■ 初めての方へ（必読）

■ この板について

this board opened on 2001/05/18 and the cat has been on it since. the site it copies opened two years before that, on 1999/05/30, and was put together by a student called Hiroyuki Nishimura while he was living in Conway, Arkansas. the most Japanese thing on the internet was started from the middle of the United States.

■ 8月危機

the board was ninety nine days old when it nearly went for good. on 2001/08/25 at 01:49 an operator called 夜勤 posted みんなはさーん. it is a pun. it sounds like addressing everybody and it means everybody is broke. the boards went out one after another over the next few hours.

nobody attacked it. it had simply become popular enough that the traffic bill was larger than the people running it could pay, and it had got that popular partly because the boards everyone used before it had collapsed and partly because a bus hijacking put it on the news.

five days later, on 2001/08/30, ふたば☆ちゃんねる opened as somewhere to go if it did not come back. futaba is the pair of leaves a seed puts up first, which is what is growing on the wallpaper you are reading this on. two years later its software was translated and became 4chan.

the site came back. the shelter never closed. both of them are still up and one of them was only ever meant to last a week.

■ スレッドの仕組み

1000: a thread holds 1000 posts. there is no extension and there never was one. it is the oldest rule on the site and nobody has ever moved it.
1001: when it fills, the thing you see in the 1001st place is not a post. it is the board writing the closing line, and every board writes its own and keeps it in a plain file at 1000.txt. this board's is a little sad.
age: posting normally puts the thread back on top of the board. the board is sorted by who spoke last, not by who is right.
sage: from 下げる, to lower. put it in the mail field and the thread stays where it is. it is what you write when you have something to add but do not think everyone needs to look. on a board like this one, where the ID is optional, it also prints your ID as ???.
ID: eight characters, made out of your address and today's date. it exists because anonymity by itself let one person hold both sides of an argument, which the board calls 自演. you do not choose it, you cannot keep it, and at midnight you are somebody else.
dat落ち: a thread falls when it fills or when nobody has posted in it for long enough. it goes to the archive and stops being somewhere you can write.

■ dat について

a thread is one text file. one line per post, five fields, split on the two characters <>:

名前<>メール<>日付 ID<>本文<>スレタイ

the title only appears on the first line, because only the first line needed it. the file is named after the second it was created, which is why every thread address on this site is a number. this one is real and you can read it: 生ログ.

■ $2chcat について

the thread on the front page is not a picture of a thread. it is one, it is shared, and it currently holds 2 of its 1000 posts. when the last one lands it closes, it goes to the archive with the rest, and part 2 opens underneath it.

the reason any of this is here: a thread from 2001 and a coin from 2026 are held up by exactly the same thing. it is on top while people are posting in it. nothing else is holding it there. every rule on this page was written by people who worked that out twenty five years earlier and just called it 保守.

$2chcat is on solana. the ceiling is upstairs and it only goes one way.