4Chan is back after nearly two weeks of closure, but still has some serious problems
4chan, a notorious forum known for posting unlinked materials on its anonymous user base, has made a comeback. A post on the website’s official blog, titled “Still Stand”, details the timeline that led to the 4chan’s closure earlier this month. According to the site’s own status checker, the board and home page have risen, but the releases and images are still closed.
The 4chan blog post explains that the host shut down the server on April 14 to prevent hackers from gaining access to the website’s source code after a serious database attack. The blog post marks the event as “disaster” because it violates a large number of 4chan databases with the most important servers. The hacker even broke the website and revealed the personal information of the 4chan Medine team and its many users.
The blog post attributes hacks to information that the site cannot update code and infrastructure due to lack of “skilled working hours”. Not surprisingly, the site starved to death due to money to solve these problems, as 4Chan has a hard time finding willing financial supporters. “It’s rare for advertisers and payment providers to work with 4chan and are quickly under pressure from activists to cancel their services,” the blog post read. “It took nearly a decade to raise funds for new devices.”
Now that the site is back, there will be some key changes. According to the blog post, /f/board will remain closed because the 4chan team cannot block exploits related to common .SWF file formats. For similar reasons, the resurrected 4chan will now disable PDF uploads as well, but will reintroduce them in the near future. Moving forward, 4Chan said it is attracting volunteers to keep up with the workload of putting the website back together. The temperance team obviously won’t let 4chan die easily – “No matter how difficult it is, we won’t give up.” Still, given that it hasn’t solved the root cause of currency to keep its servers up to date, 4Chan will have similar problems in the future.
