The only official archive of AnonTalk!
AnonTalk (abbreviated "AT" — not "AnT") is the first, best and only anonymous, "uncensored", registration-free, category-less, English-language, Web-based BBS. It allows anyone with a Web browser (that supports "cookies") to discuss pretty much any random topic with fellow "AnTs".Please understand that this is NOT a so-called "chan" and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with them; we very strongly distance ourselves from their inane "culture" based on stupidity. Get any assumptions out of your head already. The term "anon" was around way, way before the cancer of the Internet started spreading. In fact, treating this place like a" chan" in any situation is a sure-fire way of getting violently thrown out, head first.
This board gets better the longer/more you use it; many of its features are smart in subtle ways. People who give it a chance appear to end up loving it.
There simply wasn't anything out there like this. Remotely similar concepts, such as the previously mentioned copycat "chans" or the Wikipedia "Reference Desk", suck more ass than I know how to put into written words and seemingly were designed by retarded monkeys. All the countless inane technical and usability issues aside, they randomly censor "inappropriate" posts and ban people for fun. Here, you don't have to fear such idiocy but are able to freely speak your mind. (As long as you're not a complete idiot.)
Naturally, spam, vandalism (this includes posts with bad grammar, spelling and punctuation) and obvious trolling is deleted. "Uncensored" means that, for example, "positive" discussions about and related to pedophilia are allowed, which is not the case in almost every other place on the WWW (for whatever reason). In other words, what matters is not what you write, but how (and in what context) you do it. Basically. As long as you don't intend to "out"./hurt any identifiable individual.
Because they proved necessary to help filter out all the low-quality noise. These are mainly just spammy/malicious domain names/parts of URLs, but also common troll lines and memes, etc. Unfortunately, a few of these phrases may be a little "greedy", causing legitimate posts to be blocked (always clearly indicated to the user). I really try my best to minimize this, however, and it shouldn't be a real problem for quality posters. Also, it should be noted that some phrases are only temporarily banned. For obvious reasons, I can't let you see the exact list, but it doesn't contain curse words or other "moralistic" stuff.
Technically, no. In practice, however, you can discuss topics that would never be allowed anywhere else. There has never existed such a thing as actual "free speech" and there never will be. Any truly uncensored, completely "free speech" forum would be full of spam and idiots flooding it with nonsense non-stop; it would become useless quicker than anyone could post anything worthwhile. Just look at what happened to Usenet. Nobody with half a brain would want that.
Every visitor gets assigned an internal ID (and a password) the first time they visit. This is only used internally (never actually shown in public or even leaving the server) and the purpose is to keep track of your read topics, your watchlist, post history, etc. The ID is not based on your IP address but simply on the current time when it was created.
In topics, each poster is identified by a different public alphabet letter (previously a long, random string that changed entirely from discussion to discussion and thus also was 100% untraceable, although uglier). The topic starter (the "original poster") is usually "Anonymous A" (but can be "Sysop" as well), and then the second one is called "B", etc., up until "Z", at which point each new poster in the discussion will be called "Z-1", "Z-2", "Z-3", etc. This gives you full public anonymity while still providing a way to know which anonymous poster posted what within a given topic. Additionally, replies made by the author of the topic (OP) are specifically indicated for extra clarity, exposing most attempts to fake multiple individuals, which, sadly, is a frequently occurring phenomenon in other boards that use less sophisticated (read: dumb) anonymity.
Please never make references to letters in discussions as this is purely for personal reference. Also, since posters can be removed entirely from a topic, this is not "safe" as your reference would become invalid and confuse everyone.
It is just not technically possible to trace anyone here, and it will never be. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a liar set out to give this place a bad reputation (probably because they got banned for posting junk) or simply a confused individual. No amount of technical security and privacy can protect against lies and stupidity.
There is no need, nor is it even possible, to manually register a traditional "user account" and log in (although you can transfer your ID by backing it up and restoring it). Just post! (But please always keep in mind that we very strongly encourage quality over quantity.)
It's about everything! That's the point and part of what makes it so unique! "Seinfeld" was a TV show "about nothing"; AnonTalk is a Web forum about everything! Here, you will read about things that you would never normally encounter if you limit yourself to just one or a few "categories".
NO! Why do some moro… people seem to think that? This is a place for everyone (who knows basic English and has turned on their brain), including pedophiles. That's not the same thing! A used car store which stocks cars of all brands isn't a Volvo store just because most of the customers happen to want a Volvo.
Pedophilia is specifically mentioned as an example because it is currently considered (probably) the number one controversial subject world-wide. Pedophiles gather here because they have nowhere else to go. Nobody is stopping you from starting topics about things that interest you. So do so!
All traces of you (Web server log records, etc. — not actual posts, of course) are gone within a month from our system. In practice, the logs are often removed much more frequently than "once a month", typically due to attacks. The only reason that they are stored at all, temporarily, is to be able to handle trolls (and, of course, to get some useful, internal statistics). If available, and assuming that your intention is not to hurt the board or its creator, IP addresses associated with posts are never handed out to anyone for any reason, except if illegal and we are forced by local law enforcement. No third-party scripts are used. There is an encrypted version of the Web site. Our Internet service provider does not log any traffic, not even temporarily. (They are probably unique world-wide in that regard.)
Believe it or not: AT actually does care about your privacy (unlike virtually all other sites that claim to do this but still use third-party JavaScripts and all sorts of other evil things). Quite possibly even more than you do…
Using your full real name, would you admit something socially embarrassing about yourself? Most likely not. How about when using your on-line identity/nickname? On a regular Web forum, you have to pick a name (which potentially could identify you) and whoever runs it will know your e-mail address (and could use it against you). In general, as sad as it may sound, only when people are allowed to be completely anonymous (as you are here) they allow themselves to be truly honest. At least that's my theory.
