Nanochan

Old Nanochan homepage.

Nanochan was an anonymous imageboard only accessible via Tor, last seen active in November 2022. It had several boards for you to post on, including a /g/ board.

TLS information

HTTPS was recommended as it allows your browser to use HTTP/2. The SHA256 TLS fingerprint for the current (Sun 20 Feb 2022 09:43:49 AM UTC) v3 address was:

41:E2:7B:BE:85:06:15:B0:B3:AB:CE:D5:38:33:78:7A: E5:B2:7A:79:0E:B1:38:AA:85:1C:95:5B:7F:DC:33:C2

History

Origin

Nanochan was created in October 2018 by a user known as "hakase" and advertised on 8chan /tech/ (first thread, second thread). At that time, the imageboard software was a very small script written in Lua. The codebase was praised by the userbase for being relatively feature-rich yet simple in design, while not requiring any JavaScript and being accessible through Tor.

In the subsequent days more is revealed of the reasons behind hakase creating nanochan. It seems that he created it because he was unhappy with 8chan /pol/'s lenient moderation Despite this, a /pol/ board gets created without attracting many people, since many 8/pol/ users were skeptical of Tor. Instead many come from 8/tech/ attracted by the minimal design. It was also shilled at mewch.

A culture of avatarfagging (the act of marking your posts with an avatar, a bannable offense on 4chan) began increasing during May to March of 2019. The 4 prevalent avatarfags were umarufag, asukafag, starfag, and lainfag. Asukafag begins gaining infamy due to common thread derailing, hapa propaganda, and attacking other users. He claims to be the one responsible for the "HAPAS ARE SUPERIOR TO WHITES" spam on 8chan that resulted in many boards imposing restrictions on posting from Tor. Hakase refuses to do anything about avatarfagging and /o/ and /k/ get created.

In November 2018 the site experiences heavy automated spam. After failing to find a suitable captcha the site is taken down. Umarufag gets added as a gvol, but resigns after bullying. Slowly, new features get added such as an overboard, a floating post window, and support for more filetypes.

Under sakamoto

In May 2019, hakase announced his retirement, stating he was "no longer interested in hosting this pile of flaming garbage any longer, the software is too shitty and I've made too many irreversible mistakes in moderation and administration". The site was then handed over to its second administrator, who in June 2019 would name himself sakamoto. In August 2019 the deplatforming of 8chan would cause significant spill over, especially from /pol/. The influx of refugees caused post quality to drop and general spam. Eventually sakamoto hid /pol/ from public view, but it was still kept accessible with a direct link.

From September 2019 to end of October 2019 tensions between asukafag and the moderation rose, with asukafag copying threads from 4chan and otherwise spamming Nanochan. He was declared banned, but in reality the strict enforcement of this ban was difficult with many innocent posters getting caught in the crossfire. Sometime during November to December, asukafag started a nanochan clone running picochan called nanochang. The site is since dead.

Under endofunctor

In December 2019, sakamoto passed the admin position to endofunctor, then a moderator of a board. Endofunctor rewrote most of the site's code in C++, except for the moderation tools, which were left dependent on the old Lua version. He also promised a Rust rewrite that never got finished, but angered asukafag. Endofunctor claimed to have lost the password to the server with the code leaving the server in a "living dead state" without the ability to make changes. This issue was resolved when Nyanonymous convinced endofunctor to rent a new server and a redirect was set up.

As time passed, endofunctor became less involved with the imageboard he was running. With endofunctor's increasing neglect, the site began experiencing frequent downtime. An issue that would plague the site until its demise was running out of disk space, which could sometimes be corrected by moderators deleting stale files. In May 2020, the moderator Nyanonymous announced he would no longer be enforcing the quality rules on /l/. Although likely a good decision, this set a precedent that moderators could ignore site policies and implement their own. In early June of 2020 /oc/ got created, but activity soon died out. However, it is one of the only boards to have a surviving Youtube video: /watch?v=7XofAvOXMK8 .

Decline and death

In nanochan's final years, endofunctor left the site in a semi-abandoned state. In addition, the site suffered frequent denial of service attacks which endofunctor was slow to mediate. As a result, the site suffered frequent downtime, which could last months at a time.

In August 2021, a trial volunteer with limited privileges named hikari was added to the moderation team. He became the site's most active moderator, and began disregarding any rules and moderating as he saw fit. Attempts to correct his behavior resulted in disputes and sometimes revert wars and even deletions of messages by moderators to the absent admin. Eventually, endofunctor would disabled the account until he apologised, which he never did. That has nothing to do with what happened and moderation policy was unchanged. Hikari returned later under the name of flandre, before being removed again. ORLY. In November 2021, endofunctor deleted the site's /pol/ board. The reason is unknown, but /pol/ had been subject to an increasing torrent of posts by a user known as "/pol/ schizo" who would samefag threads about killing his enemies' children. Endofunctor would follow this by making extensive changes to the site rules, adding stuff about hate speech, changing the rules into "guidelines," and making the only rule "cancer will be purged."

"In September 2022, nanochan's moderation functions ceased working, meaning that the efforts of moderators to preserve the site by deleting old files could not continue." WTF? That has nothing to do with what happened. The site became increasingly nonfunctional, and was last seen partly operational in November 2022.

Rules

These were the Nanochan rules as of Sun 20 Feb 2022 09:43:49 AM UTC:

1. Cancer will be purged.

These were the Nanochan guidelines as of Sun 20 Feb 2022 09:43:49 AM UTC:

1. Child pornography is not permitted. Links to child pornography are not permitted either, and neither are links to websites which contain a significant number of direct links to CP.
2. Flooding is not permitted. We define flooding as posting similar posts more than 3 times per hour, making a thread on a topic for which a thread already exists, or posting in such a way that it significantly changes the composition of a board. Common sense will be utilized.
3. Usage of outside memes such as pepes or wojacks is prohibited. Common sense will be utilized.
4. 3DPD porn is prohibited.

These guidelines apply to all boards on nanochan except /b/ and /l/.

1. Hate towards who people are (such as racism or sexism) or what people are attracted to is prohibited.
2. Discussion of political topics is prohibited. Common sense will be utilized.
3. NSFW thread icons are prohibited.

Individual boards may set their own rules which apply to that board, and boards which do not specify their own rules typically follow the board-specific rules of /l/. However, note that the rules stated above apply to everything done on the website.

The sites which are still alive include:

• Nanochanray

Former spinoffs

Spinoffs of nanochan which existed in the past but are now dead include:

• Nanochang and Hapachan - Created by asukafag , these boards used his fork of nanochan known as picochan.
• The Ethnostate - One of the short-lived boards created by senafag, a poster using Sena from Haganai as an avatar.
• Picochan - This site's most active boards were /tech/ and /pol/. It also featured boards for anime, art, retro and traditional games, and a bunker for the /fascist/ board which was often evicted from other sites. Its admin, known as neeshy, used asukafag's improved picochan software, but hostile to his ideology; thus he changed the "HAPAS ARE SUPERIOR TO WHITES" message in the source code to "HAPAS ARE MENTALLY ILL DEGENERATES." His imageboard banned promotion of racial egalitarianism, miscegenation, homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, and pedophilia, as well as avatarfagging and blogposting. After shutting down the site, Neeshy posted the final version of its database in a thread on lambdaplusjs [1].