Nanochan

Old Nanochan homepage.

Nanochan is an anonymous imageboard only accessible via Tor. It has several boards, including a /g/ board. In 2021, Nanochan discontinued its long-running /pol/ board for undisclosed reasons.

TLS information

HTTPS was recommended as it allows your browser to use HTTP/2. This is no longer applicable.

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 and 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, but even though his focus was on making a politics board few users from 8/pol/ migrated, since many /pol/ users were sceptical of Tor. Instead many come from 8/tech/ attracted by the minimal design. It was also shilled at mewch so maybe some came from there too.

A culture of avatarfagging, the act of marking your posts with an avatar, which is a bannable offense on 4chan, began increasing during May to March of 2019. The 4 prevalent avatarfags were umarufag, asukafag, starfag, 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.

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 low-effort posting and spamming, eventually sakamoto hid /pol/ from public view, but it was still kept accessible with the 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 banned and however the strict enforcement of this ban was difficult. Sometime during November to December, asukafag started a nanochan clone running picochan, nanochang. The site is since dead.

Under endofunctor

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. 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 server until its shutdown was running out of disk space, which could sometimes be corrected by moderators deleting stale files.

In 2022, following an incident in which endofunctor, while rotating log files, misset permissions on the new log file and walked away, leaving the site partly nonfunctional, followed very soon afterwards by an extended DoS attack which he ignored, moderators and users who had long been opposed to endofunctor forked nanochan, resulting in a second instance, which ran in parallel for a while, with a separate history after the split. Although endofunctor eventually brought his server back online, the remainder of its time online would be brief.

In September 2022, nanochanq's moderation functions were disabled by endofunctor. Soon afterwards he shut down his server for good, leaving nanochanray as the only surviving instance.

Tvol/gvol system

Nanochan's moderation is to note as it was relatively complex. Reversible deletions were possible, depending on the type of moderator account which deleted a post or thread. Nanochan's moderation log was also publicly viewable, intended to be an audit mechanism.

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.