No.776
Update: New /otaku/ board with landing sticky for Samachan users at >>>/otaku/Hello sushis, I have a proposal I want to run by you. I have been in discussion with a group of users from the recently shuttered Samachan, who are looking for a new place to live. They were a fairly comfy site with just two boards, and they are in talks with me over how they might adapt to living here without disrupting our own culture too much. I think with the addition of a single board, the rest of their content could probably fit into the existing boards.
I wanted to run this by the userbase to see if there are objections or concerns, and have a conversation about these, before giving them an answer. As a condition of coming here they would be expected to use polite language and follow the rules. Currently the planning group is just a few users, with the rest of them scattered and out of contact with each other.
Samachan.org on Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200323151839/https://samachan.org/Following is our email exchange, split between posts. Please give it a read before commenting.
No.777
Hello.
I'm a user of samachan, an image board which has recently closed. Part of the community (around 8 users) managed to get together for a meeting to decide what to do and if there's even anything to do next. Some users have shown interest in trying to migrate together to another image board. Some suggested sushigirl but there are other alternatives.
I am sending this e-mail of my own accord without having mentioned it to anyone else. A couple of the things I say are based on personal opinion/experience which are certain to not completely match what other samachan users might think.
I had the opportunity to lurk your image board for the past two days (admittedly not enough time to get fully familiar with an IB) and I noticed the easy atmosphere, rules and how you have dealt with some community issues in the past. This has sprung a series of questions that I'll enumerate below:
1.1) I noticed you don't have a board specifically dedicated to anime/otaku hobbies. Most of samachan has an interest in those media. I notice some discussion of the subject spread out over the site but, considering the possible sudden influx of posters and how discussion of that subject went on samachan (individual threads for anime the users are watching), it's possible some boards may be disrupted by the possible spike in activity;
1.2) I happened to read the thread concerning lainchan and noted the commendable way you dealt with the situation, putting the culture of your IB and your users' well-being over whatever gain could come out of affiliations. The samachan userbase doesn't take itself too seriously and tends to nurture a relaxed atmosphere, but I don't think it's an exact 1:1 match with the current userbase on sushigirl.
1a) Considering the issues above, would a sudden influx of samachan users disrupt the principles and culture you have strived to create?
1b) Would you ever consider changing the theme/number of boards to accommodate user preferences?
1c) Would having one of the current boards possibly taken over by otaku media discussion hurt your vision of the image board?
2) Among the users, some were involved in off-site activities to promote samachan. Naturally, those efforts would shift to promoting sushigirl. Noteworthy efforts are a D&D campaign being played by users (always accepting new members), irregularly scheduled anime streams and my own efforts in translating japanese content. Speaking personally, over the course of two or three years, a significant majority of the things I translated were R-18 works. While I believe my fetishes aren't off-putting, I have translated one or another that might not be up to sushigirl's standard in case rule 1 includes hentai.
2a) Would such content (R-18 in general, and this particular case) be welcomed in sushigirl?
2b) Are there already any similar community events (D&D, streams, translations) established in sushigirl? Are they welcome?
You can write "samachan" on exhentai or nhentai to see what kind of R-18 content I've been working on. Note halfway through I began adding credits pages mentioning samachan. I would do similar were I to publish my translations on sushigirl. For the record, it didn't move the needle too much as far as traffic is concerned. I spotted a couple of new people but I have no idea whether or not they adapted or left the IB. I approached the admin in a similar fashion as I feared such content could attract undesirables to the site, but the admin assured me there'd be no problem and admittedly no such audience came to samachan.
2 follow-up) I've been meaning to include more SFW in my repertoire, but I can't deny there's a number of R-18 things that have been piling up over the years that I have focused on. However, in case of my R-18 content not being welcomed:
Would a similar translation effort focusing instead on SFW content be welcomed?
I'm sorry for the lengthy, detail-heavy e-mail but you have a pretty nice site and I think it would be best to clear up all these points now to save on having headaches later. Samachan's users aren't inflexible and I'm sure most of us can quickly adapt in case a number of these points are undesirable to you but I think knowing some unspoken limits beforehand will save everyone on more headaches.
