World2ch
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World2ch was a (primarily) English-language 2ch-type bulletin board website, which also featured a couple of imageboards. It was first created on March 3, 2003 by a user known as RIR6.[1] It was one of the first multi-language Japanese-style BBSes (predating 4chan by 7 months), and was made with the purpose of being a 2channel for foreigners. Unfortunately, mismanagement by RIR6 led to the site activity dying off before finally shutting down during late May 2004.
An unaffiliated revival site was started in 2022 by Angeleno, who bought up the original domain name and first promoted/discussed the project on Heyuri. Angeleno left the project in mid-2024, and the site is now presumed to be operated by a certain anti-Heyuri troll who spams mentions of the site everywhere.
Original 2003 site
Mostly comprising of 2ch-type boards for discussion varying from News to Motors to Games, the majority of the site had fractured small communities. The large variety of boards ended up pretty inactive.
Birth and development
RIR6 was, at the time, a 16 year old Japanese student living in Tokyo, initially hosting the site on one of those free geocities-like hosting services under the domain 'newswatch.cool.ne.jp/world2ch/world2ch.html'.
On April 2003, it was then moved to the 'world2ch.net' domain, where it would flourish and become a more fleshed out site, where Westerners slowly began to come in and interact with the place, and also interact with more of the Eastern side of the internet; particularly after world2ch started being advertised on other sites such as Something Awful.
The actual imageboard part of the site came around soon after, with 2 boards. the Grotesque board was for sharing guro, and the Imgboard was just a general site, all of which using an early version of GazouBBS.
- drama between it and 4chan? needs moar research. think its about stolen code or something
Death
As quoted from the world2ch Historical Society's end of world2ch section:[2]
At some point RIR6 broke the hell out of the script (best guess: Feb of 2004). Prior to this, signs of wear started to show through. In particular, double posts were routine (and can still be seen in the wayback machine). Eventually, you could only see the first discussion in any given subject. It went downhill from there and quickly became entirely unusable to the point you could no longer reply without a great deal of effort (I recall I could make it work if I saved and edited the page on my side to fix the mistake; not even worth the effort by that point). It was never repaired or reverted. If I had to venture a guess, I'd assume that RIR6 had to go back to school and forgot about us and his site.
Most of the users had jumped ship by this point anyway, including myself. The image boards continued to work and with no moderation were quickly filled full of disgusting/illegal things. In addition, the image boards also had no upward post limit, so not only was it full of terrible things, it was full of A LOT of them. At a certain point, I had stopped checking on these as they were completely out of control. The hosting company most likely found out about it and pulled the plug. Few people noticed.
It was gone from the servers by late May of 2004. The last hint of RIR6's involvement in world2ch appears to be 1 May 2004 in This archived thread, post 179. In any extant online conversation at all: 7 May 2004 here. (both links were dead(?))
It was succeeded early on by world4ch which merged with 4chan and later by the slightly more accurate (sparsely populated, kind of sad) 4-ch.
According to Shii (post: 27 August 2004):
World2ch died a slow and painful death. First RIR7 outlawed Japanese text for no apparent reason, then he inexplicably only let people enable it when they used the email “aa”, which was the worst of both worlds. Next, as the mighty sum of what was no doubt weeks of work, he introduced an entirely useless “language” drop-down menu next to each reply that made the boards confusing and decreased their popularity. Then he somehow broke the script so that nothing seemed to happen when you hit “Reply”– I'm not sure how he managed to do that, but that's what happened– which led to a huge drop in posting, and a lot of double and triple-posts by confused users. Finally, he screwed up the CGI script in some way that he couldn't fix at all; apparently he doesn't like to test out scripts before he uploads them to his website, or even make backups after he hacks together some useless feature. He shut down the boards temporarily and said he was going to fix it, but instead he stopped paying for the server and world2ch was gone forever.
