I think he did it because the actual WordPress guy (Matt Mullenweg) is really litigious.

Censoring*

Censure is like a harsh criticism

Didn’t expect that

Aaah, someone of culture, I see.

Satin undies?

Close. Soiled undies.

Ssssssandwiches

This has been possible since the very beginning of PHP.

I won’t say if this is the best way now. I haven’t touch PHP in the last 2 decades.

I completely disagree.

Intermingling PHP and HTML is one of PHP strengths. The processing/executing difference you’re describing is almost always negligible due to how PHP is optimized (specifically for this kind of thing - outputting HTML to the browser sometimes).

Seriously, compare this to the 4chan image board view we really aren’t looking at the same source code. In comparison, the WordPress function is blocked, purposeful, together. It’s a single CSS block output all at once. On the otherhand, in the linked 4chan discussion board PHP file, it echos as strings, broken up by multiple conditionals, and is difficult (even from an IDE perspective on highlighting) to tell where a block starts and where it ends (again due to it being echo’d in strings, and broken by conditionals). Trying to modify this blocked CSS is going to be wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy easier than trying to modify a bunch of printed HTML strings broken up by multiple nested conditionals. Plus it’s just straight-up easier to read and straight-forward to understand what the function does right away.

To harp on this even more, one of the benefits of blocking HTML in this way is IDE highlighting. In your example, if you were to pop that into a modern IDE like VSCode, it’ll highlight tags and allow collapsing like a normal HTML doc. It’ll probably even highlight the CSS as expected. On the other-hand, by echoing / printing HTML strings, IDEs aren’t going to highlight these things as HTML since they’re PHP strings, and in the case of the imageboard, it’s going to struggle finding matching open/end tags due to PHP strings and broken conditionals. I’d much prefer the WordPress example over echo / printing multiple lines of HTML strings (this is really a pet-peeve of mine).

I can’t think of a single system that doesn’t “stop PHP executing” at some point to output HTML in some way. Maybe an app that dynamically pulls it’s views in through JS I guess.

For comparison to future readers, this is just a small portion of the imageboard which goes on like this for another 600 lines:

	if( $resno ) {
		$closed = $log[$resno]['closed'] || $log[$resno]['archived'];
		
		if( !$stripm ) {
			$msg .= '<div class="navLinks mobile">
	<span class="mobileib button"><a href="/' . BOARD_DIR . '/" accesskey="a">' . S_RETURN . '</a></span> <span class="mobileib button"><a href="/' . BOARD_DIR . '/catalog">' . S_CATALOG . '</a></span> <span class="mobileib button"><a href="#bottom">' . S_BOTTOM . '</a></span> <span class="mobileib button"><a href="#top_r" id="refresh_top">' . S_REFRESH . '</a></span>
</div>';
		}

			if( !$stripm ) $msg .= '<div id="mpostform"><a href="#" class="mobilePostFormToggle mobile hidden button">' . S_FORM_REPLY . '</a></div>';
	} else {
		if( !$stripm ) $msg .= '
<div class="navLinks mobile">
	<span class="mobileib button"><a href="#bottom">' . S_BOTTOM . '</a></span> <span class="mobileib button"><a href="/' . BOARD_DIR . '/catalog">' . S_CATALOG . '</a></span> <span class="mobileib button"><a href="#top_r" id="refresh_top">' . S_REFRESH . '</a></span>
</div>
<div id="mpostform"><a href="#" class="mobilePostFormToggle mobile hidden button">' . S_FORM_THREAD . '</a></div>';
	}

Formatting and structure is important for a readable framework / project and longevity. 4chan had none of this - Moot took the bag and ran and whoever took it over just left left the PHP standards/organization in 2003.

here’s a new one: https://files.catbox.moe/d56ws8.7z

I can upload a new one. Ping me tomorrow when I’m awake again.

Some of the boards use a system called tripcodes, which are essentially a username and password in one that are used when writing individual posts. It allows people to prove that they’re the same person across multiple posts, without anything as identifying as a user profile attached.

She turns 33 in few days.

34 or 35, I think. I remember learning that she was around my age.

I still would

I remember when she was popular learning that that she was like 10 years younger than me, so 35-ish.

Queen

Not interested in that other stuff, but are there any sites you recommend that are closer to the old qa?

We take turns taking care of it. You’ll get your turn eventually.

You do

there are literally subreddits with slurs in the name

the definition of Morbid curiosity is essentially what my experience w/ 4chan is

/tg/ was usually decent. Often a good source for pdfs

All of these things are correct, but I would like to posit there was a specific era when it actually became intolerable, and that was about 2013 or so. It was a gradual process, but you noticed more and more “normal threads” getting hijacked and brigaded. Baw threads, or threads where people would post tumblr core sad images (mostly about missing ‘her’) got hijacked by incels (who said something like, “shes fucking chad bro” although the incel vocabulary had yet to be calcified.) You laugh you lose (YLYL) threads got brigaded by people “banana posting” or flooding the thread with images of a specific meme of a banana opening his peel like a trench coat and “exposing” himself to a pair of apples. It was boomer shit, but their alleged point was that YLYL was cringe.

Now, were Baw and YLYL cringe? Maybe. But they were also like, “normal” threads. Normal users would come and post normal content. YLYL threads (and their cousins, Epic threads) were how board culture was preserved, posting collages of greentext posts of particularly noteworthy threads or stories or interactions. The point wasn’t to point out cringe. It was to radicalize young male users who self identified as unlucky in love, to degrade board discourse so no one wanted to even post in “culture” threads, and to either radicalize the young and impressionable who might be receptive to Nazi messaging, and to push away those that were not. 4chan always tolerated Nazis, and there is an old proverb against it.

Moot used to get a ton of hate from the Nazis, because he actually tried to police them. I don’t know if they targeted him or just got lucky, but they had been trying to get rid of him of a while. He left after users found his girlfriend was cheating on him, and posted the photos on 4chan. months later, trump descends a golden escalator…

I used to frequent the /tg/ board, it had people making homebrew conceptual RPGs - the kind of stuff that the indie RPG scene pretends to have invented. Sorry to see the site go, but it was inevitable.

How could anything be better than Doomworld for new wads? That’s wild.

Not invaded. The existing 4chan user-base inspired, and was targeted with, fascist propaganda starting with gamergate!

It was literally ground zero for fascist PsyOps. Steve Bannon even considered it an inspiration, and a pivotal moment, in the creation of his fascist propaganda machine.

The same year Twitter died then.

I wonder if Poole has done any interesting interviews on the intersection of 4chan and the modern fascist propaganda machine it bred.