Complete history of 420chan

## Pre-History: The origins of Imageboards

* 1996 - A man named Masayuki Shiba creates a BBS called Ayashii Warudo (Strange/Suspicious World). Users are anonymous. Warez and cp are posted, and there is a “gesu” (scum) board where a group of the same name discussed and conducted website hackings and invasions. Many similar BBSes are formed, collectively called Nanashi Warudo (Nameless World), they develop a culture based on memes. Ayashii World functions as the hubsite of Nanashi World in a similar way to how 4chan would later function as the hubsite of Anonymous. AW's popularity increases exponentially.
* 1998 - Ayashii World doesn't have good servers, and it keeps crashing. After the owner receives personal threats over the server issues, he shuts the site down. They need a replacement. They get their replacement with Amezou, the First Channel, run by Amezou-shi. It starts off as a bunch of links to alternative BBSes for wayward Ayashii Worlders, but soon becomes its own forum and introduces a new style of threaded message board, dependent on bumping and saging. Its popularity increases exponentially.
* 1999 - The administrator of the first channel closes the site due to vandalism, before that, he makes a plea for its users to make more sites like Amezou. A man named Hiroyuki Nishimura sees all this and creates Ni Channeru (2channel), the Second Channel, using code based on the first, with enough servers this time to handle the exponential growth. Meanwhile, Lowtax creates Something Awful.
* April/May 2001 - Lowtax creates the ADTRW (Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse) board on Something Awful.
* August, 30, 2001 - 2channel is in danger of dying, so a backup forum is created, called Futaba or 2chan (two-leaves). Futaba invents a board called /b/ for random content. The site supports images and develops a unique culture all its own, growing out of the seed culture brought by the 2channelers.
* 3 March 2003 - The first English language channel is created: world2ch, made by RIR6, a 16 years old Japanese. At first, it supported text only. Its userbase consists of a mix of Japanese and English users, the only time that this happens for any considerable amount of time. The English speakers there are members of ADTRW, and they are also familiar with Futaba and visit it for its quirks. Later, English users would convince the owner to make an imageboard. He makes two, officially becoming the first western imageboards.
* 2003 – The 2chan appreciation thread is created on ADTWR, becoming the gateway between the eastern Internet culture and western. World2ch is discovered and posted on said thread, gaining a steady influx of English speaking users.
* September 29 - moot registers 4chan.net, just because it looked like 2chan.net (Futaba Channel) which was an ADTRW pastime. Originally, his only intention was to own an e-mail address @4chan.net.
* September 30: Moot announces 4chan.net in Something Awful's ADTRW forum. Thread is titled "4chan.net - English 2chan.net!"
* October 1 - 4chan is founded by moot, a member of the Something Awful forums, intended to be used as an English version of 2chan, a Japanese imageboard created in 2001 out of an extremely popular Japanese BBS called 2channel. moot creates /b/ (Anime/Random) and makes a topic at Something Awful and world2ch about the website, which is received extremely well. The success of 4chan would lead to the creation of many more imageboards all across the world in the years to come. One person influenced by Moot at that time was fellow SomethingAwful user Kirtaner.
	+ 4chan's history forks off here: http://tanasinn.info/wiki/Complete\_History\_of\_4chan

## The founding of 420chan

* 420chan.org is created on 4/20, 2005 (April 4th).
	+ ***Kirtaner on why he founded 420chan:*** "Well one day I was sitting around and I noticed that my new hosting package allowed for a single free domain name registration. I was with Tinal at the time and he came up with "420chan", a stupid combination of 4chan and drugs. I decide to use this suggestion, and register it as a joke domain many many moons ago. I didn't actually intend on having 420chan be a serious thing until another site (420chan.ath.cx) run by a handful of wtfux guys decided to have a shitstorm over the fact that I was using the same name. So to be a dick, I decided to actually set up boards on the thing. Since then 420chan has grown into a gigantic horrible place and I love it."

