Lambdaplusjs

Lambdaplusjs overboard catalog showcasing a variety of threads (dated October 2023).

Lambdaplusjs (known colloquially as Lambda, L+js, or Lambdachan) is an imageboard accessed primarily through Tor, but is accessible on I2P and Yggdrasil as well. It is notable due to its involvement with Nanochan and its related sites, moderating by moving posts rather than removing them, userboard creation, and persisting all posts (with some links and attachments being redacted when necessary). The site has been public since November 3rd, 2021.

Site contents

The main focus of the site were the /math/ and /tech/ boards, for discussion on mathematics and technology respectively. They have remained relatively active to this day. Although there are no set boards, the navigation bar and the Guide page list 9 boards that one might consider "official":

• /math/ - Mathematics
• /tech/ - Technology
• /misc/ - General topicless board (mostly used for avatarfagging/blogging threads)

By default, new threads from the boards listed below are hidden from /All/:

• /meta/ - Discussion of lambdaplusjs itself
• /test/ - Testing
• /free/ - Experimental board with minimal moderation (low-quality threads are often moved here from other boards)

In addition to not being shown on /All/ by default, these boards are not listed on the navigation bar:

• /text/ - Text-only board
• /spam/ - Flooding and advertisements
• /trash/ - Garbage (no longer used)

In addition to the "official" boards, users can create a board simply by posting a thread to it from /All/, /All2/, or a direct link to the new board. The only boards you aren't allowed to post to are boards that aren't between 4-16 lowercase letters, and boards that have been disabled by the admin. The latter has been fairly rare and has only happened when deprecating "official" boards (as was the case with /hell/ and /announcements/) and when preventing the proliferation of the kinds of posts the admin didn't want (as was the case with /childporn/, /threedloli/, /babylove/, /sexwithchildren/, several boards created to replace /sexwithchildren/, and, more controversially, /nanodrama/ and /politics/).

Most popular threads

The combination of no thread deleting mechanism and avatarfagging has led to threads that are uniquely long compared to the amount of activity the site has received.

P2781 (I2P) (Yggdrasil) - Exposing the corrupt Nanochan moderation by Yuki, the only thread to have hit the post limit (1000) so far. It's continued at P33533 (I2P) (Yggdrasil), another very long thread.

P3710 (I2P) (Yggdrasil) - Moderation requests thread by admin

P5478 (I2P) (Yggdrasil) - FaggotChan blogging thread

P35216 (I2P) (Yggdrasil) - LRH Diaries pt 3: The bleeding grounds

P6773 (I2P) (Yggdrasil) - Anão: One more avatarfag thread

Rules

The rules are often considered vague, but as of November 2023, the following is listed on the site's Guide page (I2P) (Yggdrasil) to give a general idea of how the site is moderated:

• Using lambdaplusjs to commit crimes or post personal information is not permitted.
• Child porn and links to child porn are not tolerated and will be deleted.
• Drawings and other art not involving real children are not considered child porn.
• Photographs of sex acts between humans and animals are not welcome.
• While non-worksafe images are allowed, this is not a porn site, so posts should not be made solely to dump photorealistic erotic images.
• Multiple active threads for nanochan mod drama may be consolidated or moved to /free/.
• Making excessive numbers of threads and posts to advocate a political cause, especially killing children, will result in those posts being moved to /free/.
• Low quality posts may be moved to /free/ at the admin's discretion.
• Outside /free/, images that are pornographic, distasteful, or feature "this is what you look like" memes in the first post of a thread, may be spoilered.
• In general, posts and threads may be moved where the admin feels appropriate.
• Boards not deemed a good fit for the site will have their contents moved.

Furthermore, moderators other than the admin are restricted in what they can do. From the Guide page, permission is granted for volunteers to perform these actions:

• Child porn and CP links can be redacted and moved to /spam/ with the "CP" button.
• Commercial advertising and blatant flooding can be moved to /spam/.
• Double posts, posts remade with corrections, and posts and threads that appear to be made for testing purposes, including single files posted without apparent reason, can be moved to /test/.
• Excessive political advocacy as described above, posts obviously copied from elsewhere which do not rise to the level of flooding, and zero-effort posts that merely unselectively quote another post, attach an insulting meme, and add no further commentary attached can be moved to /free/.
• Distasteful images, spammer avatars, and threads opening with "this is what you look like" memes can be spoilered with the "Spoiler" button.
• Pornographic images can be given the NSFW spoiler with the "NSFW" button.

There have also been a few things that they can do that weren't listed above at one point. These things are elaborated on a case-by-case basis as they arise, usually on the volunteer recruitment thread (I2P) (Yggdrasil). Even if volunteers abuse their mod powers, the scope of the damage they can do is very limited because they can only act on posts made within the past 24 hours and all of their actions can be reverted by the admin.

