January 30 - moot implements forced anonymous on /b/, with users unable to post with a name, tripcode, or subject, remaining until March 26, 2007, which, by then, it had definitely worn out its welcome.
February 6 - orz.4chan.org and cgi.4chan.org crash and are not fixed until three days later. During this time, the secret board, /5/, hosted on the orz server, was deleted.
February 12 – Cracky-chan discovers her cult and decides it’s enough. She makes a public statement on 420chan telling everyone to stop. Later, Kirtaner closes the board.
February 17 - The three new servers purchased during the Donate or Die 2005 campaign are successfully brought online. Each served as a backup for three of 4chan's content servers, with nov.4chan.org backing up cgi, bin.4chan.org backing up zip, and tmp.4chan.org backing up orz (img was already backed up by dat.4chan.org). In addition, the new servers took care of all post submissions, speeding up the boards significantly.
February 18 - The day after the new servers are installed, 5M GET is achieved, during which the posting rate increased twenty fold. The servers were put to the test, with jumbo.4chan.org maxing out its line at 99.31 Mbit/s (~12.41 megabytes per second). The 5M GET was a picture of cat taken at an angle that made the cat look large, with the text "Needs more towercat". Users were divided between whether it was win or fail, although moot himself called it "more garbage" in the DevBlog.
March 14 - Last known time when /ib/ (Oekaki/Random) and /ip/ (Oekaki Pro) existed. /a/ was still titled Anime.
March 23 - 6M GET was achieved on /b/, with a picture of Senator Bill Frist holding up a card and the text "In after 6M GET". It was mostly considered a winGET due to the potential for epic shoops.
April 1 - /b/'s
CSS is fucked with yet again, with the page layout being changed to tanasinn.org's layout, with a looping voice saying "Don't think. Feel and you'll be Tanasinn." Letters were randomly changed to the three-dot triangle symbol.
April 6 - Three new trial boards are added: /co/ (Comics & Cartoons), /po/ (Papercraft & Origami), and /sp/ (Sports). Two days later, five more boards are added: /cgl/ (Cosplay & EGL), /ck/ (Food & Cooking), /mu/ (Music), /n/ (News) (Changing the previous /n/ to /an/ - Animals & Nature), and /tv/ (Television). /ib/ (Oekaki/Random) and /ip/ (Oekaki/Pro) most likely merged into /i/ - Oekaki on one of these two days. The mysterious /yg/ - Yogurt board is also created on April 8, and Saber adds /ss/ - Straight/Shota to not4chan.
April 10 – When a user shows his ban reason as being DSFARGEG, he is banned and his thread stickied. Later seven threads are stickied, are stickied along with another DSFARGEG post, which consisted on a puppet from a Japanese show riding a motorcycle.
April 11 – /b/tards start to spam /b/ with the same puppet. Every post gets stickied and banned. This concluded with entire pages consisting only of stickied bans. DSFARGEG would be banned on sight from them on.
April 13 - Earliest known time when /i/ (Oekaki) existed. By this time, /a/'s title has been changed to Anime & Manga.
April 14 - moot announces that the three servers purchased during Donate or Die 2005 have been collocated and are up and running and also announces that he will rarely use the front page for small updates from now on, instead choosing to announce them on the DevBlog and blotter. moot also announces that 4chan will have a panel at which he will appear at AnimeCentral 2006, which took place on May 6. The next day, moot removes most of the wordfilters on /b/ and implements new ones.
April 20 - 7M GET is reached, but due to the high strain on the server, the file was deleted, and the post had no text. However, mods retrieved the MD5 data from the picture from their database and found that it was the popular image macro of Chopper Dave from Sealab 2021 shouting "UH OHHHHHHH". Also, 13-year-old Mitchell Henderson kills himself, after which /b/ raids his memorial MySpace and the "an hero" meme is born after a classmate of his posted a poem she written on his memorial account in which she constantly referred to him as "an hero".