As for why it failed aside from the technical difficulties, that's a bit more complex. RIR6 had sole control over the site and no one else was allowed to help. As a high school student, he certainly didn't have the time to do it alone and certainly not at the hours that his users in the USA/Europe were operating. In addition to that, he had entirely different notions of what the site should be and was confused by the things his foreign users got up to. Clearly, he wanted to discuss serious things (for a high school student) like the news and politics. We, on the other hand, wanted to make shift-JIS dicks and insult one another… It's clear to see why he lost interest in us.
That brings us to the philosophical reasons why it failed on a spiritual level or whatever. As I've brought up before, the 2ch system was completely alien to the West. It was difficult to accept except among those that were already in the know. Basically it was abandoned because it grew unusable, but it was never helped by the users themselves. All-in-all, 4chan killed it more than anything. 4chan brought the format without the hassle of the previous cultural overhead and in the end succeeded where w2ch failed (except for all that money it lost and continues to lose). It was a community that was alive and it was not burdened with forced alien memes. It developed its own domestic culture with only the slightest remnants of the past. Those text boards that followed it did much the same in their own way.
If there is a major legacy, it's that the format (and how to fully exploit it) is now widely recognized and understood in the West. People know that they don't have to register, they don't have to provide an e-mail address, and they can say what they like when presented with the familiar reply form.
tl;dr: RIR6 broke and subsequentially abandoned the site while there was a conflict of interest between westerners and him. The community wanted to post silly bullshit, but he wanted SERIOUS BUSINESS, and ended up fucking everything in the process. The majority of people progressively left, particularly when 4chan was basically the same thing, just with a more fun and interesting culture that wasn't mostly imported from 2ch.
Revival site
This page may be controversial.
Angeleno era
In late 2022, Angeleno (a regular of a certain Rule 8 website who would go on to occasionally post on Heyuri) bought the domain name and posted on Heyuri's Lounge board about his intention to create a new World2ch. While Angeleno put a lot of work into translating Zero-Channel Plus[3] for the site, the site itself saw very limited use due to a lack of promotion, lack of originality, having more boards than users, spam making the boards unusable, and general admin neglect.
One thing of note is that—during this time—Angeleno hosted a Gikopoipoi instance for Heyuri to use for its Townhall events. The 8th (2023/01/28), 9th (2023/07/25), and 10th (2024/05/11) Townhalls were hosted there, but once it was discovered that world2ch's staff now included a certain anti-Heyuri troll, kaguya made the decision to hold Heyuri's Townhalls elsewhere.
Post-Angeleno era
By June 2024, Angeleno had given the site away to a user named Sewer (Heyuri user and former admin of the now-dead imageboard ProDefCh). Sewer would make a certain anti-Heyuri troll co-admin, who eventually became the sole admin once Sewer stepped away. Instead of world2ch getting a fresh new start, it fell into further disrepair and became something of an anti-Heyuri circlejerk. Eventually Sewer left, leaving only the anti-Heyuri troll; the latter claims to have no involvement anymore and claims that somebody else owns the site, but due to his long history of lying and manipulation, roughly 0 people believe a word he says about anything.
When 4chan went offline for 2 weeks in April 2025 due to hax, "somebody" from world2ch took advantage of the situation by spamming mentions of world2ch on every English anonymous BBS ever; including Heyuri. Since then, world2ch has seen daily activity.
As of writing this in June 2025, world2ch uses various Heyuri-developed/hosted software such as:
- the imageboard software Sakomoto (a Fikaba fork developed by lolico)
- the oekaki BBS software POTI-board EVO (the English version of which was used by Heyuri before any other site in April 2021, and there was some development crossover between POTI-board EVO's developer and Heyuri)
- a Zurubon uploader fork that has been greatly enhanced by various Heyuri developers
Regarding the Zurubon uploader, world2ch intentionally removed Heyuri from the credits section at the bottom of the page. Despite kaguya requesting that they restore the credits, world2ch has thus far made no attempt to do so. This has lead to additional ill feelings towards the site from Heyuri staff-san.
