When I first started the Yotsuba Society Boards, I knew that it will never be popular as 4chan. Even though a couple of times they said that it has plenty of potential. The sad truth that anyone can make a chan but it takes a lot of effort to make it into an active chan site. There were big plans that I wanted to do with it, like having the ability to upload video of like mp4’s and the like and have everyone view them.
But sadly, those grand plans never came to fruition because of the fact that it’s relatively new. One of my IRC folk in the YS IRC channel actually told me that it actually take two years for a website for being know. Worse, no one actually donated any cash to the society since its opening. So my thoughts were sadly true and into fruition.
To this day YSchan is merely like an old outdoors message post board. It’s merely one post at a week thing or one post per day or one post per week. Ironically 4chan was like that despite the fact it was launched in one of the largest western forums – The Something Awful forums.
Despite the fact it was inactive is was very interesting for me and to us about how much we learned from the experience first-hand in handling a chan.. Most of our experiences came mostly from the use of Kusaba X before we switched over to Tinyboard. There were six or seven things we learned from it.
1.Backups: Make sure you do at least a weekly back of your board and your site. You think nothing can happen to your chan? Anything can happen to your chan. Like:
a. Failure of the hard disc drive of the company hosting your chan. b. Someone can flood all your posts from one or more boards with spam. c. A board can be wiped due to a cock up of the coding before or after.
Backups of your boards can be easily done via a FTP system. Just drag and drop the entire website into a folder. The folder could be in your internal or external hard drive or in the cloud. Do it every week, and do it before you make any major software upgrades or changes.
2.Your imageboard will never be a popular as 4chan. Let me tell you straight up, 4chan’s popularity is by luck and opportunity two things that American’s don’t seem to notice or care about. It’s primarily because of /b/ and because of that unique thing it will be most chans will never have the popularity of /b/.
By the very least, your imageboard will have one or few posts per week if not be day. If anyone actually posts on your boards. The same thing happened to /b/ when 4chan first started up. Only a few posts at a time. Believe it or not, that is normal for an imageboard to have a few posts per month in the first few years.
As a matter of fact, recently one visitor to the /ys/ board called imageboards like mine “atemporal”. Now the word, temporal is a chan site that has threads independent of time. Which means a board can stay as long as it likes due to the fact that people rather focus on one thread if the userbase is small or low.
3.Do not use Kusaba X: One thing that Kusaba X is useful is that it gives you loads of options to manage your boards and ways to make them unique. Problem is that it’s insecure as shit. And there are plenty of zero-day hacks in Kusaba X that can make your life miserable and waste all that money of upgrades. Trust us, we have been victims of such hacks such as sql injections and board floodings. In terms of security, Kusaba X is garbage.
If you use Kusaba X, please consider getting another board script/software as soon as possible
4.Be active in your community: Post images, make a few thread, on your own board. Make a thread that anyone would be interested in posting. If one thread won’t do it, create another and another and another. That’s how imageboards get known because of content.
5.Give them a reason to come: While anyone can create a imageboard. The best ones are ones that cater to one niche. If not, at least add new features that most imageboards don’t have.
6.Keep a strong passcode and keep it separate from all other sites: Our site got hacked out a couple of times due to one account using a weaker passcode than the others. The best way to use a password is with one upper case, one lower case, and one symbol.
Ndee “Jkid” Okeh Co-Founder and Webmaster of Yotsuba Society.