Today, 8-18-2022 marks 10 years since I started AllChans. This site goes back to the days of shii.org/2ch for me which I visted on a regular basis. When the owner m0hey.p0ri posted he was shutting down I decided to buy a domain and keep things going.

For the first year AllChans grew quick but after that time it seemed like the image board community was dying – major chans were disappearing and with little new support for image board software the smaller sites started popping up less and less while others died. I assume it was platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit taking over with near instant communication available. It seemed like each year I was removing more sites than I was adding. At some point around 2019 it seems like things turned around. Major platforms started pushing harder and hader to limit speech and put policies in place to ban “hate speech” without defining what that meant. Toss in the media getting caught lying over and over to and the major platforms banning/deplatforming people who noticed and people start looking elsewhere to communicate online. I think this started sending people back to anonymous image boards and got new people into creating new image boards. Today, 10 years later, there are more chans listed than at any point in the past. More traffic too:

Not only are there more imageboards than in the past, they are far more active. I remember back when AllChans was fresh going through and seeing the same content for months on many sites. Many of them would be spammed and the spam would sit for weeks. Today there are a large number of very active boards and it seems the community is growing. From my research I think there is the weakness out there of image board software not being actively developed that ends up being a road block to future sites popping up. I hope that doesn’t become the death of the smaller boards in the future.

Over the years I have hosted a couple image boards along side AllChans, none currently though. I know the time and work involved in moderating, maintaining and dealing with CP spammers. Whenever I have to remove a board that has died after being on the site a long time, I get the nostaligia feels real bad.

I want to say that I really appreciate all that these image boards do to keep running. Most of these boards are ad free and run on donations or just out of pocket for the owner. Same applies to Allchans, I think it’s running at a -$1500 loss by now, but to my benefit the site is fairly static and runs off a cheap VPS. I can imagine the costs are significantly more for an active site hosting hundreds of images.

I do miss having frame browsing of imageboards on AllChans. As some might be aware from previous posts, frames are a no-no on the internet today. One of the big reasons is the mix of https and http image boards, another is any site with hotlinking disabled would not load within a frame. A third reason is google will punish sites that use the dated frames technology. I have tried for years to find a proper menu plugin for wordpress that would allow me to set a custom “target_” on links so they could open in an iframe. (I like wordpress too much to change over to something else) I could make something somewhat usable doing that but havent seen anything that works yet.

Anyway… Happy 10th Birthday to AllChans, and I hope to keep the site going for many more years.