## The /i/ years

* **August 23, 2006:** "/b/-day" on 4chan. Moot, amongst other things, bans illegal activity and raids on 4chan's /b/. Vast number of people were banned as "civil war" was fought, resulting in a massive exodus from 4chan to "Alternative chans". 7chan was the main destination of these exiles, but quite a number also came to 420chan in this period. The combination of these raiders from 4chan plus the raiders already calling 420chan would lead to heightened raider activity on 420chan.
* **December 20, 2006** - Hal Turner, a white supremacist talk show host from New Jersey, plans his final radio show due to lack of funding, in which he takes calls for three hours straight. 420chan's /i/ boards serves as Anonymous HQ, leading a host of 420chan, 4chan, 7chan, YTMND, Something Awful, and Bantownwith to destroy the show with 150 prank calls being made in three hours, with almost none of his real listeners being able to call in due to clogged lines. Hal then posts the phone numbers of the callers on his website (some of which were minors), sparking a huge outrage among the raiders. Bantown then uncovered his personal information, including his real phone number, after which ~160 calls were made to his house. Hal gave in and removed the phone numbers from his site.
* **December 25, 2006** - Hal Turner spends Christmas with his family over at his father's house; news of this spread, and Bantown quickly found his father's number, leading to a massive amount of calls and Hal supposedly being kicked out of the house. After this, Hal claimed that the FBI was investigating 4chan (an Anonymous later called in to Hal's show claiming that he had contacted the FBI and that they had said that no such investigation was taking place) and redirected his website to the FBI page.
* **December 31, 2006** - A happy ending for 2006 after Hal Turner surrenders to 420chan and /i/ after much raiding and lulz, and announces that he is almost off of the internet completely. He announces, "I am not certain where to go from here. My entire existence - short of my physical presence on this planet - has been utterly wrecked, by people I never met from places I've never been." Anonymous knocks back a cold one and lols heartily.
* **January 24 , 2007** – Ian, owner of 7chan, gets a notice from his host saying that the board /i/ violates the TOS. He deletes it. Meanwhile, Hal Turner gets kicked from his datacenter, and on the way to get a new way crashes his car. /i/ moves to 420chan.
* **January 27, 2007** – The great chan death of January 2007 - 4chan has a power failure and dies in the usual manner, however, so do all the other mayor imageboards of the Internet. 420chan was kicked out of from hosting, 12chan was suspended by the FBI, 2ch.ru died for unknown reasons, and 7chan couldn’t handle the influx of all the users bases put together and crashed. Even wikichan went down, to never return.
* **February 10, 2007** - Kirtaner hacks Hal Turner's website to redirect to 420chan.org. Turner is furious at the "Canadian Communist"
* **April 28, 2007** – Subeta raids - 4chan, 7chan, and especially 420chan combine forces to attack Subeta, a shitty role-playing website similar to Gaia who stole Longcat and turned him into an item for their shitty site. The \*chans then DDoS Subeta, which they find hard to do due to lack of effort, as well as Subeta's 2000 GB monthly bandwidth and lack of large images. Nevertheless, two major Subeta fansites were shut down permanently and Subeta was down for two days. Keith (Subeta's owner) eventually apologized and removed Longcat from his site after a long and bloody battle, at which many Anonymous rejoiced. On this same day, Encyclopedia Dramatica, one of /b/'s most famous recruiting posts, encountered a severe hard disk failure and does not return until June 8.
* **July 21, 2007** - The Great Deathly Hallows IRL Raid of 2007 - /i/ gets a leak of Harry Potter’s seventh book, obtained from Gaia (Ha!) and proceed to spoiler it for everyone else.
* **July 26, 2007** – The Fox News Report – HACKERS ON STEROIDS - Fox news makes what is probably most hilariously retarded act of journalism in history. Covering anonymous and internet hackers in ways completely irrelevant, such as showing the footage of an exploding van and that a mother whose son MySpace account got hacked and took to defensive measures such as buying a dog. They coined many memes such as HACKERS ON STEROIDS, INTERNET HATE MACHINE, buy a dog, exploding van and lulz, a corruption of lol. While today it mostly associated with 4chan, the website actually shown in the segment was 420chan, specifically /i/. Kirtaner's trip code can be seen in the piece, as well as a blurry TCC-Tan.

