Now that things are freeing up for me, I'm thinking of organizing another watch p/ar/ty, since we haven't done one in so long, probably on the 19th or 20th, with the theme of "bad dubs".

How would everyone feel about wapchan having a social media presence to promote the site, like on twitter? I feel like if we want this site to expand, we need to start looking outside imageboards.

>>719 I don't mind. I think you should do whatever you have to, I think interests like old anime are enough to filter out undesirables. Anyway do whatever makes you happy anon, this hasn't been a good start but I am rooting for you. I will keep on dropping here from time to time. Take care and don't sweat things.

Isn't pretty much anyone on twitter fucked in the head? The only twitter users that weren't, were artists posting some of their stuff for advertising. The users are mostly uhm... special.

>>721 >The only twitter users that weren't, were artists posting some of their stuff for advertising. *in my experience at least

>>720 >this hasn't been a good start I think it's been fine, it was always gonna be tough getting a new non /pol/ niche imageboard off the ground these days. >I think you should do whatever you have to I just like to get people's perspectives on things before I make big changes to the site or stuff surrounding it. >>721 >Isn't pretty much anyone on twitter fucked in the head? A lot of people are, but it's also a lot of the modern retro anime discussion happens, at least in English.

>>723 >I think it's been fine I didn't mean it in a disparaging way. Just that it's not easy to get something like this to work out and you shouldn't feel bad if it takes time or doesn't work at all.

>>719 >wapchan having a social media presence to promote the site Depends >twitter Mixed opinions, I'd be concerned about crazies as >>721 pointed out. Reddit I think would be your best bet. Maybe try to find some Web 2.0 anime forums that are still somewhat active? Absolutely stay away from facebook though, there's nothing good about that place.

>>719 It's worthwhile, I don't think there is a reason to blanket a whole group of platform users, there are always some good and bad. Unless you are doing private invites only you always risk bringing in bad people, that's just inevitable. I would wait until 2023 on Twitter though, just because Elon Musk just took over right now and lots of the people who you (presumably) wouldn't want on here are very vocally upset and talking about leaving Twitter, so they are looking for places to go, if it's not all just hot air. In a month when everything is basically the same they won't care anymore.

Well, that was certainly an eventful 36 or so hours. Things looked bleak for a while on my end, but luckily everything ended up working out. This post is gonna serve as a bit of a FAQ about the whole situation. >Why did the site go down? As it turned out, I had misconfigured the software on here, so even though images were being "deleted", they still remained in the filesystem. This allowed a malicious actor to file a report about some illegal content previously though to have been deleted, which caused our host to take down the site temporarily. I take responsibility for not catching this beforehand, but this does not change the fact that this was a deliberate attack on the site. This has been fixed and all relevant material has been deleted, hashbanned and reported. >Changes moving forward One of the biggest changes is that I am going to setup off-site methods for communication. While wapchan has tried to self host many services, it is clear that this is a single point of failure. The revival of the old Rizon irc channel is the first part of this, and I'm planning on setting up a Steam group in the near future (which will also help organize some game nights). I'm also going to setup a proper way for staff around here to stay connected and organized through IRC, so that we can better respond to events like this in the future. Also, captchas are coming back for now, as deterrents against spambots. If we have enough staff in the future to clean this up manually then they may be removed, but I hope you can all understand that there must be compromises made to protect this site from further attacks. Also, in case you ever want to visit the emergency website again, I put it up here https://www.wapchan.org/.static/crisisArchive/index.html With that in mind, I hope you all once again enjoy posting on here. The wapchan spirit lives on.

I'm still shocked that actually happened. Like, why? We only have a handful of users and don't talk about any offensive stuff, no politics, porn or other degenerate stuff. When I saw the bot, that usually just advertised some products, started posting pizza I was already worried and considered applying as janny, a day later the site was down already. Are you sure that someone targeted this site on purpose, or could it also be that dunno some agency or something scanned the web for illegal images from their database and found the contents from that bot post? No idea how this works. Either way, getting real tired of bot spam, saw a lot of those on other image boards and lately on gelbooru and similar sites as well. The new hot thing is to post AI generated stuff so I guess you can ban image hashes as much as you it will just make more questionable content. No wonder the small sites all disappear if you have to deal with shit like that.