Sushigirl is one of the strongest alternatives being considered with the only drawbacks being the high number of boards possibly spreading the userbase too thin and the relaxed culture itself maybe being too relaxing, with fears samachan's userbase might disrupt what you've created, thinking you don't have ambitions to turn sushigirl into a bigger community and are content with how things stand. We are not a coordinated group and everyone has varying interests. We only managed to get together because some users have other users' contact info with not a lot of overlap. With your permission, I'll share the contents of your reply when we meet again.
Thank you very much for your time and, again, sorry for the wall of text.
No.778
Hello,
I will try to answer your questions as best I can.
1a) Any large influx of users will irrevocably change an imageboard's culture. When users trickle in slowly, the new users will mostly adapt to the culture of the imageboard, while bringing a piece of themselves and changing it little by little. A bunch of users at once, however, will cause the board cultures to merge instead of a one-way adaptation. It is hard for me to say how this would affect Sushichan, because I was never a user of Samachan. However, I didn't actually create Sushichan. Like Samachan, Sushichan was dropped by its previous owner, but I reconstructed the website from one of the users' personal archived copies. So, the culture of Sushichan has already changed once from this event. Whether another change is a "good" or "bad" thing is a difficult question with no correct answer.
1b) I would consider this, yes. I'm not sure how exactly I would accommodate Samachan, since your boards and our boards have some overlap. Adding boards to replace your boards would mean having boards on Sushichan with semi-overlapping topics, but not adding new boards would cause our existing boards to move in a new direction when Samachan's users bring over their own conversations. So, some careful consideration would be needed to decide how to choose the topics for any new boards designed to accommodate a merger. From a glance at Samachan's boards in the Wayback Machine, I am thinking that (most of ) /z/'s content could spread across Sushichan's various boards without much issue (though some threads are definite outliers), and an /anime/ board of some kind could be made to accommodate your /a/, since Sushichan's existing boards have minimal anime discussion.
1c) It would definitely change things. I have tried to carry on the original owner's vision of a comfy, vitriol-free imageboard. That allows for a huge amount of wiggle room in the content of the site. I don't know if it's what the users would want.
2a) Currently, only the /lewd/ and /hell/ boards allow NSFW content. I don't think I could change this. So, a lot of your content would get forced into those boards.
2b) My other community, Uboachan, has its own in-house scanlation group called Patchy Illusion Team. We scanlate several doujins every year, and there is no requirement that they be SFW. Unlike Sushichan, Uboachan is not a very "comfy" place, however. I don't think Sushichan has had any community events for a long time. If you wanted to continue your translations and host the threads on Sushichan, you would just need to put the NSFW threads in the /lewd/ board.
Now I have a question for you: Has anyone contacted the owner of Samachan about possibly handing off the site code and domain? Or, has anyone considered rebuilding it like I did with Sushichan? Having your own site might still be the best way to go, because you could maintain your existing culture to some extent. However, it would take time for activity to return without obtaining the original domain name from the original owner, because your users are scattered. Merging with Sushichan would lead to an amalgamate, and some aspects of the culture would be lost on both sides. Is there a concern that the original owner would be against their site's code and assets being ripped from backups to make a clone board?
If your team so chooses, I can offer hosting as well as 10 years of experience in running and customizing imageboards and servers, to help you forge a replacement site. The time and energy I could put into coding would be limited however, because I'm already running many projects. At the very least, I can easily spin up a Vichan instance with an /a/ and a /z/ in a few hours, if you were considering doing so but didn't have the knowledge or resources. Over time, (and quicker if someone on your end has the know-how,) the original site's theming could be ripped from Wayback Machine archives and a convincing replica could be produced.
You have permission to share my answers. Please keep in touch. If your team would rather merge than re-create, and if Sushichan ends up being a prime contender, I will pose the question to my users.
No.779
Hi again. Thank you for replying so quickly.
I just finished having a conversation with everyone (they're not my team, though. We're pretty uncoordinated as I said before…).
The general sentiment is that Sushigirl is the preferential IB to move to.
I relayed our e-mail exchange and everyone is of the opinion that you're a good administrator and interest in joining your IB increased. I was told to relay these questions, some of each are easy to reply if one lurks around for a bit but it's just to be extra sure:
1) Do you allow discussion of live-action japanese movies?
2) Do you allow the posting of content pertaining to japanese war history (similar threads on samachan were ironically enough very peaceful and there were no hints of /pol/ crap, sticking to history)?
