For those of you that haven’t seen, 4chan was hacked:
https://boingboing.net/2025/04/17/4chan-hacked-obliterated-and-unlikely-to-be-back-soon.html
A deadly blow? Will a copycat spring up? Where are the users going in the meantime? Does any of this really matter?
Why would it go away completely? Why wouldn’t they plug the hack and continue on as they were before? Getting hacked doesn’t typically kill a service unless there was data deleted and no recovery option available.
One possible reason I’ve read is that the people moderating it have had their identities leaked, so imagine being the person responsible for banning 4chan users and now also they know who you are, seems like a very unappealing thing to volunteer for.
They would need to rewrite it again, the release source code showed about of security flaws. If they’re just re upped it again it would be taken down by someone the sake day.
The current owner is not and has not ever been interested in maintaining it. He bought it to squeeze it of its worth and now that it’s suddenly going to cost a lot of money to bring back he probably just won’t.
That does leave the possibility of selling it to someone who does want to restore it.
It’s unclear if they even can plug the many security vulnerabilities that are now public information. The leaked source code reveals that the site hasn’t been updated at all since the new owner took over.
My understanding from the articles I read is that the whole platform ran on PHP 5.5, and porting from a version that old to current is no small task.