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Introducing the 4chan API

4chan.org

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are some of the threads not rendered to JSON yet? i.e., do we only get it for new threads?

All of the old threads were rebuilt, so everything should have a JSON representation.

How long did that take? Just the current active threads across the boards, right?

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#22
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great news. No hope for a posting API I presume?

Probably not. Since we don't have user accounts, and already have a bit of a spam problem, I'd be pretty worried about what a real POST API might bring.

I figured as much. Just wishful thinking on my part--it'd be nice to be able to build a client wholly atop the API.

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the old threads were rebuilt, so everything should have a JSON representation.

How long did that take? Just the current active threads across the boards, right?

Just a few minutes, since we only store active threads in the database. Was only ~9,000 threads.

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#24
What I'm taking away from the comments below is:

"Everything that could be done with this API has already been done using HTML parsing. This development will simply make those applications faster."

Truth?

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#27
post #8
post #7

The first thing that jumps to mind with this is... "Oh $#!*." I don't know why, but it scares me what could come out of this.

Came to post this. The only redeemable value in 4chan, in my opinion, is that the fact that posts aren't archived makes for a very interesting social experiment. An API firehose pretty much puts an end to that.

Selective archives (users vote to archive a thread) have been around since at least 2007:

http://4chanarchive.org/

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html

Full board archives have been around for quite some time as well:

http://easymodo.net/ (the original complete archiver, now dead)

http://archive.foolz.us/

https://archive.installgentoo.net/

etc.

I'd say the fact that your posts are most likely to be forgotten, even if it is archived, is much more of a negative aspect of the site than a positive. How many times have I spent 30 minutes on a post, only for no one to respond to it, or worse, realize that the thread 404'd? It makes you look at yourself and wonder why you bothered.

Forced anonymity is the interesting part of imageboards -- the text BBS equivalents to anonymous imageboards, based off the original 2chan, manage to maintain a very similar flavor while featuring permanent archival of all posts, and enjoy longer-form discussion as a result.

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#28
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came to post this. The only redeemable value in 4chan, in my opinion, is that the fact that posts aren't archived makes for a very interesting social experiment. An API firehose pretty much puts an end to that.

Selective archives (users vote to archive a thread) have been around since at least 2007: http://4chanarchive.org/ http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html Full board archives have been around for quite some time as well: http://easymodo.net/ (the original complete archiver, now dead) http://archive.foolz.us/ https://archive.installgentoo.net/ etc. I'd say the fact that your posts are most likely to be forg…

> I'd say the fact that your posts are most likely to be forgotten, even if it is archived, is much more of a negative aspect of the site than a positive.

This is the most magical aspect of 4chan, which is why I don't care for archives.

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#29
post #8
post #7

The first thing that jumps to mind with this is... "Oh $#!*." I don't know why, but it scares me what could come out of this.

Came to post this. The only redeemable value in 4chan, in my opinion, is that the fact that posts aren't archived makes for a very interesting social experiment. An API firehose pretty much puts an end to that.

[deleted]

Re: Introducing the 4chan API

#30
post #6

I feel kinda silly just having spent the long weekend writing a threaded 4chan scraper. This is a super welcome change though. Even if you don't visit 4chan regularly you can't ignore the VAST amount of content people upload there. I imagine some interesting statistics will come of this ( I know I plan to).

I don't know. Getting an API to 4chan is like getting a parking pass to the local garbage dump. What statistics are you actually mining here?
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