Suggesting alternate sites after March 31 #1539
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Hello ccd0, I am the admin of rising, stable image board. I would be interested in being a part of your recommended alt chans. With strong confidence I'd be able to handle an influx in traffic. My image board is run by caring and experienced administrators. It would be a pleasure to be considered an alternative image board. Thank you.
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^ mewch was regularly spammed on /soc/ and got urlbanned as a result, by the way (most of its userbase comes from there). If you decide to add it, limit it to the soc-ey boards like /r9k/ and /soc/. |
Agreed, it would probably be best to limit all the sites to one or a few relevant boards. |
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Hello! I received an email regarding this from a user. |
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Hi there, another mewch administrator. Don't mean to derail this thread into discussion of mewch, but some clarification could be used: Mewch was never spammed on /soc/. You are confusing mewch for ChanPink, which was advertised on /soc/. ChanPink was closed down quite some time ago by the other administrator Mega Milk. Although mewch was created by the same administrator, it was not spammed on 4chan and is currently not urlbanned. Mewch's top boards are /fringe/, a board that is /x/-like, and /b/. These boards are nothing like /soc/ or the earlier ChanPink's /campus/. Agreed also on limiting of all sites to a few relevant boards. Quality users should be spread out far and wide, not limited to any one particular imageboard. |
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I don't understand how this change dissuades 4chan users from coming. In fact I don't see how it changes anything other than a few swaps in API calls. Even though 4chan allegedly uses ReCaptcha v1 APIs, it has used Recaptcha v2 in the user facing side for years. This is how Google defines Recaptcha v1 and v2: https://support.google.com/recaptcha/?hl=en#6080933 ReCaptcha v1 (with 2 words) has not been in use on 4chan in years. Even when it was first introduced by Moot, it didn't really stem the user growth. For those who don't remember, this is what it looked like: This is ReCaptcha v2. Looks familiar right? Because that's exactly what it looks like now, for more than a year. The userbase never dropped significantly here either. I would say that most of the original 4chan users have already moved on to other places (including, holy hell, Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter), and are replaced by new generations that are assimilated through acculturation, maintained by some intermittently returning users. 4chan keeps growing because it is 4chan: because it brings so many people and posts together in one place. There simply aren't many other imageboards where the discussion moves as quickly as /a/, /b/, and /v/. Until 4chan itself disappears, it will not be replaced wholesale like Reddit did to Digg. |
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4chan X allows you to use legacy recaptcha, which many, many people prefer since blocking google trackers makes you have to go through 10 different captcha attempts on v2 (or just plain being disliked for some reason by the algorithm). |
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How many 4chan users use 4chan X: and out of those, specifically for the purpose of using legacy recaptcha? I wouldn't say none, but it is not going to be the downfall of the entire community of 4chan. Though I (and Moot, as he stated in his final livestream) still support having more imageboards in the community. Maybe thread and post federation like the NNTPChan protocol or GNU Social does could increase post frequency of slower, divided communities as desired. |
I don't disagree with you.
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I don't think the OP said that either.
In addition, many people on the slower boards related to otaku culture use this feature, from what I've seen, although my personal experience doesn't hold much weight. |
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The native extension also has a setting to use v1. |
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Perhaps the 4chan X script could be used to function as an Overchan beyond the spirit of this Github issue, which could have a drop down to recommend other imageboards that are in similar design and topic as the current 4chan board. That might help make these alternative imageboards gain more traction with 4chan users without having to spread through word of mouth or spam 4chan itself. A ranking needs to be determined, most likely by population with the choice of looking for smaller, midsize, and larger communities. |
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Another related question is: if these users left simply because they liked ReCaptcha v1, how will captchas be handled on the smaller communities? ReCaptcha v1 can't be used there when it is discontinued. What do we consider an acceptable captcha instead of ReCaptcha v1? What if the alternative imageboard also uses ReCaptcha v2, is that fine or makes it not competitive against 4chan? Without captchas, although there are fewer users, there will still remain a similar vulnerability to spam. For example, on 8chan, they have a captcha that allows you to post for 24 hours after just completing it once. Another reason why recaptcha v1 was being abandoned was that AI has become powerful enough to detect subtly warped text, so a simple captcha in that style might not block automated spammers for long. |