URLs, Source code, and database

Lambdaplusjs can be accessed from the following URLs:

Onionsite 1

http://lambdaplusjs35padjaiz4jw2fugdoeutse262phqr72uf634s2wdbqd.onion/

Onionsite 2

http://z5lcip4dafatwwa6hvyibizpzwycvwp67cjga3hzjhxhwvuyaqavxnid.onion/

Eepsite

http://l7jqnz3yfe2wtwietafoieadmgqbu7dcmzmey63ktbjtxal3he4a.b32.i2p/

Yggdrasil site

http://[200:e111:a7c7:6fee:8a1b:90a7:2b17:79ec/]

The site can also be viewed in a dark theme from a "dark" subdomain on the onionsites and port 8080 on the eepsite.

The source code is written in Lua and can be accessed at /Source/ on any of the above. It includes a git repository, so it can be cloned. The database can be downloaded from /Data/ as well, which includes post data, thread data, moderation logs, and so on. Images, their thumbnails, and all other files that are attached to posts are kept at /File/. The only things kept private are the CAPTCHA solutions and the moderators' passwords. According to a thread on Lambdaplusjs Two (I2P), the installation is currently broken because you are not presented with an admin/password login during install so you cannot access the control panel.

Posting and formatting

Posting does not require JS and instead relies on POST requests. Formatting is limited in nature and supports the following:

• links to posts and threads, only needing to be prefixed with the capital letter P.
• bold text
• spoilered text
• simple quoting
• a subset of LaTeX

When compared to other imageboards that support posting over Tor, the site is quite generous when it comes to file posting. You can attach up to 30 files per post, with the only other limit being that you have to keep the total size of the HTTP request that makes a post ≤ 32 MiB. Any type of file can be attached, but if you upload files that aren't recognized by the software, no thumbnails will be generated for them and you will need to tell the site to keep filenames if you want the files' extensions to be preserved. According to /Source/types.txt (I2P) (Yggdrasil), file types recognized by the software include:

• Video: .mp4, .ogv, .webm
• Audio: .mp3, .ogg, .opus, .flac, .m4a, .wav
• Images: .gif, .jpg. .png, .svg, .webp, .avif, .jxl
• Other: .pdf, .txt

The site has a simple CAPTCHA that requires you to read from a slightly distorted string of six letters to solve it. Normally, no CAPTCHA is required to post anything, but when the site gets particularly active or a spammer starts flooding the site, the CAPTCHA becomes required for more and more things as high activity or spam persists. Usually, it starts with the CAPTCHA being required for bumping old threads and creating new threads, then for posts in general. If spam doesn't slow down even after a while of the CAPTCHA being active, wait times are employed to further deter spam, usually for creating new threads before anything else as the limit for those is far easier for spammers to reach.

Community & criticism

As of November 2023, the site is still moderately active averaging around 100 PPD. There are many moderators, but only three (known colloquially as the 3 Js by their detractors) have maintained significant presence, despite considerable gaps.

Many people accuse its admin (known colloquially as Lambdadmin or soymin) of shilling his site on other Nanochan related sites and later turning to deny that happening in the first place.

The admin formally banned the use of wojaks and is seen acting on excessive soyjak posting, but the rule is not enforced strictly.

The site is frequently spammed with many things. The most consistent and largest volume spammer is known as "Historicalfag" due to their use of XIX. century or early XX. century images and topics. Now speculated by some to be multiple people, the posts have made up a sizeable portion of the total PPD until the activity drastically reduced. More recently, someone has been spamming the site with Markov chains and lists of random links from popular clearnet websites (among other things), occasionally giving a one-liner that's somewhat relevant to what's being discussed in his spam posts. Neither of these spammers have made their motives particularly clear.

The site gained much of its userbase from former members of the now defunct Nanochan, so the board culture was inherited mostly from there. This did not stop the site from developing some slang and history on its own, though.

Spinoffs

All of these lack activity some way or another.

• Lambdaplusjs Two (original) (I2P) - Launched on the 6th of April 2023 and made public on the 19th. It hosts the same software as Lambdaplusjs so it can be presumed that it is hosted by the same person that asked on instructions on hosting it in a thread. The site was filled with Historicalfag's newspapers and mod accounts named after Historicalfag before being made public, and (based on the moderation log) it seems that the admin always knows when to lock or unlock the /newsstand/ board to allow Historicalfag (and no one else) to post on it, so there is reason to believe that Historicalfag is the admin of the site. Since its inception, the site received a few threads different in topics. Namely, sharing videos, diaryblogging, discussing forum design, and exchanging PGP messages. The site also uses various CSS stylesheets not present on Lambdaplusjs along with custom headers. Recently, the admin has given up on removing most spam. As a result, the experience is more akin to 4chan or 3ch where threads get quickly buried instead of getting deleted.

• Historicalfag's Index of Boards on Lambdaplusjs - Currently (November 2023) it just displays "Lambdaplusjs" with one of Historicalfag's avatars and links to various popular boards of Lambdaplusjs along with boards that are either less known or excluded from regular viewing. The first known post about it was on the 13th of April, 2023.