>>739 >could it also be that dunno some agency or something scanned the web for illegal images from their database and found the contents from that bot post Technically that could have been possible, but the file name was extremely cryptic (for example the link to the filename to the image I posted above is https://wapchan.org/.media/8510bf993c364af620b8853d097e31821d90706e42820f45d1243a89544e543d.gif ) as well as the fact that the report that was submitted to the host was from a third party (ie not the feds themselves). >Like, why? Some people are shitty and hate fun I guess. This happens fairly regularly to altchans (you can go on /g/ and find many similar stories), since these degenerates know that most don't have the proper staff to moderate them unlike bigger websites. >No wonder the small sites all disappear if you have to deal with shit like that. This has always been the toughest part of running a website where you let users upload content, especially when you can only identify them by their IP addresses, because at the end of the day I'm the one responsible for making sure this site isn't used for distributing pizza or other fucked up shit.

That is sadly one of the main issues admins have to face when hosting anonymous imageboards. You don't need to have a controversial site or anything to trigger these malicious people, a lot of small imageboards get shut down because of CP spams followed by reports to host/registrar. Who knows what are their motives or who are they, some claim it's the work of three-letter agencies and some claim it's just bots spamming on all imageboards... Good to see Wapchan somehow pulled off from it

>>738 I'm really sorry you had to deal with all this crap but I'm glad wapchan is back. Hopefully this wont repeat any time soon.

It's been interesting seeing the influx of users heading onto Mastodon. I've always had some interest in the fediverse, but never really used it much myself (I have an account on a Pleroma instance but rarely used it). With Twitter going down the drain, maybe the best way forward for growing Wapchan is setting up is setting up a Pleroma instance and having it run alongside the imageboard, since it would allow us to communicate with all the other recent ActivityPub instances while still keeping our content hosted internally (having both an anonymous community and one with users). Let me know what you all think of this idea. (I might cut out the BBS and textboard in the process since both of those are pretty disconnected from the rest of the site by now) Also in case anyone's wondering why a lot of images are missing, I dumped the image database a few times when I was trying to find and delete the illegal content on here. Sorry bout that.

>>743 Bringing in a social media tie in is a bad idea. Imageboards are an alternative to social media, older and with a different purpose. Just like with forums the inclusion of social media into that space will turn it into a ghost town. When was the last time you visited a forum?

>>743 >Mastodon >fediverse >Pleroma Thats like a selfhosted twitter yes? Regarding >>719 >social media presence to promote the site I changed my mind and would now agree thats a good idea. My reasons are: a) I tried to advertise the site a bit by mentioning it every time I thought someone might bite, but it didnt really bring anyone here, even though some people said the site looked cool and interesting etc. Probably due to how slow it is around here? b) I was afraid that social media presence would invite shitposters and bad actors that attack the site etc. but as we've seen we had bot spam and other harmful shit happen either way. Perhaps we could try it out and if we notice it brings "undesireable" posters here we just stop? Worth the risk imo, better than becoming yet another dead altchan. Let me know what you think anons.

>>745 > a) I tried to advertise the site a bit by mentioning it every time I thought someone might bite, but it didnt really bring anyone here, even though some people said the site looked cool and interesting etc. Probably due to how slow it is around here? Are you aware that some of the successful altchans had this period in their beginning where they had basically no activity? Even a better idea takes time to spread, people are creatures of habit and difficult to break.

