Credits + External Links

Updated 2023-07-21

Acknowledgements

• The Anonymous original archiver of the Ten Billion dataset for putting in the work and sharing the results back in 2009.
• The textboards archiver (ghonsonb3120 on archive.org)
• capsized and E.E. Euler for 4chanarchive/chanarchive.org
• The guys at Internet Archive for hosting the Archive Ten Billion dataset.
• The developer of this gzip "decompilation" tool, Mark Adler, which was essential for reversing the bit rot in chanarchive.tar.gz.
• The developers of Foolfuuka, and the developer of a dockerized version of the archiver stack for making this site easier to deploy.
• The developers of Asagi, for the HTML-stripping regexes.
• Contributors to the Foolfuuka/Asagi setup instructions page and to other useful IT help pages from the Bibanon wiki.
• Contributors to the 4chan history timeline on the Bibanon wiki for helping me make sense of things like the /n/ board reset.
• Contributors from the SCP history Reddit threads for inspiring me to take another crack at the corrupt database/HTML files to recover more posts.
• Contributors to the GET encyclopedia page on lurkmore.com, which allowed me to check my work against screencaps from that era.
• 4chansociety admin, who made some helpful observations about this dataset a while back (board names, creation dates, resets etc.) and whose site has some other interesting content.

Other living archives with old content

4chan archiving has a ridiculously fractured, complex past (way beyond the scope of this section). Some of it is covered here. Here we'll arbitrarily define content from 2003-2013 (the first ten years of the site) as "old".

• 4museum: Derived from the same original source as this site, but predates it by several years (launched 2019). Covers a few large boards. Runs on original software with a date-based archive format, designed to answer the question "What were people saying 15 years ago today?"
• suptg: By far the longest-running extant archiver. It's a voting-based partial archive containing tens of thousands of /tg/ and /qst/ threads, with /tg/ content going all the way back to 2007. Has archived an unholy number of "quest" threads, including Rubyquest.
• warosu: The oldest fuuka/foolfuuka public archive running. The only public archive I know of to still be running fuuka. Has pretty comprehensive text data going back further than anywhere else for some of the boards it covers (e.g. /lit/ going back almost to the beginning). Has full image data/thumbnails for some boards not available anywhere else. Admin has been uploading public text dumps frequently for a while (maybe the only current archive to release regular dumps). Check it out and donate to keep it going.
• archive.tinychan world4ch/dis.4chan archive: A custom-built 4chan textboards archive serving the same textboard data available here (but easier on the eyes). Shares a domain with a live textboard running since 2010.
• k47.cz archive: An archive by a Czech blogger with some content not available elsewhere. Has coverage of various boards and time periods going back to 2011-2012. I get the sense that this has flown under the radar due to the language barrier. Uploaded a small dump of all boards back in 2011 here (needs this schema).
• archived.moe: A foolfuuka site which has been archiving every board pretty comprehensively since late 2015. Inherited a lot of older content from its predecessors archive.moe and 4ch.be, which themselves inherited from many earlier sources. Pre-2015 content is listed here. Contains /a/ and /jp/ content going back to 2008, plus a number of other boards starting in the late-2000s to early-2010s. Only a fraction of archived.moe content is search indexed. The last public dump was in 2019, and has since disappeared from archive.org.
• Desuarchive: Similar to archived.moe (using some of the same source archives) but focused on providing a higher level of service (more content search-indexed) for a smaller number of boards. The last public dump was in 2019.
• 4plebs: This foolfuuka site has been archiving a bunch of boards since 2013. It is most notable outside of the core 4chan audience for its /pol/ coverage (cited in many anthropology/sociology papers) and maybe its /x/ coverage (among the creepypasta/lost media set). Dumps are available here.

Other links

• Nameless Rumia's Wiki: Lots of information about many different chan sites.
• Containment Fiction Wiki: Lots of articles about creepypastas/internet horror fiction with a focus on SCPs and related content.