partcipant and witness to it all.
I can honestly say I wouldn't trade these past eight and a half years for anything the world. And for that, you all have my thanks.
–m♡♡t
As always, I can be reached by e-mail at moot@4chan.org, on Twitter at @moot and @4chan, and on AIM at MOOTCHAT.