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ReCaptcha v1 does little to deter spam. It has been left in a weak state by Google for over a year, presumably to encourage people to upgrade. Not all sites need to have captchas, or demand a captcha with every post. Even 4chan seems to have made the judgment that they only need real captcha protection for thread creation. It's good to look at other factors, such as how fast a user is making posts, or whether the post contains suspicious text such as hyperlinks, the HTTP headers, and the country or IP range being posted from, to decide whether to demand a captcha. Even using Recaptcha could be better than what 4chan does if it wasn't required for every post. Still, it's a good question what sort of captcha people should use if they need to. I'm not sure if I have the answer. If I were in that situation, I would be inclined to roll my own. Because an attacker would have to break my captcha specifically, it would make the site less attractive to spam. Granted, it would probably be a weak captcha. And I've seen many people design captchas with serious obvious flaws, such as the old obfuscated CSS captcha 8chan used at one point, and the trivially OCR-able captcha on Endchan where they for some inscrutable reason draw colored blobs over the letters that interfere with humans reading it but not computers. But even the obfuscated CSS one required some effort for people to break it (the one on Endchan, not so much). But more important than captcha is a system that prevents abuse even in the event a captcha is broken. In particular, it's good to limit the total thread creation rate (or at least the pruning rate) so spammers can't wipe the board, something 4chan has failed to do (although the archive alleviates the problem a bit). |
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I don't think alternatives need to compete against the whole of 4chan. It's healthier to have lots of sites, each with their own niche. |
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So captchas aside, what do you plan to have the 4chan-X extension do for allowing users to try other imageboards (perhaps based on the topic of the board they are currently on)? If so, how will such alternative imageboards be rated? |
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I strongly disapprove of this. Although I personally use more sites than 4chan, I don't want to see any alternative or competing imageboards being advertised, as I feel it's against the spirit of free software. |
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Yes, I'm not really sold on the question of whether the abandonment of recaptcha v1 (which no one will be able to use thereafter anyway) will really be a major push for users to move to other imageboards in the first place. And if it is, such users are the ones that are least likely to need assistance choosing a new community. Now although I see your point, I'd like to interject for a moment since Free/Libre Software (Richard Stallman prefers the term Libre to convey Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer) is about ensuring that the source code is open to all, shared for all users, with access to source code never restricted. Free/Libre Software is not and never about imposing any anticommercial or antiprofit conditions: the GPL license even allows that if only paying customers are licensed to use the program, only they have the right to request the source code as the only real licensees, though if they have users of their own those people will also have the right to request source code from them. Neither does it impose any ideological restrictions on how the software should be used: a software license on JSON.org that stipulated "This software shall be used for good and not evil" is not compliant with the Debian Free Software guidelines: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research." To clarify how perfectly legal profit models can be constructed with GPL software, With PyQt for example, they offer a free GPL version so that only Free/Libre software also under the GPL can use their libraries without risk of copyright infringement. They only provide an LGPL license (which allows proprietary software to use the library) to paying customers, which has been a solid profit model. Instructure's Canvas (and similarly, 8chan's Infinity-next) also uses the Affero GPL in this way whereby all users are required to share the source code of any operating Canvas backend instances, so that users get the source code of the server backend and Instructure then has the ability to take any features that competitors develop on Canvas for their own benefit. Instructure then issues conventional GPL or LGPL licenses only to paying customers that want to keep their server changes proprietary without running the risk of copyright infringement. The result is that many colleges have been able to use Instructure Canvas by deploying and maintaining the source code without cost, but also contribute back bugfixes and features to the codebase as free labor. Colleges which stubbornly demand the right to keep their source code secret, or just want Instructure to maintain their cloud for them thus pay Instructure handsomely for that right, in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars. Both these examples serve to protect the user's right to request the source code and aim to push proprietary developers to adopt similar source code sharing rules or face tariffs, lawsuits, or other penalties. Although proprietary software might continue to have to exist, at least proprietary developers will thus have to pay such open source developers handsomely for freeloading off of Free/Libre software. |
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I think those 'high quality posters' you're talking about will have or had a 4chan pass for years. At least I do. It might be handy posting a poll somewhere (maybe /g/?) to see if users feel really affected by this. You can't simply say users who use captcha v1 = high quality posters |
It's not that high quality posters necessarily use Recaptcha v1; it's that the people who say they will be leaving 4chan for this reason are higher quality than average simply because they know about the feature at all. And I would expect anyone using 4chan X to be higher quality than average also.
Many people have commented that they would leave 4chan if Recaptcha v1 was removed: https://desuarchive.org/a/thread/162913805/#162980382 As I've said, I expect this to be a minority of 4chan's users, but still a large number, especially compared to the size of most altchans.
This is a fair point.