Did a few minor changes today. Finally setup cloudflare for this site (to help prevent spam) as well as fixed the TOR link that's been broken ever since the server move. wapchanssuskaph2zlit2wx6vs6u6rih7xnosg4cqt3uin7sl5cpf5yd.onion

>>750 but now the IRC server is BROKEN again RANCHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

>>751 >>752 Sorry, this should be fixed soon. I had to setup a new subdomain that wasn't proxied (irc.wapchan.org), and I should get the cert up soon

Ok, irc is fixed. New subdomain is irc.wapchan.org Also fixed the radio.

>>755 Whatever you've done also made all threads removed all newlines, so a lot of posts have no spaces between paragraphs. Dunno if this is fixable but just a minor thing that has made reading some threads and posts that were long a bit harder now.

>>756 Whoops, minify was enabled for some reason. Fixed.

We're not all burgers around here, but I hope everyone has a great weekend regardless.

>>755 Connection failed (* Verify E: Failed to validate hostname? (-1)) RANCHAAAAAAN

Well, it's already December. Can't believe Wapchan is already going to be 1 soon enough. Anyways, I know the site's been breaking on and off recently, and that's on me for choosing to self host so much of the stuff on here. Also, I know I've been proposing a lot of radical changes to the site, and honestly none of these are really necessary, so I'll try and cut down on all the blogposts here. Here's some plans for this month: >Announcements will be fixed sitewide shortly, I've just been lazy about this one honestly >IRC is moving permanently to Rizon. While it's been interesting running my own IRC server, I can see now why literally no one else does that these days: it's a giant hassle, especially for one channel. Hopefully this change makes chatting more convenient for everyone >I'll be hosting a few "fireside chat" events on IRC, on the 3rd and 10th, to get some feedback for the direction of the site. I'll be posting summaries of those after the fact on here. >I'll also run a wapchan birthday stream on New Year's Eve, most likely in the morning EST (with my voice), which will be a similar format to the IRC events but hosted on youtube (with a cytube option) >I will try to fix the broken images at some point. I do have a backup with most of these images intact, so this should be feasible. >Moving forward into next year I'd like to do a lot less radical changes and mostly just keep everything running smoothly as it's gotten to by this point, as well as generally be more "hands off" with the way this site's run, allowing a more organic culture to develop. Also nu ran sucks

>>760 >nu ran sucks BASED

Yesterday's the first day it really snowed around here this year, so it really feels like the holidays now. Hope you've all been having a good December!

If you've been posting around here for a while, you're probably aware of how much of a disorganized mess IRC has been. I've decided to completely overhaul how chat is done around here, and made a post notification service in the process! >Wapchan Unified Chat (or just wapchat) We now support four chat services: IRC, Discord, Matrix, and Telegram. All of these are bridged with each other so users can use whatever service they prefer (NOTE: The IRC channel is different now, this one's actually registered under my nick) >IRC: ircs://irc.rizon.net:+6697/wapchat >Discord: https://discord.gg/crNSm7cQRz >Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#wapchat:matrix.com >Telegram: https://t.me/wapchanchat The chat is deliberately barebones for now - IRC is the baseline after all. >Wapchan Post Notification Service Let's face it - not everyone here is eternally online, refreshing this page constantly. Since this site is slow, I've made a bot that sends a notification every time a new thread or post is made on here, so you can always stay connected to what's happening on the board! This can be accessed from the same set of services: >IRC: ircs://irc.rizon.net:+6697/wapnotif >Discord: https://discord.gg/crNSm7cQRz (same discord server, different channel) >Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#wapnotif:matrix.com >Telegram: https://t.me/wapnotif>>771 I hope the new chat and post notifications will help inspire more discussion around here. If you have any further suggestions, I'm all ears. (Also, for anyone worried, the Discord server is just two text channels, one for the chat and one for the notifs)

it's snowing also, decided to go by "redlum" around here now since that's a bit more distinct than ranchan (explanation on the about page soon)

I hope that (you) find joy today, no matter your circumstances.

Merry Christmas wapfriends.

