Jay's U-18Chan Development Blog

A Brief History of U-18Chan

I have told people about the site’s history a few times before, but have never sat down to write it all out. Which is very silly of me, because it means I’ve had to write it out again and again and again. But no more! Read all about how the best furry imageboard of all time was created after the break. Yeah, we’re taking that title.

To understand why U-18Chan was made, you have to know what the Aurorafurries where. A long long time ago, back in 2006, there was a shitty website called Aurorachan. This website had several administrators, one of which went by Maritan, or Mari. Mari claims to be a girl, so we’ll go with that for the sake of simplicity. One day while on a yet another shitty website (I think it was lulz.net, but can not remember for sure) she got talking to a very drunk Polish guy, who went by Serpentor (Yes, the G.I. Joe villain. Serpentor loved that shit) and a German guy who went by Trapper. Stuff happened and the next day, Aurorachan had a /fur/ board that Serpentor and Trapper where moderators of. Here, they organized themselves with some other users to help them dump yiff on 4Chan. All the cool kids where doing it back then. They began dumping regularly in 4Chan for a couple of days, and linking back to Aurorachan to “recruit” more furries.

Meanwhile, I had been lurking 4Chan for a couple of years, but never posted. I was always happy as a lurker anyway, saving funny pictures and learning more about all the memes and junk. I had looked through many furry threads before, but never saved anything until the 100M GET, where I decided that now was as good a time to start as any. I then began posting, not exclusively in furry threads though. I had also joined a few groups for a short amount of time, such as the Patriotic Nigras and LOLWUTTV. Sadly, both of these groups sort of fell apart just a few months after, so I left. It was fun while it lasted though, and I pissed off a lot of people by simply being a furry, which was awesome and lulzy. I still remembered all the cool groups I had read about on the interwebs, and what they had accomplished in the past. I really wanted to find a group to join up, and help them become awesome enough that everyone would stay entertained, and be remembered. Sure, it was a bit childish maybe. But it was fun, and I was only 16 at the time anyway. (Sorry mom and dad) So when I saw a thread recruiting for the Aurorafurries, I joined up right away.

On the Aurorachan website, there was a sitckied thread meant for planning operations. This is what dumping on 4Chan became known as for a very long time, due to convenience and persist use of the word. A lot of people where talking, but I did not see a lot getting done. You could tell who the leaders where, Serpentor and some guy who went by Fox. I tried adding to the conversation and asking some questions, but did not get a reply. I noticed several other people in the same situation as well, and thought it was a shame that this sort of things tends to happen in many groups. So, I decided to make a post for all the eager but ignored users such as myself. I suggested we all make furry MSN accounts that are not linked to our IRL stuff, and trade those addresses so we could talk together. I left mine, and waited. I did not have to wait long until I had a new friend request on MSN. That’s how I met Filthy. Right away we became friends, talking about what we wanted to do to help the group, our history on 4Chan, and all that good stuff. The next day, Filthy introduced me to Spud, the newest member of our small group. The three of us had the idea of posting combos, since we had a clear advantage by using three people. Of course, furry combos made poeple pretty mad on 4Chan, and where a great way to draw others in for a yiff dump. I had two IP’s at the ready, so together we could post four part combos. It was still very dificult though, and somewhat exiting. If you don’t know what the deal is with “4Chan combos”, look it up or something. I’m sure someone has explained it somewhere.

Later, we got yet another new recruit, Slicc! I introduced him to Spud and Filthy, and we all continued with our combo posting. I took the position of coordinator, making sure we had establishes procedures and turns, and that we all had the same combos. Filthy took the role of recruiter, finding more people to join us. Eventually, we even got Trapper to join our group. It was exiting knowing that we got the attention of an Aurorachan moderator. See, we did not realize that we joined the site when the /fur/ board was only four days old or so. We thought it was well established and had been around for a while. We had a lot of fun posting combos, and teaching Trapper English. It’s hard to explain why combos where so much fun, but it really got you going. I remember Trapper saying his heart “felt like a race car engine” when we where timing posts. It did get pretty intense, since we had a very small window for posting in. I won’t get into the details of how we did it, but it was a lot of fun.

