420chan

» see 420chan.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 2005 my forum life was in Turkish. Donanimhaber and frmtr, hardware threads, a signature block carrying my own specs. The anglophone imageboard world was running a few clicks away for all of those years and I never crossed into it once. 420chan lived over there.

It was founded on 20 April 2005 by Aubrey Cottle, a freelance web developer in Toronto who posted as Kirtaner. The name came out of a conversation with friends and was, in his own description, a stupid combination of 4chan and drugs. There was no registration and no names. The company of record was Taima Enterprises, which is roughly as much corporate structure as an imageboard has ever needed.

What made it briefly famous was a board called /i/, short for invasion. The people organizing there in 2006 and 2007 were among the first to use the word Anonymous about themselves, and the targets are the ones every account still cites: the Habbo Hotel raids, and the campaign against the radio host Hal Turner. Wired covered it in July 2007. A Fox affiliate in Los Angeles ran a television segment the same month, which is how a drug imageboard in Ontario turned up on the American evening news. Habbo had a Turkish version by then and I was several years too old for it, so both ends of that story went past me.

~ the record ~

~ what /i/ was ~

The raid board is the part of 420chan that got written into books, and it is also the part that was over quickest. 4chan had begun clamping down on organized raiding, so the people who wanted to keep doing it needed somewhere that would not delete the threads. 420chan was that somewhere for a couple of years. The mechanics were simple enough that they are still the mechanics: agree a target and a time in a thread, then arrive together.

Cottle's later claim to have been present at the formation of Anonymous is his own account and should be read as such. What is documented is narrower and still substantial. Two of the invasions the mainstream press used to explain Anonymous to its readers were organized on his board, and he was hosting them.

~ the quiet years ~

Then 420chan did something no other imageboard of its generation did, which was get boring on purpose. /i/ receded and the drug boards became the site. For most of the 2010s the traffic was people asking what a dose does and how long the comedown runs, answered by other anonymous people who had been there. It was closer to a harm reduction desk than to anything the 2007 coverage would have led you to expect.

The wrestling board /wooo/ ran alongside it for the whole period, and the LGBT boards /cd/ and /sd/ turn up in academic work on how people came out online in the early 2010s, cited as places where you could ask a question with no name attached to it. That is a strange set of things for one site to have been, and it is the reason the site is worth a grave at all.

~ the day it died ~

On 1 June 2022 420chan.org stopped answering. There was no announcement and no explanation afterward from anyone in a position to give one. A story circulates that police seized the servers, and the dates do not support it: the Ontario Provincial Police raid on Cottle's home happened on 30 August 2022, three months after the site had already gone dark, and the equipment list he published afterward was his own. The honest version is that nobody has said why.

On 20 April 2023, which would have been the eighteenth anniversary, Cottle sold the domain to Fredrick Brennan, who founded 8chan, for 4,200 dollars in Ethereum. Brennan put up a landing page and then in March 2024 pointed the whole domain at leftypol.org, a left-wing imageboard, for his own amusement. That is what answers today. A site built as the place 4chan's exiles could go now forwards you to a board that has nothing to do with it, which is a stranger burial than a takedown would have been.

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