May 11 - Eight threads are stickied, all consisting of modified versions of a picture from some Japanese show with a puppet riding on a motorcycle and the text "DSFARGEG". All posts were followed by (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) and DSFARGEG almost always resulted in a ban or a sticky.
May 18 - /b/ reaches 8M GET, one of the first GETs to be auto-stickied. It was considered a WinGET, due to the fact that it was a picture of George Zimmer and the text "HI, I'M GEORGE ZIMMER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF MEN'S WAREHOUSE. THIS IS 8000000 GET. I GUARANTEE IT".
June 15 - Comedian Tom Green starts his own late-night call-in talk show hosted from his own living room, hosted every night at 11 PM EST. Over the next three months, /b/ trolls his show, with around 10% of all calls on the show being prank calls from 4chan. /b/ also focused on a section of his show, "Girl Talk", which featured five stereotypical "dumb chicks" giving advice on relationships. The trolling of Girl Talk was so intense that it was canceled on August 19th because of it, combined with bad response from viewers. It would eventually become a tradition to raid Tom Green whenever he went.
June 17 - A group of anons crapflood the Zelda Guide Forums for fun, after which a member threatens to "hack" 4chan. This prompts their leader, known as "Captain Cornflake" (the name of his raid account on Zelda Guide Forums, he was anonymous on /b/) to post this information to /b/. Many Anonymous joined the raid following this post and crapflooded the forums nearly into oblivion during the night while the moderating team was asleep. As the moderators were surveying the carnage the next morning, one mod actually pleaded for /b/ to stop and said he would give them their own board to spam, which just increased the raid. The forums now require manual admin verification, which keeps out many legit users, resulting in an anon victory.
June 19 - Yet another epic raid occurs, with /b/ destroying naruto-kun.com after a user there posted about their dislike of 4chan. Following a major porn flood after which the site admin threatened to sic the FCC on 4chan, one anon discovered a source code document hidden on the site containing the site's SQL database password (which Anon posted on /b/) as well as loads of unchecked MySQL injection vulnerabilities. Anonymous also discovered that the fucking dumbass's
FTP had the same password as his MySQL database, following which tons of anons logged in to the
FTP account and deleted everything, destroying the entire site, including premium accounts and the database, and bringing the site down for two days.
July 4 - The first of many in a series of /b/
CSS hacks in July as the background was turned red and the text yellow. July 10th saw the theme song from "Bill Nye the Science Guy" embedded into the background (no layout changes however), while July 15th harbored a sticky in which "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by composer Richard Strauss (2001: A Space Odyssey theme song) was embedded. Toward the end of July, ten threads were stickied, taking up the entire first page of /b/, and the theme song from Inspector Gadget was embedded into /b/.
July 6 – Crackypedia closes per (alleged again) Cracky-chan’s request. The owner posts a macro with the date of closure, viewcount (17464) and the message "Hope you enjoyed it folks, I told you it wouldn't last forever."
July 7 - 10M GET is reached, considered the most failed GET of all time, simply a picture of Hazuki from the anime Tsukuyomi -Moon Phase- on a merry-go-round, with the text "hazukiget". Ironically, it was much later revealed to be a modGET, but with no trickery involved; Shii (4chan admin; coder of discussion boards) got the GET out of pure luck, proving that all modGETs, staged or not, will always be fail.
July 12 – The great Habbo raid of July 2006 - 4chan (along with Encyclopedia Dramatica, YTMND, GNAA, Bantown, and myg0t) storm Habbo Hotel. A virtual online role playing game where, among other things, people pay real-life money for online money. Thousands of "nigras" (black characters with afros wearing business suits, the official raid costume) filled nearly every room on the site, especially the Pool Deck, during which the pool was blocked for hours because the pool had AIDS. The sheer number of Anonymous was so great that the Habbo mods could not ban the nigras faster than the accounts were being created, resulting in the mods having no choice but to reset their server, after which the raid continued for a few more hours on Habbo servers in other countries, particularly the German Habbo Hotel (where the nigras would form in swastika patterns). The Habbo raid is often considered /b/'s best and spawned the "Nigra" meme and the "Pool's closed" meme. The word "AIDS" was later wordfiltered on Habbo as a result of the raid.
