## TL;DR Regarding the Absolute State of 4chan Archival
At Desuarchive we have long struggled with many issues with many unsolved mysteries from the previous admin (peace be upon his wrists), but we have now set up the archiver on a more stable footing and there is some development going on with the scraper at least, so things are looking up as you may have seen this past year.
It is imperative for the survival of all 4chan archivers that Java-based Asagi is replaced (especially given the downfall of Fireden) and significant efficiency improvements are made in both excessive HTTP requests and RAM usage, while providing the same reliability and accuracy. As 4chan grows all archivers will be in grave danger of dying under the strain of deep software inefficiency and unsustainable costs if this is not done.
Archives are not going to be sustainable as seen with Fireden if only one dude has to shoulder the weight of thousands of dollars of equipment and bandwidth usage. The next archiver on the deathwatch appears to be Warosu.
On behalf of all 4chan archives, we need your help with the two scrapers being developed. These scrapers are currently set to be Asagi compatible as a future drop-in replacement for all other archivers: which is no small feat as Asagi regularly uses 40-60GB of RAM at full load but these could use as low as 30-150MB.
https://github.com/bibanon/eve - Python based scraper. We currently actively test it in production with /wsg/ scraping.
https://github.com/bbepis/Hayden - C# .NET light scraper, still needs testing for evaluation. But it's doing real great.
As such, we hope to be able to build a brand new archival stack based on these that dispenses with the inefficiencies of the scrapers of the past using PostgreSQL JSONB to store threads exactly as they are from the 4chan API (NoSQL style). While we are not frontend developers, we can sidestep this by building middleware to emit a 4chan compatible API, so that 4chan-X can be used as the JavaScript webapp and Android apps (Chanu, Clover) and iPhone apps could be modified with a few lines of code to work with the archive.
In support of research and onboarding for this, this effort 4plebs has generously developed partial 4chan API compatibility for the FoolFuuka frontend which is slowly being rolled out. This will allow Android and iPhone applications to view the FoolFuuka archivers (but not ghostpost yet). If you are a PHP developer we need your help here.
https://github.com/pleebe/foolfuuka-plugin-fourchan-api
They also developed 4plebs X which uses 4chan-X to function as a webapp frontend, possibly able utilize this 4chan API to replace the user facing part of the PHP HHVM FoolFuuka stack with a familiar alternative. It has flaws such as the lack of search and ghostposting, but hopefully developers could try to step in regarding that.
https://github.com/pleebe/4plebs-x
Demo: https://test.4plebs.org (to use disable 4chan-X to avoid conflicts).
If you know any third party 4chan app devs, please refer them to us so we can direct them on how to set the proper configurations for their app to access FoolFuuka archives. (there was an old FoolFuuka API already but it predates 4chan API so it is not directly compatible, best to move off it)
We are willing to provide support and troubleshooting for better understanding of FoolFuuka/Asagi instances for the construction of new ones or development of replacement scrapers, or if anyone wants to pick up the boards of Fireden. We have institutional knowledge and experience running many major archival websites gathered over 2 years, so don't hesitate to drop by.
https://matrix.to/#/@bibanon-chat:matrix.org
https://discord.gg/phPHTEs
Our guide could use some work but it will guide you there with some hiccups.
https://wiki.bibanon.org/FoolFuuka
## Regarding the Absolute State of Fireden and /v/ and /vg/ archival
Fireden is infamous in the community for never reaching out for help or advice, and never acting on anything other than abuse emails. I don't think they ever planned to operate for this long they were set up on the whim in 2015 after archive.moe died, so they probably just had enough it costs a lot to operate a site that can scrape /v/ and /vg/ images. But if the Fireden admin is reading this, be the prodigial son: we can provide any assistance or backup you need so that your hard work is not in vain.
The next archiver I expect to collapse under pressure is Warosu. As for us we are pretty stable after a $500 chassis upgrade and hot spare SSDs, but it really sucks to be one of the few people in the world who puts a large amount of capital into 4chan archival.
We refuse to pump more money in to bail out any more archivers for barely any returns, We have had to bail out 4 of them already and have paid $7000 to date out of pocket, and $200 a month, can't someone else pony up?
The best bet is for a large capital investment to be made on arch.b4k.co so it can be significantly upgraded to our standards to match the levels of Fireden, providing /vg/ scraping and full images for both. It will actually not cost too much to start out with maybe only 5x10TB drives for $700, $300 for a new case and maybe $600 for new AMD Ryzen with 160GB of RAM for Asagi and MySQL and $100 for colocation. Because we will probably never see the fireden images ever again, so that saves a lot of space.
4plebs refuses to take on any more boards as they are barely able to handle the ones they have.
## Basic Details about the Maintenance Done
This weekend we managed to do a major case upgrade for $500 for our backend image server to allow it to host more services such as scrapers and frontend content. All SSDs were moved out of the internal bay and into hotswap bays, and a hot spare SSD for booting was added: without those it was really difficult to service and made it difficult to consider using it for hosting databases safely. It may be possible to attach at least 6 more 3.5" drives which will be necessary as only 10TB of storage is available.
This may make it possible to halve the costs of cloud servers and bandwidth that we currently use by consolidating service together into a single server.
1 drive with bad sectors was replaced safely for $150 and a ZFS resilver completed. The other drives do not appear to have issues, but we continue to monitor the situation.
Tests done with the bibanon/eve scraper for scraping /wsg/ have been extremely promising, though development is still ongoing to put it on par with the Asagi scraper. It is possible that any new deployment of the scraper will utilize either this or hayden, but proper testing will still be necessary.