3) 3D girls: yea or nay? (the same thread on samachan limited itself to japanese cosplayers and twitter models)
4) Is lolicon and shotacon allowed?
As for the details of a possible moving, I made everyone aware that things would only be fully confirmed once you had a discussion about it with your existing community. We discussed the possibility of the creation of some kind of otaku board that would be pretty much a SFW /a/z/ hybrid but I'm concerned doing that would siphon content/activity from other boards in you IB (pretty much all of them, since we even had a thread about cooking on /z/…). People still see the number of boards sushigirl has as excessive but I made mention of /kaitenushi/ and how, even if we dispersed over a multitude of boards, it was still possible to get some kind of exposure. Still, I think I echo everyone's feelings when I say even I myself would prefer a board for everything (though I myself think sushigirl has a little too many boards and making a new board would only add to that). I think the major compromise to make is to leave out of this theoretical new board any subject that's already the theme of some other board (like cooking and videogames). In my personal case, I have no problem in moving my activities to /lewd/. I also think a good course of action would be to see, for a limited time, if a new board is justifiable by watching how posting trends change with our moving. We talked about anime, certainly, but only four or five anime every season ever warranted their own thread, but I didn't discuss this possibility with the other users so I don't know how they feel about it. Things like a D&D thread don't seem to have a place where they'd fit in the current layout.
If your community is against our moving, that would leave looking for another IB or take your offer of a new samachan. As for this new samachan, it's not something we hadn't considered but we quickly discarded the option because no-one has the know-how. The admin of samachan has mentioned having added custom code to the vichan being used and also mentioned having no plans or willingness to share the code. Me and others attempted to contact the admin after the decision to close samachan was made public (I myself asked if there were any plans for a new board or plans to move to a new community). Until now, none of us got any reply, so it's easy to assume the admin cut off all contact. Thus, it would have to be a vichan clone following the same aesthetic of the old samachan. Some people are not receptive to this option and I personally think a change of name would be for the best. There's also the issue that we're all users, none of us were mods/janitors on samachan, but I think a couple of us have what it takes to take those positions. Whether or not they have time/motivation for it is another story. I asked if people would move back to samachan if the admin remade the site later on and people said no, so I assume a possible new board would justify its existence with activity.
So, to summarize: we're mostly up to moving to sushigirl. We'd prefer a move proper rather than a new IB just for us. We'd prefer a board for otaku media proper but are willing to compromise.
I think that's all. It's up to you and your community whether or not we're worth the hassle. Whatever decision may come from, I'd like to thank you for your openness and availability to go beyond a migration.
No.780
Some quick answers to your questions before I start work:
1) Yeah there shouldn't be any problem with this.
2) That is not a comfy topic regardless of how it is discussed, but it is a decent topic of conversation. That sort of thread would be a good fit for /hell/, which is our catch-all board for uncomfy conversation.
3) I don't think there are any such NSFW threads currently, but it should be fine in /lewd/ if it was just one or two threads. On /kawaii/ there is already at least one thread of SFW 3D.
4) Those are currently allowed in /lewd/.
Our culture board isn't really about otaku culture, and that's spread kinda thin around the site as it is, so I think an /otaku/ board of some kind would catch most of your content. Our /lounge/ board is the catch-all for comfy and SFW threads, like /hell/ is the catch-all for uncomfy (still mostly SFW) threads. Anything hard-NSFW must go on /lewd/. So, your DnD thread could probably go on /lounge/. Based on how things went with just an /otaku/ board, things could be shuffled later.
Is it ok to post our emails on /yakuza/ when I write to the users?
No.781
Thanks again for the quick reply.
Feel free to post our exchange but I'd really appreciate it if you don't show my e-mail address.
No.782
>The samachan userbase doesn't take itself too seriously and tends to nurture a relaxed atmosphere, but I don't think it's an exact 1:1 match with the current userbase on sushigirl.
I looked at the Samachan archive. I think about half of the posts could sort of fit here. Samachan feels like otaku culture with comfy rather than comfy with otaku culture. As Seisatsu said, if Samachan users come here en masse, the culture will irrevocably change.
I personally come to Sushichan for what I call "sushi bar threads" where you come in, take a seat, and just talk life. Samachan users would definitely increase the activity of the media boards like /kawaii/, /culture/, and /lewd/. Which, now that I think about it, would not be so bad.