Naturally, simple embarrassment is far from the only reason for wanting to be anonymous. Around here, you get a new chance at a "reputation" as a poster for every topic. Nobody knows who posted what between topics; only within topics. Nobody will be able to use your alias, full name, e-mail address, Web address, previous posts or anything else against you, since they don't know about them! Discussions can be held without prejudices and internal fights. Anonymity can also be necessary for personal security purposes. You may want to stand up for your opinion, but you simply can't because if certain people learned about it, they would hurt you or you would lose your job or something like that.
It is not recommended, and the board tries to force you to stay anonymous. However, if you really must, you need to provide some sort of reasonable "proof" that you are who you claim to be. For example, don't post random pictures of a person showing his/her face and say that it's you; you're gonna have to take a photograph where you hold a sign saying "AnonTalk.com" and the current date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Also, it is not allowed to exchange personal information, e-mail addresses, etc.
As a general rule, no. They don't "expire". All posts here are supposed to be high quality texts that stand the test of time and provide valuable information for future readers. Topics are kept open indefinitely unless they are manually locked. Posts that are complete garbage and cannot be "saved" are deleted when spotted (no matter how old). Sometimes, entire posters are "nuked" many months after they stopped posting because all they did was post nonsense. For this reason, it is important that trolls are ignored so that topics don't become nonsensical without such replies.
No. As long as you know how to read and write English reasonably well, you are welcome here. There is absolutely no sane reason for preventing kids from asking their questions anonymously; you don't have to lie about being 18+ here. Note that it is not considered OK to type "lol", "u" instead of "you", "i" instead of "I", "there" instead of "their", etc.
The "horrible" catch is that you need to type correctly around here. No sloppy posting!
We are frequently the target of so-called DDoS attacks (bandwidth overload) carried out by retarded bigots who can't stand anything close to free speech. Rather than just not visiting it, they use these illegal means to make the site inaccessible for everyone, because they are scum, unworthy of living on this planet. All this downtime has cost us huge amounts of money, a lot of wasted time (that could have been much better spent improving the software and promoting/growing the community) and tons of lost activity/visitors.
Protection from this is very expensive and cannot be done with software. Your continued donations are most needed.
Many Web masters have anti-leech mechanisms set up, meaning that while you may be able to see the image that you just found on the Web, others won't. Without going into further details, the short answer is that linking directly to images (or other media content) on the source Web site is not at all safe. Please don't do it.
This is purely based on the number of replies (it used to base this on the number of visits, but this caused too many crappy topics to show up which attracted the most readers but weren't really popular activity-wise). Only topics created within the last week qualify.
Because you are supposed to make up your own, unbiased mind instead of relying on the opinion of the masses. AnTs are not sheep.
No. Edit your texts and think them through before publishing them! There are countless problems associated with letting people "travel through time", causing confusion and even worse "lazy posting".
They are surprisingly restrictive, actually. Topic visits are unique, as in only one "visit" is counted per session (they are not "views" or "unique visitors"). A "session" ends when the Web browser closes, regardless of the time span. The author's own visits and ones made by the sysop are never counted. Some of the earliest topics have too low counts because these stats were not kept track of from the very beginning. Due to my unwillingness to use internal redirects, combined with limitations in how the Web works, these visit counts are actually too low, if anything. (However, that is obviously much more useful than too high values.)
Visits are not counted at all when viewing posts stand-alone.
Most likely because you are doing silly things with cookies, such as blocking them for whatever stupid reason. Stop doing that if you want to be able to post. Also, if you are doing any "suspicious" things such as modifying the cookies or generally behaving like a bot, you will get an error as well.
By just hanging out here, contributing with quality posts, you help a lot. Telling other decent people about the Web site is of course the key to keeping it alive. Naturally, donations are always welcome.
Just a guy fed up with all the suffocating censorship going on around the Internet, as well as the staggering stupidity that is allowed to flourish everywhere. I'm sick and tired of all these fucking high-on-power hypocrites, preaching their pseudo-moralistic values and shoving their random rules down our throats. I wanted a place where you can actually have serious discussions about controversial (and perfectly ordinary) topics in an anonymous, clean environment, and since there was no such thing, I had to do it myself.
The board system was written from scratch by me and is constantly being worked on behind the scenes (many small changes and fixes every day). It is proprietary (closed source) and NO, you can't "have a copy", license or even buy it! Sorry. Please respect this. (Any crappy clones that you may find have nothing to do with us and are unauthorized, highly unwanted and illegal in all civilized countries. Please help by reporting them to their Internet service providers to get them removed.)
However, you are more than welcome to donate or >buy some ad space here.
Because it is an international, commercial (yes, for real, although making money obviously isn't the primary objective), English-language Web site. It is the only TLD worth a damn for this purpose as far as I'm concerned.
You can send a private message through the board or e-mail [email protected]. Private messages must only be used for internal matters; business stuff must go through e-mail from your company's domain. (Don't even bother sending fake e-mails as they are easily detected.)
Issues related to your account and/or IP address must include the ID and/or IP address in the first e-mail; you will no longer get a reply back asking for you to provide this information as this wastes so much time.
If your important e-mail is not responded to within a reasonable amount of time, it must have been lost due to anti-spam measures. In that case, be sure to also send a private message through the board mentioning the e-mail, since that is guaranteed to work.
All "hate mail" is immediately deleted without being read and the sender is put on a permanent block list. Don't waste your time.
Abuse reports on posters/posts must not be sent in via e-mail, but rather through the built-in mechanisms.