Plagued 4chan - the Internet hate machine

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Will the 4chan hack be the end of it?

  • Yes, goodbye forever 4chan

    Votes: 1,031 18.5%

  • No, they will rise from the ashes, stronger than ever

    Votes: 343 6.2%

  • This will rattle them but it will be forgotten about next week

    Votes: 2,323 41.7%

  • I am just here for the janny phonebooking

    Votes: 1,093 19.6%

  • What the fuck is 4chan

    Votes: 218 3.9%

  • Yotsuba&!

    Votes: 569 10.2%
  • Total voters
    5,577
triforce9001 said:
Were they to actually replace the underlying software, we'd be talking about idk, at least a month or two of downtime before they could bring the site back online.
Click to expand...

And this is where you lose me and a lot of other people.

It'd be like you have this really old school bar that the locals love, rowdy crowd. Built in the thirties. The water heater is a fire hazard, there's asbestos in the walls, there's a really bad rodent issue, there's frayed cloth wiring. Somebody plugged in a space heater to some shitty wiring (that they suspected was shitty and were hoping it was) and it started a fire. You know about a lot of the other problems now because you had an appraiser come out from your insurance company and point out oh yeah, not only do you have the asbestos, but the floors are water damaged from the water used to fight the fire and that's going to lead to black mold.

It's so bad that with some more time, your appraiser/inspector might with some additional input come to the conclusion that your beloved restaurant is a total loss. More expensive to repair than it is worth. Pour a new foundation, build new construction, put up the new watering hole.

Rather than saying okay what can I save (what really needs no retouching), what requires replacement (OS reinstall, new PHP version) and what needs overhaul (gotta rip up the damaged floors and replace them), you decide that people love the old drinking hole so much that you're gonna replace the water heater, only replace the wiring that has visible burn marks, and then cover the water damaged wood flooring up with laminate. After all it'd be more expensive to actually replace the flooring underneath and folks really want to come back and we gotta reopen.

I'm sorry, but any argument that prioritizes opening the site ASAP when the scope of the hack was so bad that basically everything became open air is not appropriate. You know have a motivated group of people and plenty of people with an axe to grind (or just are flat out bored looking for the lulz) who now know all of the aspects of the site software, which gives them ammunition to run amok when the site is invariably brought online with insufficient hardening.

One may argue the site costs money to run, and the longer its down, the more costs accrue that cannot be borne, but that's the type of logic that leads to the shitty decisions that put profit over doing the right job to fix it that just lead to a second fire at that bar. And if the site gets hacked again then like the bar catching fire again people probably aren't going to want to work there and risk their safety (PII in the case of the jans/mods).

If you want to make the argument that the site software is so intrinsically core to what 4chan is that replacing it would destroy the spirit of the site, that would be an argument for a comprehensive review, extremely careful, to make the site resilient and secure while changing it to bring back with as little alteration as possible. A lot of us would probably take issue with that extremely narrow definition of what makes a site a site, and argue that other points you made like 4chan X having to append the site to add huge quality of life improvements to what is a very dated site is proof that making quality of life improvements is something the site administration should be doing, but accepting the argument that Yotsuba makes 4chan feel how it is does not then support the argument that they should do the bare minimum to pop up the site ASAP when it's clear the existing site software has a lot of warts.

What the site risks in bringing the site back with no improvements (arguably just detractions like killing /f/ and PDF upload, I'll acknowledge these are probably more niche for more posters, I'm just saying that removing shit while adding nothing is all stick with no carrot) and prioritizing a rush to the finish line is that it gets pwned quickly and then people really do decide to move on. Beyond a lack of mods/jans making it an unusable hellhole of spam and ungodly illegal content and damage to user faith on having the site go down again.

I hope I'm wrong, because I'm not a hater. But having seen this line of thinking many many times in software implementations before - it almost always ends very poorly.
 
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Enig said:
Larger file size limits since they touted having new hardware
More than one file per post
Webp support because it obliterated gif and apng
Actually use wide screen space instead of clustering entirely into a 3:2 safe zone to the left
Stop restricting sound videos to a few boards while crying lolsuit
Actually suppress the coomers and schizos instead of letting it run rampant
Bigger oekaki pad

Or, y’know, a lot of the shit 8chan.co had in 2014/2015 they had an entire decade to embrace like all other imageboard software did (webp support is new tho)
Click to expand...
>webp support
why not go for the actually good choice jpegXL?
 
ITT:
mw2.webp
 
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