At Desuarchive we have long struggled with many issues with many unsolved mysteries from the previous admin (peace be upon his wrists), but we have now set up the archiver on a more stable footing and there is some development going on with the scraper at least, so things are looking up as you may have seen this past year.
It is imperative for the survival of all 4chan archivers that Java-based Asagi is replaced (especially given the downfall of Fireden) and significant efficiency improvements are made in both excessive HTTP requests and RAM usage, while providing the same reliability and accuracy. As 4chan grows all archivers will be in grave danger of dying under the strain of deep software inefficiency and unsustainable costs if this is not done.
Archives are not going to be sustainable as seen with Fireden if only one dude has to shoulder the weight of thousands of dollars of equipment and bandwidth usage. The next archiver on the deathwatch appears to be Warosu.
On behalf of all 4chan archives, we need your help with the two scrapers being developed. These scrapers are currently set to be Asagi compatible as a future drop-in replacement for all other archivers: which is no small feat as Asagi regularly uses 40-60GB of RAM at full load but these could use as low as 30-150MB.
https://github.com/bibanon/eve - Python based scraper. We currently actively test it in production with /wsg/ scraping.
https://github.com/bbepis/Hayden - C# .NET light scraper, still needs testing for evaluation. But it's doing real great.
As such, we hope to be able to build a brand new archival stack based on these that dispenses with the inefficiencies of the scrapers of the past using PostgreSQL JSONB to store threads exactly as they are from the 4chan API (NoSQL style). While we are not frontend developers, we can sidestep this by building middleware to emit a 4chan compatible API, so that 4chan-X can be used as the JavaScript webapp and Android apps (Chanu, Clover) and iPhone apps could be modified with a few lines of code to work with the archive.
In support of research and onboarding for this, this effort 4plebs has generously developed partial 4chan API compatibility for the FoolFuuka frontend which is slowly being rolled out. This will allow Android and iPhone applications to view the FoolFuuka archivers (but not ghostpost yet). If you are a PHP developer we need your help here.
https://github.com/pleebe/foolfuuka-plugin-fourchan-api
They also developed 4plebs X which uses 4chan-X to function as a webapp frontend, possibly able utilize this 4chan API to replace the user facing part of the PHP HHVM FoolFuuka stack with a familiar alternative. It has flaws such as the lack of search and ghostposting, but hopefully developers could try to step in regarding that.
https://github.com/pleebe/4plebs-x
Demo: https://test.4plebs.org (to use disable 4chan-X to avoid conflicts).
If you know any third party 4chan app devs, please refer them to us so we can direct them on how to set the proper configurations for their app to access FoolFuuka archives. (there was an old FoolFuuka API already but it predates 4chan API so it is not directly compatible, best to move off it)
We are willing to provide support and troubleshooting for better understanding of FoolFuuka/Asagi instances for the construction of new ones or development of replacement scrapers, or if anyone wants to pick up the boards of Fireden. We have institutional knowledge and experience running many major archival websites gathered over 2 years, so don't hesitate to drop by.
https://matrix.to/#/@bibanon-chat:matrix.org
https://discord.gg/phPHTEs
Our guide could use some work but it will guide you there with some hiccups.
https://wiki.bibanon.org/FoolFuuka
## Regarding the Absolute State of Fireden and /v/ and /vg/ archival
Fireden is infamous in the community for never reaching out for help or advice, and never acting on anything other than abuse emails. I don't think they ever planned to operate for this long they were set up on the whim in 2015 after archive.moe died, so they probably just had enough it costs a lot to operate a site that can scrape /v/ and /vg/ images. But if the Fireden admin is reading this, be the prodigial son: we can provide any assistance or backup you need so that your hard work is not in vain.
The next archiver I expect to collapse under pressure is Warosu. As for us we are pretty stable after a $500 chassis upgrade and hot spare SSDs, but it really sucks to be one of the few people in the world who puts a large amount of capital into 4chan archival.
We refuse to pump more money in to bail out any more archivers for barely any returns, We have had to bail out 4 of them already and have paid $7000 to date out of pocket, and $200 a month, can't someone else pony up?
The best bet is for a large capital investment to be made on arch.b4k.co so it can be significantly upgraded to our standards to match the levels of Fireden, providing /vg/ scraping and full images for both. It will actually not cost too much to start out with maybe only 5x10TB drives for $700, $300 for a new case and maybe $600 for new AMD Ryzen with 160GB of RAM for Asagi and MySQL and $100 for colocation. Because we will probably never see the fireden images ever again, so that saves a lot of space.
4plebs refuses to take on any more boards as they are barely able to handle the ones they have.
## Basic Details about the Maintenance Done
This weekend we managed to do a major case upgrade for $500 for our backend image server to allow it to host more services such as scrapers and frontend content. All SSDs were moved out of the internal bay and into hotswap bays, and a hot spare SSD for booting was added: without those it was really difficult to service and made it difficult to consider using it for hosting databases safely. It may be possible to attach at least 6 more 3.5" drives which will be necessary as only 10TB of storage is available.
This may make it possible to halve the costs of cloud servers and bandwidth that we currently use by consolidating service together into a single server.
1 drive with bad sectors was replaced safely for $150 and a ZFS resilver completed. The other drives do not appear to have issues, but we continue to monitor the situation.
Tests done with the bibanon/eve scraper for scraping /wsg/ have been extremely promising, though development is still ongoing to put it on par with the Asagi scraper. It is possible that any new deployment of the scraper will utilize either this or hayden, but proper testing will still be necessary.