 File:Exploding yellow van.gif
* **July 27, 2007** - /i/ raids the shit out of Fox News, spamming MyFoxLA and MyFoxDC forums until the admins deleted them, getting into a completely unprotected FoxNews.com and stealing the personal info 1.5 million users from ZiffDavis.com via a UNIX script, all blaming whilst eBaumsWorld. Other Anonymous IRL raided the Fox News LA Studio by ordering pizzas, male hookers and fast food and many others things.
* **October 20, 2007** – With 4chan off the map for a few days due to downtime, /b/tards flock to 7chan and other sites, as usual. 7chan’s server cannot take this much traffic and wavers in and out of service. 420chan enters partyhard mode to keep the site out of /b/tards.
* **January 1, 2008** – Turner's server is hacked once again – This time the hackers finds something interesting, an email exchange with an FBI agent, showing that Hal Turner was in fact Psy-Ops infiltrating the neo nazi movement. Of course, they spread the news like wildfire.
* **January 10, 2008** – The exchange is discussed on a neo nazi site (Stormfront?), Hal Turner officially breaks off the neo nazi movement and vowed to end his show immediately. On his site, after a long streak of messages, he officially ends the Hal Turner show.
* **January 29, 2008** – Hal Turner makes an official announcement on his dead site that he has no relation whatsoever with the FBI.
* **July 21, 2008** – The Chanopocalypse – Three users from Raidchan, Pacifico, and ViraL have the idea to start an imageboard civil war; their attempts fail as they were discovered, so they decide to go nuts and DDOS every major imageboard on the net.
* **August 19 2008** - /wooo/ is Suicide: /wooo/ manages to hijack a viral marketing campaign by nationally televised wrestling promotion Total Non-Stop Action (TNA Wrestling).
* **August 22, 2008** – One of the most notorious Tom Green Raids. Tom Green decided to challenge his users to play “the game” – As long as his view count never dropped he would keep taking calls. #tomgreen began to call for /b/lackup on 4chan, 7chan, 420chan and many other sites, and soon the view counts tripled. Botnets were assembled to create fake views and cries of FAT N\*\*GERS flowed from the phone. Tom Green lost it, shouted “Fuck you, man” at the last caller, torn the phone cable, shouted “PHONES ARE BULLSHIT” whilst leaving and closed the show with a final “See ya, pricks”. Anonymous gave the coup de grace by DDOSing the server.

## The Last of the great Alternative Chans

* During the late 00s, 420chan, 7chan and 711chan are considered the 3 Major Alternative Chans to 4chan. Cementing their connection was that each were a host to /i/ for periods of their history.
* 711chan shuts down in 2011 and 7chan grinds to a halt. 420chan remains the last of the 3 to provide major traffic. In a move that would have horrified the original users of imageboards, numerous imageboards dedicated to My Little Pony emerge including 2 major imageboards ones. MLP is banned from 420chan outside of /h/ and /mtv/.

