The farm is back, and Junkuchan has returned to its usual, quiet self. I wanted to provide a postmortem to any of the lurkers that remain, since I neglected to do that the last time Junkuchan hosted a major community I'M SORRY.
What happen(ed)
I would like to encourage you to lurk more to unearth the juicy details, but early on the morning of September 9th, 2024, /shelter/ received a massive influx of posters from a displaced community. The quantity of posts these expatriates generated rivalled that of c3’s, with an average of 150 posts an hour, exceeding the rate of every other board in the (known) webring.
The farmers stayed on Junkuchan for about 35 hours. During that time they attained 5245 posts (roughly), two file deletions, and zero bans. A dozen or so reports were filed, mostly for some variation of a-logging, all of which were dismissed. The community retreated as quickly as it arrived around midday on September 11th, 2024, leaving the site more-or-less how they found it after doubling /shelter/’s post count.
What worked
The backend handled the increase in traffic like a champ, with no downtime observed or reported. Junkuchan did have the option to temporarily ‘scale up' but the requirement to do so never presented itself. Junkuchan’s built-in VPN blocks didn’t appear to be too disruptive, and a fair number of farmers opted to use the onion address.
No farmers violated sitewide rules, allowing for very hands-off moderation. The occasional infighting may have scared off would-be posters, but this would not have prevented them from lurking and eventually migrating back to the farms after the downtime. Overall, I think the low barrier to entry and lean list of global rules enabled the farming community to regroup, communicate, and move on effectively.
What needs work
Cycling threads are incredibly convenient for staff and bystanders who don’t want to be inundated by a constant growing tumour of threads that have hit their limit. However, they don’t work for communities that like to document and archive everything. The farmer archivers were having some trouble archiving the thread, especially media to include OC. This issue was intensified by how Junkuchan instantly deletes media associated with deleted or pruned posts. It’s great for handling illegal content, but not for charming tegaki art that got slid off the site by shitposting.
I may have to pester dear Tom and other jschan contributors to implement a paged, infinite thread feature. Simply, a new ‘page’ is generated once a certain number of posts is reached where posters can continue, forever. This isn’t a new concept, it’s ancient as far as the internet is concerned, but it’s a bit of a foreign idea for western imageboard users. Of course, everyone and their drama-loving aunt will want to fine-tune pagination or turn it off entirely, downloading all 5000 posts at once, which will increase the technical hurdle of implementing the feature.
I also have some work to do with UI and UX. A massive, cycling thread will lag a lurker eventually if they never bother to refresh. I don’t want to force a refresh (they may be archiving), but I would like to remind that lurker that they can refresh and improve their experience. Also, Junkuchan’s UI elements and styling options might be killing some nonnies’ phones. I may need to see if we can implement a ‘poor mode’ to allow those affected to lurk and contribute without lag.
Briefly, the way forward
<Come up with something better than cycling threads
<Stop annihilating the legendary doodles
<Stop melting dear Anonymous’ Nokia.
Further reading:
https://archive.ph/https://junkuchan.org/shelter/thread/5931.html
The farm
The community from New Zealand