The sense in which I agree with this is that we want to make sure the software is serving the users' instead of our own interests. Software that doesn't serve the users can still be free software, but it will be forked and changed so it does serve the users. In this spirit, if I decide to go ahead with this, it should be minimally annoying and maximally informative. 4chan X is probably going to show some sort of message anyway explaining to users that Recaptcha v1 is dead; otherwise I would get a slew of needless bug reports asking why it is broken. It's not very annoying to add a short bit to the message saying something to the affect of "a list of boards welcoming affected users is [here]." A list on a separate page like that (that is, not within 4chan X) would also be easier for people to link on 4chan for the benefit of people not using 4chan X. And it might be useful to compile such a list even if I decide not to link it from 4chan X. Organizing the list by the boards on 4chan each site would be most relevant to would still be a good idea. We could even avoid making our own list and simply link to existing directories like http://www.allchans.org/. But I've always found those a bit lacking. We should probably link to such places anyway if we do make a captcha refugee focused list. Another thing that could be improved along the lines of being informative rather than prescriptive is dropping any of my personal bias and having the list open to any sites, rather than just "deserving" sites or "preferably not 8ch-style board hosting services or sites with a reputation for raids on 4chan". |
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We've got a wiki here, so we might as well get started: @mewch and @samachannel: Please add your site to the wiki page if you still want to participate. Whether I end up linking this from 4chan X will depend on how useful the list ends up being and user reactions to the idea. |
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I have in the past explored rebasing my ui for nntpchan (decentralized imageboard of doom ™ powered by usenet) atop 4chan-x but that was a while ago and idk how much the code changes. If 4chan splits again perphaps consider a "decentralized" solution? In all honesty I don't think that very many will migrate off 4chan because of lack of alternative captcha. |
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As Riot/Matrix (slack and irc replacement) and Pawoo/Mastodon (microblogging) show, federation is the killer feature that allows a viable alternative to centralized social networks to be constructed, uniting these little communities into big competitors. If there must be a successor to 4chan in the future, it will probably be using a federated protocol like NNTPChan. @majestrate At the Bibliotheca Anonoma (we run Desuarchive and Rbt.asia and wiki.bibanon.org), we are considering a possible NNTPChan setup that could revitalize the network. We should probably aim to add NNTP support to multiple popular imageboard scripts such as tinyboard, foolfuuka, and infinity so that these diaspora of little imageboards can become one great alternative. Contact us on irc.rizon.net #bibanon if you're interested in this effort. There may still be clustering (like gmail with email), and the nodes to federate with will probably have to group up to follow the laws of the nation the server is hosted in. No pizza bullshit for example, which killed the last attempt outside of tor... But hey, 4chan follows the laws of the State of California anyway, so we might as well abide the same. |
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I disagree with your prediction. Some small percentage of paranoid users might leave, but they've been leaving for years; if this is the straw that breaks the camel's back, it really makes me wonder why they ignored all the previous straws. The majority of today's 4chan users don't care if Google tracks them; March 31 2018 will be a non-event. |
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@antonizoon Tinyboard and Infinity are both unmaintained abandoned branches. Please don't waste time porting NNTPchan network functionality to them. Vichan is still being maintained (by me and @czaks), that's the fork to target. Tinyboard users have an upgrade path to Vichan; Infinity users are using deprecated software and should either switch to the N. T. Technology sponsored OpenIB fork or switch to a more sane software like LynxChan. |
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@ctrlcctrlv I see, the imageboard engine ecosystem has progressed tremendously from when I last looked at it. Any other imageboard/textboard systems of note? I found Monaba to be awesome. |
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Going to try reviving this idea for what it's worth now that they've killed the noscript captcha. I expect this won't be the last time captcha gets worse either. |
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I obviously recommend that 8kun not be considered for recommendation. |
EDIT: I am trying to put together a list of 4chan alternatives welcoming 4chan users who are locked out by or are unwilling to put up with the ever worsening reCAPTCHA v2, which, unless something changes from 4chan's end, will be the only captcha option available on 4chan after March 31, 2018.
https://github.com/ccd0/4chan-x/wiki/4chan-Alternatives
Anyone is welcome to add their imageboard to the list. This includes boards hosted on 8ch and similar services, even though I said in the original post "preferably not." I still encourage people to host their boards on servers they control themselves, but that is just my opinion.
Whether this list gets linked in 4chan X in a one-time notice delivered only to reCAPTCHA v1 users depends on the quality of the list that emerges and how users feel about it. We should also encourage people to try "Force Noscript Captcha" or audio captcha.
Original post below:
On March 31, 4chan will suffer a serious decline in usability. When that happens, some fraction of 4chan's users will get fed up and leave. It probably won't be significant from 4chan's perspective, but could be massive for alternative sites which are very lucky to have a tenth of 4chan's users. What's more, this exodus will be different from many previous exoduses because the users leaving will be higher quality posters than the average anon, rather than low-quality posters leaving because they got banned. After all, the new and the clueless are unlikely to even know that the option to use legacy captcha exists.
I think 4chan X should help the process along by recommending alternate sites. Recommendations could be shown in place of the text captcha in cases where it fails to load. Different recommendations could be shown for different boards.
To do this, I need to compile a list of boards that are willing, ready, and
deservingto take a large influx of slightly above-average quality 4chan refugees.Preferably not 8ch-style board hosting services or sites with a reputation for raids on 4chan.I am neither seeking nor accepting compensation; these are not paid ads.The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: