4archive

4archive was a popular 4chan archiving service founded January 17, 2014. On May 7th, 9:15 PM, 4archive shut down due to personal decisions. At the time of shut down, 4archive stored 57,674 threads, 9,754,504 posts, and 3,235,393 images and gained over 26,000,000 page views, and 6,700,000 unique users.

System

Utilizing selective archiving, users can choose what they want archived from 4chan. All images are stored away on Imgur and Imageshack servers due to storage costs.

The backend system is powered by Lumen, a micro-framework created by Laravel. Our backend database is MySQL 5.

No support will be given for setting this up. Please only open issues for real bugs or mistakes I made.

Initial Setup

php composer.phar install

Make your own .env file, using .env.example as your base. If you don't know what you're doing, read the Lumen documentation.

php artisan migrate

To seed fake data into the threads and posts table, run php artisan db:seed

Known issues

• Board lists is not supported.

What this source comes with

• Automatic take down requests
• Full archiving process.
• Uploading images to Imgur/Imageshack
• Popular threads listing
• Latest threads listing

What this source does not come with

• Automatic view_cache clearing
• Automatic e-mail notifications for takedown requests
• Donation page. The view is there but needs to be filled out with your own message. (donate.blade.php)
• Terms of service page. Again, the view is there, but you need to fill it out. (terms.blade.php)

Backwords Compatibility for Old Schemas

When 4archive shut down, it's database was also released the public in a shutdown message I left (You can read the shutdown message below).

This new version of the 4archive code was written before I decided to shut down 4archive. I had full intentions to create a new UI for 4archive, new schemas, and overall make a beautiful product that I could be proud of. Because of this, the schemas are different!! You cannot use this code for the old schemas!!!. In order to achieve backwords compatibility, you must line up the columns from the old database to this new database. Or just alter the source. It's very clean and easy to modify if you know your way around Laravel.

Here's a gist of what is changed in the schemas:

• Tables now have foreign keys.
• threads_id is now thread_id in all applicable tables.
• available is now deleted_at to be Laravel friendly.
• Primary key and foreign keys are now int(10) and int(10) unsigned respectively.
• Normal integers are now int(11)
• created_at and updated_at columns added across all tables.
• Posts table specific:
  • chan_image_name is dropped.
  • image_dimensions and thumb_dimensions are now image_width, image_height, thumb_width, and thumb_height
  • chan_post_date is now post_timestamp and is now a timestamp type.
• Threads table specific:
  • archive_date and update_date are dropped and replaced with created_at and deleted_at
  • user_ips is dropped and records are now placed in the update_records table.
  • admin_note is dropped.
  • alive is dropped.
  • tweeted is now tweeted_at (timestamp)

You can find the original SQL dumps here.

But why didn't you release the old code???

Because I didn't want to release code that I am not proud of. This code I am very happy with. It's easy to move from server to server, it's flexible, and it's core framework has great documentation. The original 4archive code was a custom framework I made a long time ago. I'd rather bury it.

The original shutdown message read as follows:

4archive.org started January 17, 2014 and has since become one of the most popular 4chan archives currently alive. Sadly, today, May 7, 2015, 4archive is shutting down all operations. Since it's arrival, 4archive stored 57,674 threads, 9,754,504 posts, and 3,235,393 images and gained over 26,000,000 page views, and 6,700,000 unique users. 4archive was also the only 4chan archiver that archived /b/.

Today, I am releasing the trove of archived content for the public to archive themselves. These threads should not be lost because 4archive goes down, and I hope the records find a safe home. I will also, in the coming weeks, be releasing code for a new version of 4archive I was working on created in Lumen, a micro-framework in PHP created by the developers who made Laravel. Hopefully, someone can find it useful. I will have 4archive.org redirect to the repository when it is available.

I'm sure a lot of people will want to know the reason why 4archive is going down. The reason 4archive is going down is because frankly I don't want to take care of it anymore. Honestly, I felt a bit of a disgust with what was being archived. I didn't feel good about hosting archived content that actually upset people. Not only that, but I had to pay $50 a month to the hosting provider to keep 4archive up and sometimes had to pay that out-of-pocket, and I don't have that much money :(. With that said, I welcome anyone to take the place of 4archive. Hopefully, the SQL dump can be a good start for you.

If you plan on reviewing these dumps, try not to judge my column names :( These schemas were made a long time ago, and I've since learned my lesson. Also, I would really appreciate it if someone downloaded this and re-uploaded it somewhere else. 4archive.org will be 100% unavailable starting May 13, 2015. It'd be a shame if this archive was lost.