Chanarchive

Notice: The modern successor to the Chanarchive is the 4archive. - (archived at http://4chanarchives.cu.cc) Nowhere near as good, but it's something where you can submit threads to be slurped down.

The Chanarchive (formerly 4chanarchive) was the first, the largest, and the most important 4chan archive site ever built, until the dawn of the Fuuka archivers. It was created by an anon known as capsized, and contained somewhere from 15,000-20,000 threads.

Users could request and vote that a thread be archived, and it worked for every single board on 4chan. This made it an incredibly important repository of 4chan's threads from 2006-2013.

Capsized eventually decided to close the site on 2012, but a group of anons that recovered Encyclopedia Dramatica, including Edgeworth E. Euler, convinced him to transfer the 500GB archive to them. Unfortunately, it was permanently lost when Edgeworth E. Euler, the final owner, became MIA around 2013 (he may have been imprisoned following raids on LulzSec, or died).

The site eventually shut down when one hard drive got busted, and the admins could do nothing, as the data access passwords were taken by Edgeworth to his grave.

The Bibliotheca Anonoma, in a new attempt at Internet Archeology, is attempting to catalogue the threads that were on this massive library, and perhaps resurrect a significant portion from the many snapshots at the Internet Archive. But we can't bring back everything, especially not the images.

Timeline

• 2006 - The 4chanarchive is founded.
• 2011-02-17 - 4chanarchive is transformed into the Chanarchive.
• 2012-02-11 - The original owner of Chanarchive announces that it must shut down, due to lack of funding. Edgeworth E. Euler and other members of Anonymous and the ED Archival Team convince him to provide them with backups of the site.
• 2012 - Edgeworth E. Euler and the rest of the ED Archival Team take full ownership of Chanarchive and restores it to working order. The Bibliotheca Anonoma attempted to request an archive be backed up somewhere safe, but does not succeed (lacking a place to put it).
• 2014-06-02 - A moderator of Chanarchive announces that the website has been lost entirely. Because the owner of the hard disks, Edgeworth E. Euler with his SRSVPS account, is MIA, the hard drives cannot be legally accessed and are presumed to have been scrapped or wiped.

Restoration

However, there is a possible way to restore a significant portion (if not all) of the archives. Archive.org extensively crawled the site during all 7 years of it's existence, so the older threads will definitely have at least one snapshot.

• Wayback Machine - 4chanarchive.org (2006-2012)
• Wayback Machine - Chanarchive.org (2012-2013)
  • Wayback Machine - Chanarchive.org, direct link

However, images might not have survived the move well, even thumbnails might be scarce. The odds get thinner as we get to the new threads as well.

And it is not enough to just sift through the mess of snapshots. We need to be able to gather a list of links to the threads that still exist, otherwise nobody can find them.

The Bibliotheca Anonoma has taken on the immense task of cataloguing all the threads that was once on Chanarchive, and then seeing what threads are still alive at Archive.org.

Cataloguing

We must categorize and make a list of all that was lost. The featured threads on twitter are a good start.

• Original 4chanarchive Twitter
• New Chanarchive Twitter

The next part is to gather links from the homepage snapshots on Archive.org, and see which ones have the thread saved.

Known Epic Threads

Take these into the Bibliotheca Anonoma as articles.

• Bayeux Creepypasta - Creepypasta of Medieval Times.
• Stanleyrr - An elderly YouTuber Declared as Uncle /b/
  • Know Your Meme
  • Blogspot - Baltazar2

4archive

A modern successor to the Chanarchive, saving threads since 2014.

• Best of 4chan Thread