megabbs

» see megabbs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A 2channel regular posting under the handle Ni-ch Hensha opened his own board on 3 June 2000 and called it 2-hen Channel. He renamed it megabbs on 13 August of the same year. The script was a thread-float board of the kind 2channel had made standard in Japan, and he got his first users by going around 2channel and putting up a thread advertising it on every single board, which years later he still described as a good memory.

It did not look like 2channel. The background was wood grain. Above the post box were checkboxes that the parent site did not have. One forced monospace, so ASCII art and long passages held their shape. Another was a sage box, for replying without floating the thread back to the top. Threads could run to 2,000 replies where 2channel capped them at 1,000, though the site never had enough people to fill that, and most threads sank into the archive well short of it. Regulars were called megabists, after the nickname megabi.

Plenty of boards tried to be the next 2channel and almost none of them lasted. Barbara's 2005 history of the Japanese internet lists megabbs in the small group that survived, next to 15ch and milkcafe, and gives the same reason for all of them: they ran specialist boards for demand 2channel was not serving well, and they were content to be small. megabbs ran for eight and a half years on that.

Turkish forums of the same period had the same shape at their own scale. I was on donanimhaber and frmtr, writing signatures with my hardware list in them, and those boards also ran on one or two people who read everything that got posted. What is different about megabbs is what happened once the reading stopped being a hobby and became a legal obligation.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why he quit ~

The front page on the day it closed gave the reason as a growing management burden and the lawlessness that came from not moderating enough. Speaking to ITmedia the following day, the founder was more specific about what the burden actually was. Requests for investigative cooperation from law enforcement had become frequent, and he was obliged to set aside a fixed amount of his time for them whether or not he had any appetite for it. His estimate was that nearly 100 percent of those requests were school related.

Japan had a word for the thing he was hosting without having set out to host it: gakko ura site, the school underground board, where classmates went to say the things they would not say in a classroom. He also gave a second reason, which is the one the Japanese press picked up. His child was reaching the age of knowing what the internet was, and he could no longer introduce an under-moderated site to that child with a straight face.

~ what it hosted ~

The last years were rough in a documented way. Harassment and personal attacks ran freely, sometimes with real names and addresses attached, and the operator side did almost no deleting. In November 2004 the national media picked up posts on one of its boards that were suspected of having come from the man responsible for the murder of a first-grade girl in Nara, and megabbs was named in newspaper and television coverage of the case.

It also generated something that outlived it. A false claim about the supposed birth names of a well-known television journalist and a sitting member of the Diet started on megabbs and is still circulating in Japanese online politics more than fifteen years later, long after the board that produced it stopped existing. The site is gone and the lie has better uptime than it ever did.

~ the day it went ~

It closed on 4 November 2008 and nobody was told in advance. Users wrote to the founder afterward saying they had lost contact with people they had been talking to for years and had no other way of reaching them, which is what happens when the only address you have for someone is a handle on one board. He told them a certain number of people were still using the site and that closing it had been heartbreaking, then apologized for not being strong enough to keep it going. Some of those users built a replacement board and he put a link to it on the front page, which is the last thing megabbs.com ever did.

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