How do 4chan threads work

Poole has worked on other projects beyond 4chan in recent years. In , for instance, he launched a site called Canvas, which allowed users - logged in through Facebook Connect - to upload digitally modified images. Poole announced in that Canvas would be going out of business. Go to www. You can select any board from the main page.

You will have to agree to the site's disclaimer before viewing any board. Once you open a board, you will notice all the semi-random names for 4chan boards listed horizontally at the top of the site. Click on any of those links to navigate from board to board.

The Home link -found near the top right-hand side of every board - will lead you back to www. The site doesn't allow any board to have more than 10 pages at a time, meaning threads expire or are pruned at a relatively high rate.

Most content is actually only available for a few hours or days. If you'd like to see the very latest threads posted to a board at any given moment, hit the Refresh link at the bottom of a board. To start a new thread on any of the site's boards, you must click the Start a New Thread link and then upload an image 4chan is an imageboard, after all. There is no account registration process on 4chan. Most users tend to post threads anonymously, simply by leaving the name field blank.

To reply to an existing thread aka to comment , click the Reply button near the thread and then the Post a Reply link. Comments do not require images. You can adjust your settings, such as how you preview quotes or whether you want all threads to auto-update with the latest comments, by going to the Settings link at the top-right of any board. To search threads, use the search box on the right-hand side of a board, just above the top thread.

Next to the search box you will also see a Catalog button. It will make each thread appear as thumbnails in a grid-like view. You can select a thumbnail to view the entire thread in full. Breaking the rules may result in post deletion, a temporary ban, or even permanent banishment. Check out 4chan's Rules page for more information about what you can or cannot do while using the site.

An example rule includes: "You will immediately cease and not continue to access the site if you are under the age of That said, following the public backlash surrounding the theft of personal celebrity images, 4chan changed its rules to comply with US copyright laws more specifically, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In other words, copyright-infringing images were typically removed before the copyright holder even noticed a violation of their rights. Tonnes of personal photos belonging to more than celebrities have been released on 4chan over the last month, but most of those threads immediately led to deleted pages. Even new threads tend to stop working within minutes of creation. Anonymous is a term loosely used to describe an international network of hackers self-described as hacktivists.

Anonymous members are called Anons, and they're distinguishable through the use of Guy Fawkes masks worn both in public and in online avatars. Anonymous began in , through a 4chan imageboard, and has since become known for a series of well-publicised cyberattacks and stunts. There are a few different things you can enter in the email field of a reply; your browser will cookie these so you don't have to enter then over and over agin, assuming you've upgraded from Netscape, anyway.

Click on a post number and it'll be entered in your reply field; when you post your response it'll show up as a link that jumps to the post that you replied to.

The more posts you reply to, the more sound your argument. This is supposed to indicate a quotation of someone else's post, but as no one one 4chan has any respect for petty distinctions like intellectual property, hardly anyone does this. Much more common is reductive quoting:. Benefits include but are not limited to:.