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Open Source The Internet Upgrades News Technology

4chan Undergoing Major Revision, Getting Public API 166

Posted by timothy from the waiting-on-the-verticals dept.
AdmiralXyz writes "Even the darkest corners of the internet aren't immune to the Web 2.0 boom: BoingBoing reports that 4chan is working on the largest codebase update in its history. The new 4chan will include as standard the functionality of popular browser plugins for using the site, as well as a JSON API so- hooray?- anyone can have immediate access to the contents of 4chan for any purpose they like. This represents a significant update to the heretofore haphazard development process of 4chan, and opens up the possibility of third-party 4chan apps... though probably not on the App Store."
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4chan Undergoing Major Revision, Getting Public API More

4chan Undergoing Major Revision, Getting Public API

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  • Uh oh... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:33PM (#41281543) Journal

    You got to love it when 4Chan makes a headline here on Slashdot...

    I never saw that coming, seriously...I didn't.

    • Re:Uh oh... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Lanteran ( 1883836 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:37PM (#41281577) Homepage Journal

      You didn't see it coming? I thought this place was news for nerds?

      • Yeah yeah...but 4Chan? ...drawn Rule 34 stuff?
        Ok, I'm a nerd...but...people in Slashdot, at least have something interesting to discuss, like world peace, new chips, new technology, new innovations...etc.

        But Drawn pron? Rule 34 Pron? And 4Chan? You know, if I wasn't so intoxicated by a 6-pack of light beer right now, I'd say that this conversation where taking place in a secret place in bizarro world in my head right now ;)

        • Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Funny)

          by shiftless ( 410350 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:54PM (#41281745)

          Ok, I'm a nerd...but...people in Slashdot, at least have something interesting to discuss, like world peace, new chips, new technology, new innovations...etc.

          I agree. I think this article should be removed, since some other article is clearly blocked from being published due to its presence. Worse still, approximately 762k of disk space and a mind numbing 3 million bits of data have been absurdly wasted on this catastrophe of a submission. My eyes are bleeding just imagining the horror. What were the editors thinking? Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go comment on some more interesting article on a real tech web site (like Kuro5hin), before recompiling my kernel. (I'm working on integrating the Metro UI to Windows 2000.)

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            The funny bit about your post is that I can have more discussion about technology related things on 4chan than I can here.
            I understand how that can be quite the horror to you.

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Have you ever even been to 4chan's tech board? It's all Install Gentoo, ThinkPads vs. MacBooks and anime/MLP shitposting.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Anonymous Coward

                Nobody mentioned /g/, here.

                While /g/ used to be good even just a couple years ago, it went considerably downhill due to lack of moderation.
                Hopefully the new moderation that is incoming will fix it.
                I miss the good programming threads and esoteric hardware designs and discussion. (they still happen, just rarer)

                Sadly on 4chan, "board culture" took over the actual damn separate boards. Of course, the same even happens on here occasionally, such as actual stories being posted in idle and the other way too.
                When

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Anonymous Coward

                Have you ever even been to 4chan's tech board? It's all Install Gentoo, ThinkPads vs. MacBooks and anime/MLP shitposting.

                Check, check, check-back the fuck up, it's Motherfuckin' Pinkie Pie, bitch! [youtube.com]

                (No, really, it has a /mlp [4chan.org] board. Even I thought it was a trap when it got created, but it's still there and still going strong as we await Season Three.)

                //doublechecks "Post Anonymously".
                /right, let's do this shit.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by jonadab ( 583620 )
                > Have you ever even been to 4chan's tech board?

                Don't be absurd. Nobody actually goes to 4chan, in the sense of looking at the site with human eyeballs.

                The way it works is, Anonymous has a set of shell scripts and Windows batch files that randomly select content (or what passes for content on 4chan) from the various other boards and reposts a percentage of it on /b/, sometimes running it through a Markov chain generator first. Then another set of shell scripts looks for repeating patterns on /b/. When

          • Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Funny)

            by vlm ( 69642 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @03:04PM (#41281833)

            (I'm working on integrating the Metro UI to Windows 2000.)

            This just cries out for a Gnome or KDE joke...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Nimey ( 114278 )

            a real tech web site (like Kuro5hin),

            Kill yourself.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

          new chips, new technology, new innovations...etc.

