Nanochan

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. In 2021, Nanochan discontinued its long-running /pol/ board for undisclosed reasons.

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.

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

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.

In May 2019, hakase announced 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" and handed over the site to its second administrator, who in June 2019 would name himself sakamoto. In December 2019, sakamoto passed the admin position to endofunctor, then a moderator of the 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.

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 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 by more privileged moderators to correct his behavior resulted in revert wars and even deletions of messages by moderators to the absent admin. Eventually endofunctor would remove him, only for him to be brought on again with a different name, then removed again. 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. He 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 May 2022, during an extended downtime, an unknown third party created the site nanochanray with a copy of nanochan's posts up to that point. The site ultimately failed to take off because of overly aggressive moderation, nondisclosure of the source code, and dishonesty with the users, such as maintaining fake moderation logs [2]. It has been speculated, based on the site's moderation policies, that the admin is the same person as the volunteer hikari. When nanochan returned from its downtime, nanochanray was not updated with posts from the old site.

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. The site became increasingly nonfunctional, and was last seen partly operational in November 2022.

External links

• Onion
• Bunker on Endchan (clearnet), admin endorsed [1]
• History of Nanochan (up to 2020) (clearnet)
• Thread advertising nanochan on 8chan
• Second nanochan thread on 8chan
• Database as of 22 Nov 2022

Spinoffs

In nanochan's final years, the site was left in a semi-abandoned state by the last administrator endofunctor, leading to frequent downtime. During this period, multiple spinoff sites were created:

• Lambdaplusjs - Has a /tech/ board, a less active /math/, and miscellaneous blogging threads. Users can create boards, but moderation is decided by the admin and recruited moderators (currently 7 many being former members of Nanochan). Currently the most active of the three averaging several hundred PPD. Refer to their wiki page for links and more information.
• Phichannel - Home of Lynn's knitting blog, and other boards about computers, art, Monero, and books.
• Nanochanray - Unofficial nanochan clone with posts copied from the original. Its admin has a documented history of gaslighting users with falsified moderation logs, specifically by rolling back the database to remove posts without adding them to the logs. [2] Numerous wordfilters, including the admin's suspected former moniker "hikari", trigger fake connection errors. Somewhat useful as an archive. Since May 2023, the admin no longer deletes child pornography, only hiding it.

Footnotes

[1] nanon ## Nanochan Administrator, /meta/3770/#post3768: "If the server goes down, I'll be around at the /nc/ board on endchan, or the thread on pigchan." endofunctor # Nanochan Administrator, /l/21579/#post21623: "Remember that there is a third party bunker at http://enxx3byspwsdo446jujc52ucy2pf5urdbhqw3kbsfhlfjwmbpj5smdad.onion/nc/ which I will read if this site goes down." Note that the third-party clone site nanochanray does not endorse the bunker (/othersites.txt on nanoray).

[2] Demonstrable examples can be found on archive.is: shitpost deleted (/b/122092) with nothing in log (/audit.log); in another case, metaposts rolled back (/b/122216). The site now blocks archive.is.

All nanochan posts referenced can be found in copies of its database.