2023 marks the first anniversary of wap... things are going to be hands off (at least from my end) for the most part as i focus on other projects. i can't guarantee how things will develop here but hopefully we can develop more of an original site culture and get more users. also, maybe potentially changing the site name? ("wap" has been a source of confusion for a while)

>>787 >maybe potentially changing the site name? I think it should stay as it is. Who would be confused by "wapanese"?

>>789 i think it's more to do with a certain song called "wap"

>>787 >hands off (at least from my end) Oh noes ranchan abandoned us ;_;

>>791 im still around (especially to deal with spam), i just don't have any big plans for the site currently and would rather let it grow organically while i work on other projects

I've added a new board: /th/ - touhou. I haven't played a ton of the games myself yet, but hopefully you all enjoy the board. Also we could use some original banners for it, so if you've got any ideas put em up!

AI Art is now banned sitewide, read on for an explanation. This isn't something that I really though about before on here, mostly because I am not much of an artist myself (I draw occasionally, but I have a long way to go), but I have always had an interest in the doujin scene, especially concerning UY fan works. We all have artists we like (one of my favorites is https://twitter.com/H7Ihm ) and truthfully, a lot of the time AI art is used in bad faith to directly rip off artists and by megacorps to profit off of users of their software rather than to actually generate interesting pieces. My old policy was to turn a blind eye, but then I talked to someone in the scene and realized that this wouldn't solve anything - like the ban on politics here, this is to ensure our discussions are kept in good faith, and so the site can develop an organic artist culture. I hope you can all understand why this is being put into place. -ranchan

Wapchan has settled into a pretty comfortable niche... but at the end of the day, the site still feels hacked together (because it is). Over the next few months, I intend to redo a decent amount of the site's interface, some features, and some of the "extra" services associated with the site, which should hopefully give the site a more unique and retro feel. I've given this the tentative name of Wapchan 2 (or if you prefer: Wapchan, too). I will be adding one thing to the current site, though: A regex spam filter to replace the current one (this shouldn't take too long to develop) To start off, I want to redo the boards. The current selection of boards is really just stuff I thought people liked, with a few requests mixed in. However, I feel it is important to make the site representative of the userbase, and a lot of users have no interest in japanese culture, and want more boards catered to other topics. This is honestly great - I think making this site more cosmopolitan is the right direction. So here's my proposed changes to existing boards: >/ar/, /a2k/, /th/ These boards I feel are fine in their current incarnations for serving their respective niches, though I might change /ar/ to /cel/ and /a2k/ to /digi/ (trying to move away from initialisms). >/br/ This board will probably be removed, mostly because it's way too broad yet limited at the same time (being pre 2k only). Most threads will be moved to some of the newer boards. >/clv/ This will be renamed /hob/ - hobbies, mostly just to make the board's purpose clearer (or maybe we can take a page from kissu and do seasonal hobby boards? that could be cool) >/lum/ This will be renamed /rumi/, since while /lum/ getting it's own board was cool and all, it makes more since for it to be about all of rumiko's stuff (that's how everyone treats rumi threads anyways) >/meta/ No changes other than renaming it to /wap/ >/vr/ No changes other than renaming to /pixl/ (or a different better name) And proposed new boards: >/tech/ For modern and retro tech of all kinds. >/art/ Dedicated visual art board (including photography). >/lit/ For books. Reading is good >/mus/ (or /music/) Music board, for both listeners and creators >/etc/ A sort of replacement for /br/ without the retro restrictions (but not like /b/ either, we're better than that). There's no plans for a /tv/ style board at the moment, but that could be added as well if people want it. So the boards list would look like this: >｢cel / digi / rumi / th / pixl｣ ｢art / hob / lit / mus / tech｣ ｢etc / wap｣ Tell me what you think. I will probably push these changes in a few days if everyone likes them. Also, I will be setting up a working test site for the UI rewrite, which will be accessible at https://test.wapchan.org. This site has no guaranteed uptime, since I will be pushing changes whenever I get the time. Here are some general ideas of mine for this: >Be written in HTML4 with minimal javascript (to increase compatibility with older browsers - as part of this a subdomain will be setup giving site access over non secure HTTP, though obviously webm/webp would be broken on old browsers) >Have unique CSS & logos for each board (this will be elaborated on) >Chatbox on the front page (not IRC based like the old one, more like a one thread textboard) and possible depreciation of the current chat system >Flash support though Ruffle (flash is currently broken on here) >Emotes (old BBCode style) >Total reworking of wapfm (the net radio service) - one idea is to have /mu/ users vote on it monthly in an automated format >Public ban list (This is not a native feature of the engine but I can probably make it work) >WAP support, at least on the front page, mostly because it would be funny ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol ) >TF2 server at some point >return of movie nights As you can see this is a lot of changes. I'll be setting up a page to track where I am with these soon. All the best, -ranchan