          I think the point of the summary is that even the seedier side of the internet sees itself benefiting from new technology. That has policy implications (Faux News Headline: Is web 2.0 really just a way to hide Child Porn from police? Popular seedy site 4chan ....), and whatever you may think of it, 4chan is certainly a fascinating exercise in community organization.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          4chan is more than /b/

          /hr/ [4chan.org] is where I get all my 3840x2400 T221 wallpaper.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I've had more interesting discussions on /g/ in the past year than on Slashdot in the entire decade I've been here. Slashdot is so far up it's own fucking ass it's a joke.

        • Yeah yeah...but 4Chan? ...drawn Rule 34 stuff?

          You must frequent 4chan often to know the contents so well :p

          You know, if I wasn't so intoxicated by a 6-pack of light beer right now,

          you wouldn't have given yourself away, /b/ro.

        • Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Z34107 ( 925136 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @06:18PM (#41283257)

          You realize /b/ is only one of the boards on 4chan, right?

    • Because 4Chan has never shown up on Slashdot before [slashdot.org], right?
    • 4chan is one of the oldest sites on the internet same thing with slashdot and amazon great to see sites like these still around, going strong and making headlines.

      • 4chan is one of the oldest sites on the internet same thing with slashdot and amazon great to see sites like these still around, going strong and making headlines.

        Ummm ... what? 4chan started in 2003 [wikipedia.org]. That's pretty much a decade after some of us started using Netscape.

        And internet addressing goes back well before that (because the Internet is not the World Wide Web).

        There's simply no way 4Chan can be one of the oldest Internet sites. There's just too many years of the internet before 2003.

  • Today op (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:35PM (#41281563)

    was not a faggot

  • They were pretty much forced to (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:39PM (#41281597)

    They were pretty much forced to go the JSON API route. Every power user of 4chan (which is pretty everybody) uses the 4chan x extension, that pounds the servers for thread updates (it downloads the complete page and parses it every 10 seconds (default is 30, but most change it to 10 for doing well in troll chess)).

    • It's interesting to see the evolution of forums and chat as we continue into the Internet Age. As forums get larger and larger and number of messages posted increases, it quickly exposes the flaws of the current paradigm. We need a rethink of forum/chat systems. The old PHPBB/SMF/VBulletin deal is inadequate and does not scale. Slashdot has some of the right ideas, but I don't think it's the holy grail either.

      ITT: Others brightly chime in with awesome ideas of how to innovate in forums, only to have their i

      • Re:We need a rethink (Score:4, Interesting)

        by oakgrove ( 845019 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @04:58PM (#41282765)

        We need a rethink of forum/chat systems.

        My suggestion is do whatever these guys [ycombinator.com] have done to keep eternal September at bay as long as possible.

        ITT: Others brightly chime in with awesome ideas of how to innovate in forums

        As far as Slashdot, disallowing AC posts might help raise the level of discussion. Maybe remove the karma cap and make the number publicly available maybe beside the user name. Since the community is large and healthy, disallow new users from posting for at least 3 days to stop some of the hit and run trolling. Something else that could be tried is maybe make a person lose some karma points everytime they post. That way people would more likely post things they think will get modded up rather than "me too" type stuff. Last but not least, how about bringing on the mighty "hell ban"? When a user trolls and trolls until his karma gets terrible, instead of just starting off his posts at -1 from then on, you bring in the hell ban. From the posters perspective, he is posting as normal and he can see his posts like he always could. But from the perspective of everybody else, his posts never actually appear. What happens is the poster eventually seeing that nobody is feeding his trolling, moves on or starts another account hopefully with a better attitude.

      • We need a rethink of forum/chat systems. The old PHPBB/SMF/VBulletin deal is inadequate and does not scale.

        Hm, I've heard of a couple of new things called "Internet Relay Chat" and "News Network Transport Protocol".

        • Hm, I've heard of a couple of new things called "Internet Relay Chat" and "News Network Transport Protocol".

          Both these protocols are too primitive to do what people expect of modern web forums. IRC is too evanescent (it's designed for real-time chat). It also doesn't support file attachments or other HTML features (yes, you can DCC files, but that doesn't help in a forum context). NNTP lacks the moderation and administration features that forum users want. Also, attachments are a hack rather than an integ

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Thiarna ( 111890 )

        I think the biggest problem with forums, chats, mailing lists etc is the linear format where all the focus is on the most recent topics, jumping from topic to another but not getting into depth on much. Quora seems to be the most succesful I've seen so far at breaking this.