July 20 - moot announces that they will have a panel at Otakon 2006 from August 4-6 in Baltimore, Maryland, with enough seating capacity to allow 680 people compared to the 230 from Otakon 2005.
July 22 - /v/ reaches 1M GET, considered to be one of the greatest non-/b/ gets of all time. The GET was a picture of PONG, the first-ever video game, thus a very fitting get for /v/.
August 4 - Otakon 2006 starts and so does 4chan's panel. Many important 4channers are there, including moot, shut, Shii, and the apparent return of W.T. Snacks. An epic sermon was delivered by "Reverend" Lemmy Caution to spread the gospel of Raptor Jesus, and moot even created a new board, /con/ (Conventions), for people at the con to use, which was deleted a few hours after the con ended.
August 12 - The 4chan :codes: (words put between colons that are turned into smilies, like how posting :happy: would display a happy emoticon, for example) are released to the site. They are soon spammed all over the place, and threads are pruned extremely quickly.
August 16 – The Tom Green raids - Tom Green, an Canadian host in an Internet call in show, Tom Green’s House Tonight, gets massively prank called by /b/tards, who made him hold a paper with the work b written on, wear a wig, suffered an hour long of DESU spam and meme spouting such as “Do a barrel roll”. All these calls ended up clogging the lines and keeping actual fans from calling in. Green gets pissed enough that he announces on live TV: “thanks to you assholes this will no longer be a call in show”. The next show in line was GirlTalk, which also got raided by /b/. This raid is possible because neither shows screened their calls.
August 22 - A group of Anonymous go on a midnight raiding spree, eventually attracting tons (~100) of Anonymous to their posse in raid threads. They charged, destroying Proana.us (a pro-anorexia community), deleting all accounts on the site. After this (by now around 1:00 AM of August 23), they attempted to raid the myg0t forum, but the raid failed due to myg0t's massive size. Instead, they raided teenbabynet.org (not only furries, but teenage furries with diaper fetishes), locking the forum and rendering it totally unviewable by 10:00 AM. At around this time, they turned their attention to WikiFur, leaving it in complete disarray. With mods extremely worried, moot does something drastic around noon of August 23…
August 23 – The /b/-day - moot (in a somewhat justifiable fit of anger) posts a sticky (later referred to as the Bob Ross sticky, for he used an image of Bob Ross) announcing that anyone who posts illegal content will get you permabanned and possibly arrested, and that even people who REPLY to illegal threads will receive a two-week global ban, with the definition of "illegal threads" referring to CP, jailbait, personal info, and raids (some of /b/'s most cherished traditions). This led to a massive outcry due to the fact that this policy was technically introducing rules to /b/, whose main goal was to be a rule-free board. The sticky was deleted and replaced with a new sticky restating the policy, which was then de-stickied and re-stickied over and over by moot and some other mod, and, along with spamming from angry /b/tards, caused img.4chan.org to crash, leaving 14 boards, including /b/, /an/, /b/, /c/, /cm/, /g/, /k/, /m/, /o/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /t/, /v/, and /w/ inaccessible. A civil war broke out, with many /b/tards permanently leaving 4chan and taking up new homes at 7chan, IIChan, 2ch.ru, and 420chan. moot got rid of the policy very shortly afterwards due to the enormous backlash. However, img.4chan.org didn't return until August 25, two days later. Eventually, it would be considered that the events of the /b/-day where a failure, because a week later /b/ was doing the same routine as if it never happened. On the rest of the Internet, however, this resulted in a massive increase of alternative image boards, like WTFux, 7chan, 2ch.ru and others where many banned users took an exodus to. This marked the rise of the /i/nsurgence, given that 7chan housed an /i/ board, long forbidden by moot, for the first time the /b/tard would orchestrate raids on an organized fashion.