So this had been going on for a week or so, and then one morning, Filthy linked me to this shitty Xat chat room that Serpentor had made for the furs on Aurorachan. By then, we had also adopted the name “Aurorafurries”. Clever, right? I became frustrated with how the chat worked and left, since I had work that day anyway. But the next day, I got it figured out. Filthy was already a moderator by then, and made me a member. I remembered thinking to myself that I didn’t care what rank I was, or if I ever got any recognition for helping in the group. All I wanted was to do my best to help make it a group I could be proud of. Ironically, I would later climb my way up the ranks and eventually become the leader of the Aurorafurries years later. But that is an entirely different story. All of our current administrators with the exception of Akamaru wet each other in this Aurorafurries chat.

Now though Aurorachan /fur/ was our base of operations, it was by no means a good imageboard. We used to dump our collections there so we’d have access to them later if needed, and kept everything well organized, but the site kept having software issues and lost our content multiple times. The administrator who made it, Mari, seemed to not give a shit about it though. But hey, what could we do? I think you can tell where this is going already. But for completeness’ sake; Filthy contacted me about a *Chan he was starting with someone he met online. They where calling it FilthyBastaardChan, because the other guy’s online handle was Basaard. He asked me if I wanted to help him administrate it, since he had been impressed with my group organizational skills during combo posting. Apparently some shit went down with it, and the site was gone the next day. But Filthy and I still wanted to make a website. Apparently Filthy had made a board on ImageBoard4Free back when you could only make a single board, and it had gotten quite popular. But since then, the site had evolved so you could make an entire *Chan on it. So, Filthy and I created FilthySlothChan. The reason for this being my handle was AlienSloth Man (that’s a different story) so it worked. We organized the website into a few boards. The ones I remember where /fur/ - Furries, /c/ - Comics, /s/ - Sexy Beautiful Women, and /lo/ - Lounge. I’m sure there where others though, and U-18Chan has certainly had many boards added, removed, and changed in it’s history. The site was mostly used to store all of our content though, since Aurorachan kept losing our stuff, and only gave us one board. We had Spud join us as well, though he was a bit hesitant about being an administrator right away. He was always like that though, haha.

Slowly, our site became more and more popular, and started to get actual users. Eventually, it was clear that our website was far superior to Aurorchan’s. Now at this point, I was an ‘owner’ (Xat equivalent of administrator) in the Aurorafurries group, and suggested Filthy and I talk to Serpentor about making our site the official one to use. By now the site had gone through many names, but was currently called U-18Chan. This was because we’d change the name after raiding a place to avoid being DDoSed and slowing down then entire IB4F server. The url of the chan changed with the name. U-18Chan was meant to be a temporary name I picked because I thought the submarine joke was suitable. Serpentor agreed to move our base site, but we all decided it would be best to just not tell Mari or post about it on Aurorachan. This way we’d avoid her throwing a hissy fit while we where busy trying to move people over. This strategy was a success, and Mari smartly admitted defeat when she later found out. Some time later, the /fur/ board on Aurorachan was deleted.

A lot happened back then though, and even more in the time up to now. The most significant change for the site was when ImageBoard4Free went down. By then, we had our own domain, but where left waiting to see if IB4F would come back up. Sadly, it never did, so we started fresh on a Kusaba X installation and a similar style, same board layouts. I also had to start paying for our own server. Now we where a real imageboard, with nothing to fall back on. We lasted a good while with this, but we had to upgrade out server from a VPS to a dedicated machine, and where STILL having performance problems with Kusaba X. Eventually, we had to lock down the site because another post would crash the server and prevent it from booting. Out of desperation, I contacted the IB4F owner (who had helped us out a great deal in the past) and he gave us the IB4F software, which was grand. We quickly installed it and converted our database over.

Since then, we have undergone yet another server upgrade and many software modifications, but that is nothing new to us. We have always made the extra effort to improve our site when users said it was already perfect. But still, through our entire history, from a random board for storing images, to the largest *Chan on ImageBoard4Free, to the largest furry imageboard on the entire Internet, we have always kept two things exactly the same since day one. We have always had a pawstika in the upper right hand corner of the site, and we have always been an imageboard by furries, for furries.

I’d also like to thank all of our staff and my fellow administrators. U-18Chan would not be what it is now if it was not for everyone who has helped us over the years. And Filthy, though you are not around much anymore, we still all miss you. In conclusion, I find closure knowing that I did achieve my goal from all those years ago. I am proud to say I am not only the administrator of U-18Chan, but also a member.