I've been working a lot on the initial design of the first few themes, so here's a preview of them. >Shrine (for /cel/) This is meant to look like an old web shrine. I was able to find some really nice bitmap style vector fonts. Hopefully the pattern isn't too obnoxious.

>Yotsuba (for /digi) This is meant to look like 4chan circa 2003. The other themes are progressing but are not as far along yet. If you want to follow along with development the instance I use for development/testing is live at https://test.wapchan.org/

>>822 this one is the best. Can't wait for it

>>821 All the new styles are very good, i like them especially for the fact that they not only change the colour/background of the site but also the layout. the /th/ one is my favourite because it really embodies the style of the game.

Happy corporate love day to you all. Make sure to buy cheap chocolate tomorrow. >UI Refresh Update There's been a lot going on in my life at the moment (it's actually been real great) so I haven't had as much time to work on polishing a lot of the themes yet, but progress is being made. I should be able to finish it all up and launch it by the end of the month. As always you're free to post on the test server, though all posts will be wiped when I push the UI to the main server.

A titan of the manga industry, Leiji Matsumoto, has passed away at 85. With the first anime convention held in the states being dedicated to the legendary Space Battleship Yamato, as well as him being responsible for other interstellar classics like Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999, he was really at the heart of what this site is all about, and will truly be missed. Also, his work with Daft Punk is pretty amazing, if you haven't seen it before. https://ourstarblazers.com/vault/317/

Happy march. It finally snowed a lot around here. Sorry for the UI refresh development slowing down, but there's been a lot going on in my life (still real good). I have spring break in a week so I can probably finish it up then. Keep it comfy in the meantime, alright? -ranchan

>>832 take your time dude. We'll all still be here :)

Hey all, this is just to let you know that I have renewed the site for another year and am as committed as ever to wapchan. Went to Anime Boston over the past weekend, will have a update about that later (got my first cel) Take it easy everyone.

>>838 Wait, what do you mean by site renewed?

>>841 This site is hosted on a VPS, so I have to pay the annual invoice to keep it up (every april since that's when the move to the current server happened), and the domain every january.

>>842 Thanks for keeping the site up and running!

blaze it, nerds

>>842 Well hey thanks for keeping this alive and dedicated, don’t give up. Also testing to see if this works, apparently I’ve had trouble posting images on 4chan ever since I updated my iPad to IOS16

>>845 Well hey it works here at least lol, don’t know what’s going on but I’ll figure something out

seems like a few soy teens tried to raid the site - that's been cleaned up. if any of you that got banned want to actually contribute around here you're welcome to join the discord/irc. i recommend going on a hike instead of spamming boards with jaks.

>>852 You know you finally made it when people are trying to raid you.

>>852 well, this explains the insanely large daily posts graph.

