Hispachan

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

~ the obituary ~

Spanish is the second most spoken first language on earth and for most of the 2000s it did not have a 4chan. There were small national boards instead, Sectachan in Mexico and 6-chan in Chile among them, each with a few hundred people and no particular reason to talk to the others. On 17 November 2012 somebody calling himself Zeta opened one address for all of them.

Hispachan was built on the Futaba layout everybody copies, with threads of images and no accounts anywhere in it, and then organized in a way the Japanese and American boards never needed. Roughly thirty five boards, twelve of which were countries. You went to the Venezuelan board or the Peruvian board the way you would walk into a different room of the same house, and the general boards sat above them for anyone who wanted the argument to be continental instead of local.

The Turkish internet of the same decade never produced one of these at any size. What we had was forums with real accounts: donanimhaber for hardware, frmtr for everything else, where your post count sat under every message and your signature carried your specifications. Reputation was the whole currency. An imageboard runs on the exact opposite arrangement, where nothing you write is ever attached to you again, and reading about Hispachan is the closest I have come to understanding what that does to a conversation over ten years.

By March 2021 a disinformation research outfit put numbers on it. More than 27 million posts and 1.15 million visits across six months, with over 10,000 users on an ordinary day and close to 50,000 on a busy one. More than thirty percent of that traffic came from Venezuela, a country where the formal media environment had collapsed and an anonymous board was one of the few places left where nobody could be identified for what they said. The servers were in the Netherlands.

~ the case file ~

~ the part that is not nostalgic ~

Anonymity at that scale produced what it always produces. The same research write-up catalogs posts tied to an assassination in Mexico in 2015 and to a school shooting there in 2017. It also records a coordinated hoax in 2016 built around a fake terrorist site, revenge imagery and threats aimed at journalists in 2019, and an attack on Venezuela's state telecom company credited to users of the board. That is the record, and a grave for a community of this shape is not worth writing if it leaves the record out.

It is also why the people studying Latin American information operations knew the address at all. Hispachan turns up in monitoring work as a place to watch for coordination, which is a strange kind of importance for a website whose front page was mostly jokes in Spanish.

~ the pause, and the sequel that never shipped ~

In March 2018 the boards went dark. The stated reason was that Zeta had things going on in his own life and was rebuilding the whole thing on new software, a successor he called Hispagold. The site came back in November, eight months later, on the old code. Hispagold was never released.

That gap is the tell for everything that came after. One person paid for the hosting and ran the moderation and wrote the code, for a site with tens of thousands of daily users, and when that person needed a break the entire Spanish-speaking anonymous internet had nowhere to go for most of a year.

~ the last week ~

The closure was announced on 25 May 2022 from the site's own Twitter account, and the schedule in it was precise. Posting would stay open until the night of 31 May. The site would remain readable but closed until 12 June, when everything would be deleted and the address would serve one page of links and text. The announcement ended with a line aimed squarely at the users: this is the future they chose.

It did not run exactly to plan. A reader who was watching says the administrator posted something on 2 June that read like a joke about the site not closing after all, and the next day the address was showing a sentence saying Hispachan had closed its doors. Ten years of boards, and the thing that decided the hour was one tired person at a keyboard.

~ nothing in the wayback machine ~

Ask the Internet Archive for hispachan.org and it answers with a 403 and a single line: this URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine. No captures for any year, under any subdomain. The largest Spanish-language imageboard that ever ran is, as far as the world's main web archive is concerned, a domain that never existed.

What exists instead is an item uploaded on 4 June 2022 by a user called Changa Escobar, ten pages saved by hand as PDFs and HTML in the hours before the deletion, with a note apologizing that there was not time for more. The thread titles in it are the ones you would expect. El final. Gracias por todo. One stranger with a save-as dialog is the entire archive of 27 million posts.

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