## Recent History: Growth & Expansion

* **5 Sept 2009:** Netjester is introduced to 420chan.
* **16 Sep 2009:** @420chan (https://twitter.com/420chan) officially joins twitter. It provides important updates relating to the site.
* **6 Oct 2009:** Banned users can now see detailed ban information when attempting to post.
* **2 May 2010:** 1701, a Star Trek board, and detox, a rehab board, introduced.
* **Late May 2010:** Feemocalypse. After a former mod, Feem, wiped out the site's database and left, 420chan starts anew with a clean slate.
* **5 Sep 2010:** /balls/ becomes sports, the new wildcard (wc) topic is skateboarding and math is made a permanent board.
* **26 Apr 2011:** wooo's post limit bump goes from 4,000 to 8,000.
* **29 Aug 2011:** A generous user contributed a $1400 donation via Bitcoins. He is an awesome person.
* **Sept 2011:** WWE Live Tour raid by /wooo/. WWE creates a new section on their website where anyone can upload images of their live events. However, it's unmoderated, thus any image of anything can actually be uploaded. /wooo/ floods the sections with NSFW images.
* **26 Oct 2011:** wooo is officially made Safe for work. When OmegaBR stickies a thread to highlight this, the /wooo/kies rise up in outrage over the feeling the board is suddenly being censored. /420/ is besieged by /wooo/. The Admins say that a SFW ruling was made over a week early, and this was "made clear" by a little notice under the submit button. This is a problem however though, because of the majority of /wooo/ is iterate. Chaos continues to reign on /wooo/ as suddenly the mods decided their only defence is to unleash Kane from hell. Kane appears in the corner of the screen for the night of the 26th, and /wooo/ is covered in flames (...flame .gifs that is). However, the mods don't realise the portal to hell they used was left open to long, and horror of horrors Chris Benoit temporarily returns to haunt /wooo/. It takes Alberto Del Rio (since he's can't retain heat) and Glacier to quench the flames and send Benoit and Kane back to hell. Randy Orton and a BAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWING toddler replaced Kane in the bottom right hand corner of the /wooo/ screen.
* **8 Nov 2011:** Boards and threads (particularly large ones) improved: They load in a fraction of the time and use 80 to 90 percent less bandwidth.
* **5 Dec 2011:** Post limits for slower boards or boards with shallow threads have been significantly reduced.
* **April, 2012:** One of the first "episodes" (threads) of 420chan Today appears on /b/. "420chan Today", presented by Ron /B/urgundy, was/is a sort of informal news source and recap thread for all of 420chan. Numerous episodes would appear over the next two years to sizeable fanfare.
* **May, 2012:** lang and tinfoil are made official boards while sh and gore are axed. /sh/ (Shenanigans) had been intended to be a home for pranks, but as the board marched on it became a hive of wildly illegal activity, with "how I do I get revenge" threads becoming a common sight. /gore/, a now secret board, was generally not something most of the staff wanted to moderate, and this caused problems. Also, both boards presented problems as 420chan moved away from donations towards relying on ad revenue for support.
* **July, 2012:** The long awaited Taima Store is finally created, allowing 420chan to sell merchandise. T-shirts, stickers and the Souls of banned posters are sold at http://taimashop.co/
* **15 Jun 2012:** Threads no longer expire based on the age of the thread. They are now pruned based on their activity. There are still reply limits.
* **21 Jul 2012:** The 420chan page on facebook is finally returned to Kirt and co. It later becomes a place for INTERPOL to fuck around.
* **16 Aug 2012:** Spardot Mode, later renamed to Zen mode, is introduced as theme. It allows users to see the word through her eyes, a world where everyone is fucking banned.
* **2 Apr 2013:** The image deletion X with is replaced by random images of sandwiches, kittens, and cupcakes. Cross-board linking has been back ported from the development boards. It follows the standard format, **>>>/board/post**.
* **1 May 2013:** 420chan's API made publicly available at http://api.420chan.org
* **7 May 2013:** Following the death of Synchtube, Kirtaner creates his own version in 420chan's sister site Taima.tv (originally known as taimatube). The flagship of the new site is /wooo/'s own 24/7 station /wooo/tube.
* **Aug 11, 2013:** DrHouse, a /wooo/kie, donates enough money to pay for all of August's bills and then some.
* **Sept 10, 2013:** Icons for dino, mtv, ani, sa, and fo have been added.
* **Dec, 2013:** 420chan is saved from 4 days of DDOS attacks when Kirtaner introduces new anti-spam technology, which thankfully doesn't use captcha.
* **Jan 12, 2014:** Taimatube officially renamed Taima.tv
* **February, 2014:** Russians from 2ch.ru briefly take residence on Taima.tv in massive numbers. It's a short but romantic affair between two international imageboards from different sides of the world
* **Feb 10th, 2014:** Small emoticons from /wooo/tube are introduced site wide on 420chan.
* **Feb 18, 2014:** The trial boards (tesla, Futurism, /fo/ and /lang/) are moved over to the permanent section.
* **Apr 23, 2014:** webm. files begin working on 420chan's test board, with the promise they're be on the entire site soon enough.
* **July 14, 2014:** TNA's Online Universe raid by /wooo/. /wooo/ hijack part of TNA's official website and floods it with NSFW content as well as /wooo/ related jokes.
* **2022** 420chan is kill. RIP

## Particularly Memorable Threads

**I come in peace. by Turaaan'Do'Lkkkk'Pvr'Er**