      • A nice, distributed, client/server system already existed. It used open APIs, and allowed clients to have neat things called 'killfiles' and 'scorefiles' to organize the things/posters they were interested in. It could even interact directly with email.

        It was called 'usenet'.

        • And yet, today nobody uses that. Care to come up with some kind of theory as to why that may be? After inevitably concluding that usenet is dead for good, would you mind perhaps expending a little effort on the task at hand? i.e. ideas on how to improve forums and chat, not doggedly insisting on doing things the exact same way they were done two decades ago?

  • Can't wait for the first app (Score:3)

    by santax ( 1541065 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:39PM (#41281601)
    to link it with the googlemaps api. 1) download the pics 2) strip EXIF 3) get street address of child 4) PROFIT! Hold on 15 years guys, I see a really cool v& stopping in front of my window. Brb.

  • Oh Boy! (Score:2, Troll)

    by Hardhead_7 ( 987030 )
    Now everyone can have easy access to the world's deepest cesspit of racism, misogyny, and murder-porn.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      huh? What does this have to do with slashdot?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        hi slashdot 4chan here i need advise about if i shoud tell my parents that david , my bf , is hiv +

        david has been a poz for 3 years and im a neg who want to stay this way! but my parents is kinda homophobic and i dont think that they will take it alright. i need to have their aprovable cuz i live with them thou i have my own job and shit but they coul dthrow me out and david isnt ready for me 2 move in

        we have had sex lots of times saftly w/ condoumes and im still a neg and all so dont wory bout me! :~)

        also

  • Original post by moot (Score:5, Informative)

    by Milharis ( 2523940 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:52PM (#41281721)

    http://www.4chan.org/news#108 [4chan.org]
    The original post.
    It's on 4chan, but the page shouldn't contain anything NSFW.

  • News Update (Score:3, Informative)

    by Riddler Sensei ( 979333 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @02:54PM (#41281737)

    Here's the original link to Moot's news update regarding this.

    JOINING THE FUTURE, ONE COMMIT AT A TIME [4chan.org]

    (It's SFW, but I wouldn't blame you if don't take the chance.)

  • Whats up with /.s RSS feed? (Score:2, Informative)

    by vlm ( 69642 )

    Even the darkest corners of the internet aren't immune to the Web 2.0 boom

    Holy Shit! You say Slashdot's getting UTF-8? Finally my life is complete, I can post the UTF-8 goatse symbol on /.

    Oh, naw just a bunch of repetitive whining about 4chan being "full" of CP. I don't personally every remember seeing anything objectionable in /fit but whatever. Maybe if you find a low-carb diet morally reprehensible ... (insert valley girl voice pattern) whatever.

    Oh no wait its just the /. RSS feed not updating for the last 12 hours. (per goog reader, the terminally ill igoogle home page,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gorzek ( 647352 )

      Slashdotters seem to have really weird ideas about what really goes on at 4chan. It's not a haven for child porn and general illegality. /b/ used to be a lot more "Wild West" but it isn't anymore, it's pretty much a memetic recycling bin now.

      The rest of the (non-pornographic) forums are pretty tame and relatively good at staying on-topic.

      Honestly, I tend to see better discussion on 4chan than I do around these parts.

  • There are already third party 4chan apps like the 4chan browser extensions, 4chan mass image downloaders... I don't understand exactly what new doors the API changes are opening up. If anything, these changes will probably cause problems for 4chan. I was under the impression the whole reason that site had such a big community was it's simplicity.

  • Web 2.0? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09, 2012 @03:06PM (#41281841)

    > Even the darkest corners of the internet aren't immune to the Web 2.0 boom

    Web 2.0 denotes websites where the content is posted by the users, not the owners. 4chan (an image board) has always been Web 2.0.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gorzek ( 647352 )

      But by that definition, "Web 2.0" was happening back in the... mid 1990s. I mean, you had WWWBoard back then, which was primitive compared to modern forum systems but still relied entirely on user-generated content (posts.)

      I consider "Web 2.0" to be the iteration of Web interactivity that brought us JSON/AJAX-based page updates and SOAP/REST interfaces. Those weren't really possible back in the '90s, since they hadn't been specified yet and browser supported no similar functionality. Those didn't take off u

  • Hold onto your butts (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Time for the eternal summer to go up a level.