Hey all, thought i'd give a proper update post due to recent events, as well as answer some lingering questions >Why was heyuri & mootxico removed from the friends list This was mostly due to the culture of the sites drifting apart. While I try to keep this site mostly SFW and generally appealing to those who don't typically browse imageboards, those sites have a somewhat "looser" style where NSFW content (some graphic) is fairly common. To keep this site comfy for the foreseeable future, I've decided to only have relatively SFW sites on our friends list, such as kind.moe and 04.sbs. I want to state that there is no bad blood between us and heyuri/mootxico, and we wish them the best. More information here https://img.heyuri.net/q/koko.php?res=63615 >Why are there soyjaks on here now We were raided the other day by some users on soyjak.party. While both soyjak.party and heyuri are affiliated with Kolyma, I severely doubt that heyuri had anything to do with this raid. Anyways, a few users decided to stick around, and have proposed a "retro soyjak" containment board on here (only ones from 4/qa). This would probably be pretty unpopular with most users, but I figured I would mention it, as soyjaks/frogs aren't banned on here, but a containment board might be the best solution for all this, as well as prevent future raids. >When will the cp bot spam stop Hopefully soon. I've been testing a regex filter that will detect those cp bots, since they post in a predictable way. I'll run some tests on here soon before implementing it and releasing it to the public, so other sites can be protected. >When will the UI refresh come out Hopefully within the next two weeks. Regex filter will come first, but after that I can apply the finishing touches on the UI refresh, as well as make a fun retro style "promo video" that will be on the front page (more to come). This would also include /v2k/ (2000s vidya) and the potential /soyr/ or /qar/ containment board. >Will you start making youtube videos again Once I'm done with my finals and move into my new house I'm renting for the year I can. >One more thing Our friends at /kind/ are planning a watch party next Saturday, more information at https://kind.moe/kind/res/3324.html . Maybe during the summer I can actually find the time to run a few here. Also, I made this image edit for the UI refresh a while back. Figured I'd share it with you all. Have a good one, lads.

>>862 But we can still visit here from time to time, right?

The old friends are back. Celebrate with breadsticks! We should do a big watch party sometime.

>>865 >We should do a big watch party sometime. That'd be very cool. Unfortunately not this week, since we already have our own watch party planned around the time you and /kind/ have yours.

Happy may 4th. How many of you have actually played the vector atari star wars games? I can get through the first few rounds until they start putting a bunch of bars in the trench.

Frogs and jaks are now officially banned sitewide. They don't fit the theme of this site at all, and hopefully this encourages more original meme formats.

>>889 >Frogs and jaks are now officially banned sitewide. They don't fit the theme of this site at all, and hopefully this encourages more original meme formats. I like this decision.

>>889 Democracy wins again, yangbros

>>889 Nomad here. I'm happy to see this become a trend among smaller imageboards. Hope you guys establish yourselves and fine your own identity.

>>889 LONG LIVE RULE 8

>>891 >white subs

>>907 Who are you quoting?

>>907 Weird thing is he doesn't even say this in CA subs.

Hi all. It's summer for me at last, so actual site work can begin for the first time in ages. Finally realized I could block most spammers with a few DNSBLs (domain block lists) instead of making a complex regex filter, so hopefully this cuts down dramatically on the spam received. Also, I'm finally going to implement proper guidelines on ban lengths and reasons, since pretty much all previous bans have been permanent and the reasons I wrote down at the time were poor (half of them are just "kill yourself"). I have redone the moderation tools so that we will have four levels of ban: >Warning: For first offense on breaking most rules, besides those relating to politics or illegal content >3 day ban: For second offense on breaking most rules, besides those relating to politics or illegal content >1 week ban: For third offense on breaking most rules or posting /pol/ type content (there will be no warning on that) >Permanent ban: For fourth offense on breaking most rules, second offense on /pol/ type content or any sort of illegal content. As well as actual selectable reasons for being banned. Also, images removed will automatically be hash banned for now on (figured out this setting). As part of this change, all preexisting non image bans have been lifted, so that all bans in the logs will actually make sense now. We'll probably have to re ban some users, but with the new filters probably not many. Next on the agenda: finishing the new UI and migrating everything over. Should be done soon (actually)