September 4 - World-famous Australian "croc hunter" Steve Irwin is killed by a stingray barb to the heart while filming a documentary. /b/ is immediately flooded with this information and one of the first threads to announce it was stickied for a week, becoming the most replied-to thread in /b/ history with slightly over 5,200 replies (later beaten by the "#fortune" sticky on April 27, 2007). Many Rule 34s and general parodies are posted in /b/ during that time.
September 11 – Habbo, Revisited - In response to Steve Irwin's death, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and hatred for Habbo Hotel, /b/, led by AFRODUCK, starts another massive raid on Habbo, with around 5,000 Anonymous partaking in the raid (~600 nigras on the Pool Deck alone). They blocked every single room, announcing that not only did the pool have AIDS, but also had stingrays as well. The raid continued for 3 days until September 14.
October 1 - /b/ celebrates its third anniversary, and places blue-and-pink striped party hats on the top of each thread. /b/tards made pictures interacting with the hats, causing many threads that are epic win (a good chunk of epic thread screencaps are from this day). Dan makes a second commemoration.
October 20 - Jake Brahm turns himself in to authorities following a now-infamous copypasta that he had written, reposting it around 40 times within the previous 30 days, in which he warned of simultaneous terrorist attacks against seven football stadiums across the United States on October 22nd. Two days before this, on October 18, the Department of Homeland Security was notified about the copypasta and attempted to track down and arrest the creator of it; when the Wauwatosa, Wisconsin police department (Brahm's town of residence) received a tip on October 20, he turned himself in and faces up to 20 years imprisonment, thus making him the only person to have been party v& for his actions as of 2007. The phrase "DON'T MESS WITH FOOTBALL", uttered by FBI agent Les Wiser during a news report on Brahm's arrest, has since become a meme, and was briefly added to teh rules for /b/.
October 30 – Habbo, Revisited 2 or the Habbo fail raid – Somewhere around 100 nigras gather around Habbo Hotel, but are banned quickly.
November 7 - After moot doesn't pay the bills, the site goes down for two days, during which a page was put up explaining that the servers were gone because moot didn't pay and that the problem would be fixed within "24-48 hours" (crossed out with "FIFTY-BILLION YEARS" written next to it). Many /b/tards, looking for a temporary *chan to go to until 4chan returns, cause a major spike in traffic for other *chans as /b/tards go there temporarily. 7chan and 12chan were destroyed by the flood of traffic and suffered severe downtime.
November 21 - /b/space day – A /b/tard loads a keyloggers on a public PC and gives /b/ over 40000 MySpace accounts and passwords. Of course, they proceed to have a field day over it.
November 30 - moot announces that more banner ads from AdBrite will be added to 4chan in December due to the fact that donations are no longer possible. As a result of the extra money, 4chan becomes faster after moot uses the money for extra bandwidth capacity.
December 20 - Hal Turner, a white supremacist talk show host from New Jersey, plans his final radio show due to lack of funding, in which he takes calls for three hours straight. However, a combined surprise raid from 4chan, 7chan, YTMND, Something Awful, and Bantown destroyed Hal's show, with 150 prank calls being made in three hours, with almost none of his real listeners being able to call in due to clogged lines. Hal then posts the phone numbers of the callers on his website (some of which were minors), sparking a huge outrage among /b/. Bantown then uncovered his personal information, including his real phone number, after which ~160 calls were made to his house. Hal gave in and removed the phone numbers from his site, but as we all know, Anonymous does not forgive.
December 25 - Hal Turner spends Christmas with his family over at his father's house; news of this spread, and Bantown quickly found his father's number, leading to a massive amount of calls and Hal supposedly being kicked out of the house. After this, Hal claimed that the FBI was investigating 4chan (an Anonymous later called in to Hal's show claiming that he had contacted the FBI and that they had said that no such investigation was taking place) and redirected his website to the FBI page.
December 31 - A happy ending for 2006 after Hal Turner surrenders to 4chan after much raiding and lulz, and announces that he is almost off of the internet completely. He announces, "I am not certain where to go from here. My entire existence - short of my physical presence on this planet - has been utterly wrecked, by people I never met from places I've never been." Anonymous knocks back a cold one and lols heartily.