Another thing to consider is how much additional traffic would this place get? On the Samachan /a/ archive I see about ~3-20 posts a day. Sushichan itself gets the same amount of posts per day (I'd say 0-20 posts per day.) Would this change the slow board environment?
No.784
Capcode as full disclosure.
I support this measure, overall. Having lurked samachan on occasion (although I never posted or read it regularly), I can confirm they were one of the chiller [a/jp] spinoff/specialized imageboards. There are some differences in board culture, but nothing insurmountable: while niceposting wasn't upheld there in form 100%, it was in spirit, so the transition should occur smoothly.
One thing that should be noted is that sama is relatively fast, probably as fast as sushichan. Since a lot of that activity was concentrated in two boards, /anime/ could end up disrupting kaitensushi a bit (assuming /z/ just gets dissolved into the rest of the board), but it should stabilize if sama users also venture into the rest of the website. I don't think the activity increase by itself could disrupt the comfy sushi culture, but others may not think the same. It's worth keeping in mind that we're not getting their entire userbase all at once (from what I've understood, there was no offsite rallying point or anything where every ex-user could get informed), so the increase should happen slowly enough to limit any potential damage.
I think sama had a few tripfriends? Tripcode culture isn't really a thing here, so should watch out for a potential clash.
Apart from that…
>Things like a D&D thread don't seem to have a place where they'd fit in the current layout.
I thought there already were tabletop game threads on /arcade/, but can't find any in the catalog. I must have been dreaming. The board could probably accommodate that (maybe just changing the board description from "viday gaems" to just "gaems"?).
>content pertaining to japanese war history
Political and war history is something I would definitely classify as too uncomfy for /culture/, but it should be fine on /hell/ – that board already has precedent for these kind of threads, and this seems a hell of a lot better (no pun intended) than some of the stuff posted on it in the last year.
I've been somewhat (pleasantly) surprised by the amount of sushi users admitting they have never browsed imageboards apart from this place. We should try to take that slice of the sushi population into account and make sure the laid-back bar counter culture of this website doesn't fade away or disappear, no matter the final decision on this matter.
No.785
>>782
>I looked at the Samachan archive. I think about half of the posts could sort of fit here. Samachan feels like otaku culture with comfy rather than comfy with otaku culture. As Seisatsu said, if Samachan users come here en masse, the culture will irrevocably change.My idea for this is to add one board specifically for Japanese/Anime/Otaku culture, since Sushichan isn't very focused on these things currently. This should help prevent the rest of the boards from becoming too Japan-centric. But, new users will still bring new things to the table.
>Another thing to consider is how much additional traffic would this place get? On the Samachan /a/ archive I see about ~3-20 posts a day. Sushichan itself gets the same amount of posts per day (I'd say 0-20 posts per day.) Would this change the slow board environment?If every single user from Samachan came over, you could probably expect activity to double. As it is, most of their users have scattered, and many of them may not find their way here, or may have already become comfortable somewhere else.
No.786
I've noticed a bump in activity which is probably some refugees. They seem like they'll blend in fine, especially the kind of people that are drawn to this site in the first place. One thing is that a new board might be redundant with the /kawaii/ board, the subject isn't exactly the same but there's a lot of overlap.
No.787
>>786I've noticed that too, however the transition has not been harmful at all. I'm positive that samasushis will integrate perfectly.
As of my opinion, of course it's worth noting the culture shift a merge would cause. However, I think sushichan can only benefit from this. Change is not always bad. As much as I love Sushichan and what we accomplished and the struggles we went through, an influx of fresh blood, especially from such a splendid imageboard, can only make us stronger.
Getting a new board for our friends wouldnt create a mess since /kaitensushi/ doess such a good job making sure all the boards get a bit of attention (I think most sushis, like me, browse /kaitensushi/ mainly.)
No.789
>>785It seems like at the end of the day there isnt really a choice, and it seems like its more of a question of accommodation in culture than the number of users.
I suggest changing the wildcard board to welcome them as a trial period with the SFW/NSFW rules posted in a sicky with the usual links to /hell/ and /lewd/
This will allow the their base and the current users to have a "toe in the water" kinda of ordeal before any major changes are made.
