4chan Undergoing Major Revision, Getting Public API

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4chan Undergoing Major Revision, Getting Public API

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 9, 2012 @06:28AM 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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Uh oh... by MindPrison · 2012-09-09 06:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

You got to love it when 4Chan makes a headline here on Slashdot...
I never saw that coming, seriously...I didn't.

--
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
1. Re:Uh oh... by Lanteran · 2012-09-09 06:37 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  You didn't see it coming? I thought this place was news for nerds?
  
  --
  "People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
2. Re:Uh oh... by shiftless · 2012-09-09 06:54 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  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.)
3. Re:Uh oh... by vlm · 2012-09-09 07:04 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  (I'm working on integrating the Metro UI to Windows 2000.)
  This just cries out for a Gnome or KDE joke...
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
4. Re:Uh oh... by 93+Escort+Wagon · 2012-09-09 07:09 · Score: 2
  
  Gnome, KDE, and xfce walk into a bar, and ... well, you know the rest.
  
  --
  #DeleteChrome
5. Re:Uh oh... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:10 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Have you ever even been to 4chan's tech board? It's all Install Gentoo, ThinkPads vs. MacBooks and anime/MLP shitposting.
6. Re:Uh oh... by Sir_Sri · 2012-09-09 07:17 · Score: 2
  
  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.
7. Re:Uh oh... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:54 · Score: 2
  
  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 one board gets crap, a whole bunch of users move to some other board and post off-topic crap and generally crap all over the boards.
  Then there are the board wars which are getting worse by the year.
  Harder moderation can't come sooner.
8. Re:Uh oh... by ultranova · 2012-09-09 09:03 · Score: 2
  
  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.
  
  --
  Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
9. Re:Uh oh... by Z34107 · 2012-09-09 10:18 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You realize /b/ is only one of the boards on 4chan, right?
  
  --
  DATABASE WOW WOW
10. Re:Uh oh... by arth1 · 2012-09-09 14:44 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Nice trips!
11. Re:Uh oh... by helix2301 · 2012-09-10 00:24 · Score: 2
  
  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.
  
  --
  http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
Today op by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 06:35 · Score: 5, Funny

was not a faggot
They were pretty much forced to by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 06:39 · Score: 4, Interesting

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)).
Can't wait for the first app by santax · 2012-09-09 06:39 · Score: 2

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.
this would be a good time to invest in by circletimessquare · 2012-09-09 06:50 · Score: 5, Funny

eye bleach futures

--
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Original post by moot by Milharis · 2012-09-09 06:52 · Score: 5, Informative

http://www.4chan.org/news#108
The original post.
It's on 4chan, but the page shouldn't contain anything NSFW.
1. Re:Original post by moot by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 06:58 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  >It's on 4chan...
  >shouldn't contain anything NSFW.
News Update by Riddler+Sensei · 2012-09-09 06:54 · Score: 2, Informative

Here's the original link to Moot's news update regarding this.
JOINING THE FUTURE, ONE COMMIT AT A TIME
(It's SFW, but I wouldn't blame you if don't take the chance.)
Web 2.0? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:06 · Score: 3, Informative

> 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:Oh Boy! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:10 · Score: 2, Funny

huh? What does this have to do with slashdot?
We need a rethink by shiftless · 2012-09-09 07:12 · Score: 2

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 ideas shamelessly stolen err borrowed by err..someone who then goes on to make millions of bucks from it. Or just creates something fucking awesome and gives it away free to mankind....THEN people just hand him $20s all day long on the street cause he's so awesome. (Right...) I dunno exactly what the future holds, ladies and gentlemen, but when thinking minds come together I know we can figure out what the future should look like, then implement it. So let's hear it.
1. Re:We need a rethink by oakgrove · 2012-09-09 08:58 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  We need a rethink of forum/chat systems.
  My suggestion is do whatever these guys 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.
  
  --
  The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
2. Re:We need a rethink by Arancaytar · 2012-09-09 09:28 · Score: 2
  
  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".
3. Re:We need a rethink by Thiarna · 2012-09-09 10:23 · Score: 2
  
  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.
4. Re:We need a rethink by JDG1980 · 2012-09-09 10:55 · Score: 2
  
  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 integral part of the protocol.
5. Re:We need a rethink by Pseudonym+Authority · 2012-09-09 11:19 · Score: 2
  
  If geeknet really cared, it could make trolling a lot harder
  Please. You are giving these guys way to much credit. They can't even figure out a way of stopping look-alike names without completely blocking unicode. CSS and half-functioning AJAX is about the limit of their abilities.
6. Re:We need a rethink by oakgrove · 2012-09-09 11:23 · Score: 2
  
  Well, that's informative. I was wondering why unicode didn't work here.
  
