Vichan

Vichan is a BBS software developed on top of Tinyboard. Famously it isn't well made, and is no longer maintained. It's slowly being superseated as time passes by more customizable and actively maintained alternatives, such as Kokonotsuba (Heyuri's in house software) and Lynxchan.

Vichan has been developed by a variety of people over the years, including Kuz, Angeleno, and other folks. It's also the longest developed, on paper, dating back to around 2012. Various forks have been spun off from it to power other imageboards, but throughout it's lifetime it's maintained itself as a solid choice, particularly when it was most popular.

There has been a notable amount drama and history regarding it's development, but it's hard to find any records on the subject.

End of life

On July 7th, 2026, Angeleno archived the github repository and added the following to it's README:

Vichan has reached its end of life. many of us have lost interest in the project, and the current direction of the internet has not been good for imageboards, whether its ID verification laws, big social media companies killing competition, or Google being hostile towards smaller sites. There are other imageboard engines out there but even if you use them, these are still issues you will need to think about if you start an imageboard or UGC website. You can still install or fork vichan, but do so at your own risk.

vichan is dead, and any further development made by other sites are kept to their own (usually closed source) forks, or have moved off/are in the progress to their own inhouse engines. Sites like Kissu and 39chan are examples of the latter.