Ive been on both sides of this in various forms when sites die and at least they were nice enough to ask instead of just post up in /lounge/ and get vengeful.
No.791
>>790Check out
>>>/kawaii/ for posting art, especially of cute things or /culture/ for classic art.
I cant help with the mp3 issue though.
No.792
I'm not a part of this Samachan group but I have used that board quite a lot, probably even more than Sushigirls. I felt that Sama was a fair bit faster than Sushi so that might cause a bit of disruption depending on how many of us show up but culture-wise I'd like to think we're a good fit.
No.793
>>790>>791You can just use /culture/ for art threads in general, and /kawaii/ for cute stuff.
I'll enable mp3 support, I didn't realize it was off.
No.794
>>785>>789These sound like a good ideas. As long as /lounge/ stays I am happy.
>>792I think the increase in activity is good too, since a lot of sushis are lurkers. Maybe with more activity more sushis will come out of the woodwork and chat.
On a side note, thank you to the Samachan refugees who asked first. Looks like you guys will fit in just fine.
No.796
The /otaku/ board has been created with a guideline sticky, and I'm emailing T-san with the go-ahead.
No.799
Just a suggestion, but if /lewd/ and maybe if /hell/ gets too active, it might be nice for them to be excluded from /kaitensushi/. I think new currently really contributes to the sushi bar feeling since it grabs all the threads that have been active lately and brings the conversations together into one space where you can sort of sense the stuff going on in the background, and too much porn and random stuff might disrupt that, though those are nice too.
But then if sushichan gets much more active, i might have to start looking at the boards individually anyway (shock!)
Anyway, welcome to the samachan users!
No.801
How about making changes on kaitensushi so it displays the latest activity on 3 threads per board or something? That way no matter the activity every board gets its share on the spotlight
No.802
Does a sage'd post bump a thread in /kaitensushi/?
No.803
>>802It doesn't!
My apologies for bordering on spam but I needed to test a way to self-moderate…
No.804
>>776>Currently the planning group is just a few users, with the rest of them scattered and out of contact with each other.Some people are on Fufufu:
https://fufufu.moe/a/res/17552.html No.805
If you're interested, I could have 4chan X add a small link to here on Samachan.
No.806
>>805Waow the 4chanx guy is here hi hi
That would probably be good, yeah. Maybe to this specific thread.
No.809
>>808Looks fine to me, I was going to say probably make sure it says it's a 4chanx message but you did that already
No.810
>>809It is done. Should show up for people as soon as they get the next update.
No.811
Question for the long time sushis if that's okay:
How much more active has the site been in the past few days? Is it worse or better for it?
No.812
>>811It feels twice as active. Definitely better, I haven't noticed any drop in quality and more active discussions are always welcome.
No.815
>>790>>793Seconding the idea of mp3 support, although no rush if it is inconvenient at the moment. Already appreciate the amount of work and overwhelming support Sushi has been giving to users of Sama.
No.816
>>815They're enabled on /tunes/ right now, just uploaded one to test and they seem to work, if anything I think the biggest problem one could find is the size limit as some pieces tend to be over 10MB
No.817
>>805>>808That's pretty cool, thanks. You could either link to the /otaku/ board which has a landing sticky for people arriving from Samachan, or you can leave the link to this thread. I'll put crosslinks in each.
No.818
>>816I could possibly increase the upload limit to 20MB. I will consider it.
No.820
>>818Thanks for the consideration!
>>810Updated and indeed the message is there, thanks a lot for the help
No.821
>>808>>776Don't use my website to advertise this garbage imageboard. Thanks.
No.822
>>821Are you the creator of Samachan? While I don't appreciate you saying those things, I think I understand where you are coming from it being your website and all. But, I think you understand that shutting down Samachan will increase website traffik to Sushichan. This thread served as a discussion for current members about the incoming Samachan users and what should be done to accommodate for them. They are already here without advertisement.
Personally, I think contacting the respective owners via private email probably would have been better than through a public forum here.
No.823
>>822see
>>779>Me and others attempted to contact the admin after the decision to close samachan was made public (I myself asked if there were any plans for a new board or plans to move to a new community). Until now, none of us got any reply, so it's easy to assume the admin cut off all contact. No.824
>>822I was contacted privately by email and dumped the emails in this thread after some discussion. Yuno could not be contacted by anyone.
