4-ch

AKA Channel4, better known by its URL, 4-ch.net. A proper article will come here soon, of course. Rumia has a bit more comprehensive article about it, but I wanted to add some things here before I forget.

Squeeks, 4-ch's old admin, didn't like running the show at all. In fact I'm more lenient to say he absolutely fucking hated it. If you search far back enough in /dqn/ you'll find a handful of IRC chat logs where he makes it very clear that he was getting tired of being the butt-end of the userbase's jokes¹⁾ and overall having to wrangle a bunch of unruly kids while everything else was collapsing around him (inactive mods, deaths of associated sites like iichan/Wakachan, 4chan dying over and over and getting an influx of exiles, etc). We're talking about 2005, perhaps not even a year after 4-ch's birth.

The first sight of negligence was his complete lack of attention to the fact that /dqn/'s mittens were not working. Sure, the JS was working fine and dandy, but the mittens.gif image was never once hosted in the 4-ch servers, proper. They were, in fact, hosted in Shii's website - when Shii brought everything down, mittens.gif went down with it. Why? My God, I have no fucking idea, mittens.gif weights a whopping 1.62KB so it definitely wasn't a hosting issue. You know, I don't think squeeks ever noticed.

Eventually 4-ch goes down somewhere in late December 2013, if my memory serves me right. Nobody knew what the hell was going on, and the domain was in danger of being taken by domain squatters. I approached squeeks on IRC to ask him what was going on and he replied, approximately and with a handful of more rude words, that he was no longer interested in keeping the thing up any longer and wasting money on server and domain. He sounded more jaded than angry, if you ask me. I think he wanted some recognition for his work, and besides he had trouble finding an actual IRL job so that might not have been very good for his mood - can you blame him?

bps had been around for a while in the #4-ch IRC in Rizon, but he didn't say much. Not his fault, really, #4-ch had fallen into enduring idling for years now, so it was a thing more endemic to all of us. He's the head honcho of one of the largest riichi mahjong hubs in the West, and his site is still the go-to place for documentation on the Tenhou and Share clients. He saw this clusterfuck and offered to take over: he then proceeded to host 4-ch under his wing, took control of the 4-ch.net domain, pruned a lot of the long-standing bugs in Kareha and is keeping things running well-oiled until the present.

Some time after, bps' server shat itself and 4-ch went down along with it; after its eventual return he decided to pass the baton to what's probably this wiki's only confirmed reader, ssz. Things have been running along smoothly since, the fact that the site keeps lulling itself into a comatose dormancy notwithstanding. May ssz's reign last ten thousand years, and may his successor continue this funky tendency of three-letter handles.

My role in all this crap was that of an observer, merely one of the fairly few voices concerned about the impending death of 4-ch. iichan had died shortly before and the grand textboard collapse was taking place all around us. On second thought, I did pester bps not to forget to fix /dqn/'s mittens - he had actually no idea they were gone either. You're welcome.