  • though probably not on the App Store.

    Actually, Apple has allowed many forum reader and commenting apps on the App Store. Alien Blue is considered the best app for reading Reddit, arguably using the touchscreen is way better than browsing on a PC/Mac.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There WAS a 4chan app on iOS, but it was removed for having access to NSFW materials. Simultaneously, there are at least 3 competing ones on Android. And Windows Phone doesn't have any apps.

  • 4chan != /b/ (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dontbemad ( 2683011 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @03:13PM (#41281897)
    "Even the darkest corners of the internet" Why is that entire site synonymous with a single one of its numerous channels? And even dumber still, I would expect at least a decent number of slashdotters to understand the concept of user-generated content. Yes, 4chan has seen child porn, racial biggotry, and graphic images posted before, and it probably will again. For that matter, facebook has seen them, youtube has seen them, and numerous other sites where users can submit content without peer review have as well. The "omg 4chan so evil" hype created by the mainstream media and spearheaded by faux news is long over. Stop drawing undue attention to the site, stop creating FUD over absolutely nothing new, and stop sounding like children on a site designed to inform the more intelligent masses on the internet.

  • Great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wbr1 ( 2538558 ) on Sunday September 09, 2012 @04:18PM (#41282481)
    4Chan can update it's codebase, but I still cannot post Unicode chars or have a decent editing box on /.. The mobile version breaks on me standard android browser more often than not, and no matter what I do, carriage returns have to be manually input as HTML. Really fun on a touchscreen keyboard.

  • Public's View of 4chan (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is as silly as tech illiterate people's view of the internet. If you think Joe Sixpack's view of the internet being anyone who uses a computer being some insane hacker, why do you think the same of 4chan? While /b/ may be a large board, there are many other boards out there that do not partake in anything highly illegal every waking moment. If you venture onto any other board than /b/ you'll find that just about everyone despises the board for the name it brings us.

    • And the Roman Catholic church is still thought to be full of pedophiles, even though it's only a few priests who actually are, and all government officials are accused of being corrupt, even though most are making an honest effort to do their jobs right.

      All groups become stereotypes, based on whatever the most well-known characteristic of the group is at the time. It's a human mechanism for simplifying the complexities of a diverse society. 4chan, at least, has an administrator who could clean up or close /

      • And the Roman Catholic church is still thought to be full of pedophiles, even though it's only a few priests who actually are, and all government officials are accused of being corrupt, even though most are making an honest effort to do their jobs right.

        Though they all do cover up the crimes of the few pedophiles instead of bringing justice. The same happen cops, a few bad cops and every other cop supporting them. They are all equally evil in my opinion.

      • And the Roman Catholic church is still thought to be full of pedophiles, even though it's only a few priests who actually are, and all government officials are accused of being corrupt, even though most are making an honest effort to do their jobs right.

        Actually, you are wrong. Every priest is a pedophile, as in....they are ALL attracted to little boys, not that they've all necessarily acted on those impulses. Think about it, who in their right mind would ever submit to a life of celibacy when one could simply be a preacher in another christian religion and be able to marry a woman? Who actually makes that choice? (the answer is: pedos). It's like those guys that say homosexuality is a "choice". Ummmm....yeah....it is a choice for you because YOU'RE GAY

        • Think about it, who in their right mind would ever submit to a life of celibacy...

          Anyone who thinks that their religion is more important than sex. That was easy.

          It's like those guys that say homosexuality is a "choice". Ummmm....yeah....it is a choice for you because YOU'RE GAY

          There's a wide spectrum of sexuality, and some folks are indeed in a place where they can choose their preference. Others aren't.

          Thanks, though, for illustrating my point nicely: Regardless of facts, people (including you) often defer to stereotypes to make assumptions about a whole group.

  • App store? Running binaries related in any way to a community that's all about trolling probably isn't the best course of action.

  • ...was gained.

    (kidding)

  • ... when I saw 4chan, I thought it said 'pubic API'.

  • I'm sick of clients asking for facebook and twitter and leaderboards and in-app-payments-and-ads and "usage metrics" (aka spy on the users) integration, but I'd add 4chan integration to my engine any day. Sounds like fun (seriously).

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