  --
  The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
7. Re:We need a rethink by SCHecklerX · 2012-09-10 02:17 · Score: 2
  
  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'.
4chan != /b/ by dontbemad · 2012-09-09 07:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

"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.
Re:App Store by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:21 · Score: 2, Informative

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.
Re:This is great news! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:25 · Score: 5, Funny

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little fucker? Iâ(TM)ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and Iâ(TM)ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and Iâ(TM)m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. Youâ(TM)re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and thatâ(TM)s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your little miserable life off the face of the continent, you little fuck. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little âoecleverâ comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you could have held your fucking tongue. But you couldnâ(TM)t, you didnâ(TM)t, and now youâ(TM)re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. Youâ(TM)re fucking dead, kiddo.
-/b/
Re:This is great news! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:26 · Score: 2, Funny

I'll kick your ass faggot. You think you're tough? lets see how tough you are with a couple rounds from my .45 lodged in your skull. Kinda hard to talk shit when I've blown half your face off. You better watch yourself faggots, I work for the fucking CIA, if I want you dead, you are dead. Its that fucking simple. Watch your god damned fucking mouth. I have over 30 years military training, I would rip your spine out while raping your fucking mother up her dried up old skanky cunt. I would then proceed to bundle up what remains of your body and shove my 12 inch cock down your throat and skull fuck you till my cum oozes from every hole in your body. Watch your fucking back. I'm coming for you.
Re:Meh. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-09 07:31 · Score: 5, Funny

I was mongling some cocks late one night
When my eyes beheld an awesome sight
All the tripfags' cocks began to rise
And suddenly, to my surprise
They did the mash
They did the 4chan mash
The 4chan mash
It was an internet smash
They did the mash
It caught on in a flash
They did the mash
They did the 4chan mash
Leonidas!
From thermopylae where i fought so well
To my restaurant in the depths of hell
This is SPARTAAAAAAAA! I cried to my men
But the Persians all formed up and then
They did the mash
They did the 4chan mash
The 4chan mash
It was an internet smash
They did the mash
It caught on in a flash
They did the mash
They did the 4chan mash
Raptor Jesus!
The Admins were dropping' bans
They party had just been vanned
The guests included Slowpoke,
Magic- and Rabbit-chans.
Pedobear!
The scene was rockin' when some loli came in
I wanted to commit a deadly sin
They party van had just arrived
But, though i was sure they weren't here to jive,
They did the mash
They did the 4chan mash
The 4chan mash
It was an internet smash
They did the mash
It caught on in a flash
They did the mash
They did the 4chan mash
Moot!
THEN OUT FROM THE SHADOWS, MOOT'S VOICE DID RING
SEEMS HE WAS TROUBLED BY JUST ONE THING
AS THE TROLLS AND GAIAFAGS QUICKLY MADE TRACKS
"B&!", HE PROCLAIMED, "GET OUT OF HERE, SNACKS!"
SNACKS... DID THE MASH
HE DID THE 4CHAN MASH
THE 4CHAN MASH
IT WAS AN INTERNET SMASH
HE DID THE MASH
IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH
HE DID THE MASH
HE DID THE 4CHAN MASH
EFG!
I GOT IN ONE LITTLE FIGHT, AND MY MOM GOT SCARED
SHE SAID YOU'RE MOVING WITH YOUR AUNTIE AND YOUR UNCLE IN BEL-AIR
Great by wbr1 · 2012-09-09 08:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

--
Silence is a state of mime.
1. Re:Great by Angrywhiteshoes · 2012-09-09 08:38 · Score: 2
  
  NO TRIFORCE
App store? Running binaries by irwiss · 2012-09-09 08:57 · Score: 2

App store? Running binaries related in any way to a community that's all about trolling probably isn't the best course of action.
Re:The Internet cancer by Pseudonym+Authority · 2012-09-09 09:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

Hi Kimmo! How's your spamming and botnet's coming along? I hope you not still upset that moot put a CAPTCHA in to stop your Anontalk spam shit. Have a nice life!
Re:HAHAHAHAHA by Z34107 · 2012-09-09 10:22 · Score: 2

You don't know how 4chan works, do you? Try linking to the archive next time.

--
DATABASE WOW WOW
EPIC FAIL SLASH-DAUGHTERZ by newbie_fantod · 2012-09-09 11:21 · Score: 4, Insightful

Six replies mocking the standard posting style of 4chan and all but one are modded Troll?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony/
1. Re:EPIC FAIL SLASH-DAUGHTERZ by germansausage · 2012-09-09 12:43 · Score: 2
  
  Like Ray-eee-ay-ee-ayn on your wedding day..