>>5,17
I often wonder about the sort of life that "textboards" have taken on. In some way, I feel that Shii and his software + essays + group of friends are almost directly responsible for how we see "textboards" as some kind of unique forum that stands in opposition to both "imageboards" as well as "traditional (i.e. phpBB) forums". When really, "textboards" were just the phpBB of early Japanese internet. >>17 is emphasizing the ware nature of early 2ch, ayashii, amezou, etc. but these were just the big nefarious boards. This kind of software was in use for every type of forum, they were hosted on people's homepages as a type of guestbook, japanese forums today still use software derived from these types of boards, etc. It wasn't all nefarious, if you look at the objective history of this trend, it's just as generic and boring as the history of phpBB, vBulletin, or whatever. Japs couldn't figure out registration or sql so they made anonymous flat file systems because that's what guestbooks used and the html BBS grew out of the guestbook, and Americans thought this was exotic.

The English name in general is silly, a "textboard"? a board to post text? All internet forums are "textboards", all forums, even those that allow multi-media content, still emphasize comments and discussion over anything else. If the name textboard means "no multi-media content", I still don't get it, it seems like pushing way too much emphasis on what the board can't do rather than what it does. Shii and the like seemed really opposed to just calling these boards what they are: forums. His essay on textboards makes this pretty clear, as this "new system" of textboards is constantly contrasted with phpBB in particular. Of course, textboards are older than phpBB. Rather than viewing textboards as a primitive version of a registration-forum, he instead projected his Japanophile views and argued about the differences between western and eastern culture.

I think this overall had an impact, with his views being shared by WAHa and Mr VacBob, and with their influences on world4ch and 4-ch and iichan and so on. The terms "textboard" and "imageboard" took on a life of their own within the west. I see scripts on github with descriptions like "textboard with imageboard capabilities": you mean it's a forum that can optionally post images. I see discussions like "are textboards superior to imageboards?" and I see people arguing the fine points about what makes a textboard a textboard and what makes an imageboard an imageboard and so on, and there's such a weird obsession with making these two variations on a simple theme into their own category altogether.

These days, I just use the term BBS to describe both textboards and imageboards because the more I think about it, the more I think the distinction between "textboard", "imageboard", "forum", and so on really makes no sense.