Table of Contents
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Channel4
4-ch is a multi-textboard site that has been around for almost 20 years, as of now. It also happens to be the largest English-language textboard site on the internet.
Despite it being the largest, it has a small userbase, which is considered by many to be the biggest issue holding Channel4 back. The fact it continues to exist is something of a miracle in and of itself.
Board Impressions
Despite being the largest English-language textboard site… it’s pretty slow. It’s much slower than 4chan and other imageboards, but for a textboard it’s fairly fast.
The community I can only describe as fairly normal. No-one is especially good or bad and they come off as fairly sane (at least that’s the impression I get on most of the boards).
There is a slight difference in the community from board to board, but I’m betting there’s a lot of overlap.
Boards of note include:
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- A place to discuss things that don’t fit into the other boards. Fairly fun sometimes.
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- This is probably one of the best places online to discuss other BBS things and the internet as a whole.
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- Equivalent of the Japanese VIP board. I don’t go here often but it’s interesting looking at the board every now and then.
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- This is likely one of the last places online that still has fun with Ꜳ and SJIS art.
History
It was originally founded in 2004 by Squeeks as a sort of test, apparently. He ran the site half-heartedly until 2014 when he gave it to bps after some downtime. During that time they were also part of the Idlechan confederation.
After bps took over, he promised a bunch of changes… and as far as I know, he didn’t actually deliver on most of them.
bps ran the site until around sometime in 2020. After some downtime, he handed the reins over to ssz. ssz was apparently a moderator on the site prior to this point, but I honestly didn’t know there were mods until he took over.
So far, ssz has been running the site fairly well. He’s made some changes and appears to be delivering on his promises.
Misc
2ch Navigator
This is an old tool to help English speakers navigate 2channel. It was broken until ssz fixed it by having it point to 2ch.sc instead.
Trivilinks
- My own estimates put the number of users between 30 and 3000. I have no way of knowing for sure though.
- I usually check 4-ch out once every few months or so. The (lack of) speed makes checking daily, or even weekly, a bit underwhelming.
- Hello DQN!
- I was actually the one to suggest having the 2ch navigator redirect to 2ch.sc.