See a live demo
What's ChanBase?
Simply put, it's a ground-up imgboard clone based on modern tech- Standards Compliant
- Modern Format Support: Not just JPEG/GIF/PNG, but also SVG and HTML5 Video
- Above democracy: No moderators required. Users, as a group, handle the moderation of content and banning of problem users. No single person has absolute power, actions must be carried out as a group.
- Distributed: A single backend can serve multiple frontends. Anyone can write and host their own frontend and connect to any backend over HTTP.
- Completely Anonymous: Not even the server logs raw IP addresses. All unique user IDs are salted hashes of IP addresses that cannot be reversed.
- Realtime AJAX posting and updating: No need to hit F5 constantly.
- Samefag-proof: Hashed IDs keep you anonymous, but everyone can see when you're replying to your own post.
Topology
The ChanBase platform has a backend/frontend topology where several frontends can connect to a single backend.
The Backend
The backend serves data in a standard RSS format with all metadata embedded within RSS extensions. The backend can be browsed with an RSS reader, which allows items to be subscribed to. This also allows anyone to write a frontend for any platform using XML parsers.All posts use the standard HTTP POST method and provide XML AJAX responses. Anyone can hook into it. As the server does not serve complex web pages, it runs with relatively little load. It does, however, handle all media traffic.
Browse the live demo backend with RSS
The Frontend
The frontend does not require direct database access, this allows it to run on a different server, and be managed by anyone. The frontend parses RSS data from the backend, and almost all of the work is performed by the client browser through CSS and JavaScript. There is very little per-user load on the frontend server. All multimedia (image and video) traffic is sent directly to the server. As a result, the frontend has a near-zero bandwidth requirement.The only frontend at present is based on HTML5. However it's possible to write a standalone custom frontend for Android/iOS/.Net etc.