>>821>>805>>808Sounds like Yuno has requested that 4chan X remove the link. I'm not sure why they dislike Sushichan or don't want their users to regroup here after they shut down their board, but it would probably be best to remove the link from 4chan X if that's what they want, since the site is still theirs.
Yuno, please email me. Email in the email field. I would like to have a conversation.
Edit: Looks like Samachan.org now redirects to 4chan.org/a/. If the 4chan X link gets removed then Yuno might be comfortable putting their parting message back up, which is at least better for the users than getting dumped into 4chan. I will see if there's a way to contact the author in case Yuno didn't contact them yet.
Edit 2: I have contacted ccd0 through GitHub about removing the redirect and await a possible email from Yuno.
No.825
I'll remove the link. I could replace it with a notification to anyone with posts made or watched threads on Samachan, unless you think that would cause too much strife.
No.826
>>825Not sure. Let's see if Yuno contacts me in the next couple days.
Edit: I have attempted to email the contact address that was on Samachan before it went down, but it has been disconnected. Waiting on Yuno.
No.827
>>823>>824Ah, by "contacting the respective owners" I meant for Yuno to contact Seisatsu and ccd0. Now we'll see if anything comes through.
No.828
Yuno killed her email though so it's not like she can
No.829
>>828Not from her Samachan address, anyway.
No.830
So … lots going on. Can any サマ tell us why your place fell to bits? I lurked there now and then and it's a surprise to hear it's KYSd.
No.833
Sorry if this is an uncomfy topic but I'm curious about what sort of discussion about Japanese war history went on in Samachan, does anyone have a link to an archive of those threads?
No.834
>>830Pretty much Yuno just shut it down with no notice whatsoever.
>>833It was mostly talk about tanks and a few specific battles from what I recall.
No.835
>>830Admin just couldn't be bothered to run the site anymore, pulled the plug before growing any more disillusioned.
>>833Talk about japanese campaigns, evolution of military uniforms, weapons in use in specific eras, international newspaper cuts about japanese military research in the first half of the 20th century. That's as much as I remember.
No.836
4chan X has added a notification about the Sushichan migration for anyone who visited Samachan in the past with the extension installed. Best we can do.
I'm sad that Yuno took down their goodbye message and I think maybe we crossed a line we shouldn't have by putting a link directly on their site without their permission, but I think it's important to help people regroup somehow. A notification in the extension's interface would have probably been a better option from the start. With the redirect they've washed their hands of the whole thing, so they shouldn't have any more complaints, but I can't help but feel that things could have ended differently.
The reason I am still running imageboards after more than 10 years despite the negatives is because I want to maintain these connections that people have made. I had hoped to understand Yuno's feelings as a fellow imageboard administrator and give my own perspective, but we will probably never hear from them again.
Both Sushichan and Uboachan are sites I picked up where the previous owner left off to prevent those connections from disappearing, and I guess this is a continuation of that cycle. Not just imageboards, I run a couple of other hand-me-down communities as well, and have run others in the past, though I was honestly pretty bad at it at first. It seems like this cycle of inheriting the will of communities at the end of their rope will probably just keep happening to me as long as I don't give up on it.
Maybe Yuno feels like I interrupted what they intended to be a final goodbye to their community, and maybe I ruined the peace they had made with that. If I could talk to them again, I would like to apologize for whatever hard feelings this operation might have caused them, but try to make them understand why I did what I did and why I am still doing it. A community is more than a website. You can own a website but you can never own a community, only support it and try to influence its development. Hopefully a good number of the users can find each other again on this platform.
Maybe that all comes off a little weird or sappy. At first maybe it just felt cool to run websites that a lot of people used, but my feelings around running them became more personal for me over time. Anyway, I really love keeping communities going! Thank you for choosing Sushichan, and I hope we will be around for a very long time.
No.837
>>836You're doing God's work Seisatsu
No.838
>>836Hey Seisatsu, just wanted to give an honest thank you for keeping these websites alive. Small sites like this provide something large sites can't and I'm glad some people put in the effort to keep them afloat.
No.840
>>811Compared to last month, its pretty active now.
Its fun.
No.842
>>832Thanks for that link Seisatsu.
I for one welcome your new overlords.
Seriously, it's nice to see generosity.
Love you all.