Ah, 4chan. You either loved or hated it, but there was no doubt that the site had a lot of colorful characters. It had a lot of different boards too, each with their own "culture"; although they could occasionally come together for glorious unity. This is a story from one such board, /sp/.

What are tripcode users/What is 4chan? A primer.

Back in the good old 4chan days, there were many people who participated in 4chan. Most posted as an anonymous user; a feature of the site, which was based off of Japanese imageboards like 2ch. However, some chose to use keep themselves identified with a username and tripcode, which functioned much like Discord's hashtag identifier. The randomized garble of letters, symbols and numbers soon becoming as familiar to 4chan users as the username itself. People could make a username at any point on the site, but most chose not to as a part of the "board culture" which glorified anonymity and distanced social interaction. To be fair, there was also an element of social anxiety, autism and general mental disorder to go along with it. If you got into an argument with one user on one thread, you could come together as brief friends on another thread in another day. People could not normally track your posts as an anon (unless they were creeps who studied your typing style), which dissuaded a lot of post stalkers. Similarly, your triumphs were brief flashes in the pan.

Trip users gave up this anonymity and fleetingness in order to build up their own reputations, for good or for bad. This commonly was met with anger or sullenness by the other anonymous users, who often would refer to tripcode users as "tripf*gs". Still, one could not deny that tripcode users were useful as they had much more weight behind their words and a strong ability to command a thread if they were old enough and had done enough things. Many tripcode users were, in essence, "mini-celebrities" of their board. This brought more scrutiny upon them, and as one tripcode user would find out, creepers.

The story.

/sp/ was the 4chan board for sports. It discussed games of any kind, although they often warred over certain, somewhat insignificant topics in comparison to the wider world. (This Team Sucks! Wrestling doesn't belong in /sp/! American football is boring and stupid!) One of the tripcode users, a mini-celebrity like I talked about earlier, was a European who went by the trip UTV. As described by the Daily Dot, UTV was a british man who followed the Premier League, liked the Aston Villa striker Christian Benteke, and enjoyed..."racial humor". He was known to be very, very active, and very very caustic and aggressive to other users on the board, very up his own ass. Not many people liked him. Aside from one.

Apparently, around July 1, 2013, an anon calling themself "The Archiver" began recording each and every post that UTV made, commenting in each thread and stalking his every move. As quoted in the Philmarilion,

[S]ometimes it is impossible to resist speaking to him, he is a naked woman and I must have a peek,” the archiver explained. “As you can see, his responses to me are generally good natured ‘banter’ with humorous intention that show the sweet, tender relationship that we share together.

This while UTV had somewhat noticed someone was stalking him and was attacking them with insults and hatred.

This continued for about 3 months. About 1,472 logs were tallied, Archiver recording and finding every single post this very active user made daily. It spiraled past that. Soon, Archiver was composing poems and songs based off UTV. He was creating his own Rorschach ink blots out of UTV's posts. He was planning for their life together. Their (or UTV's) funeral (with other tripcode users, remember what I said about tripcode users being mini celebs?). He was creating little to-do lists to complete and labeling certain food items as belonging to UTV. He made a welcome mat out of the posts of many of UTV's haters, and a belt of UTV's posts to guard himself.

When I have to go out and miss UTV I always want to read some of his posts,” the archiver wrote. “This idea is a belt with UTV posts attached that allows me to quickly pull off a UTV post at any time for my reading. They are all responses to me and seem more personal and make me miss him less.

Probably among the creepiest of posts had him considering kidnapping UTV and leaving a ransom note for his family, or posting 3 very creepy, short videos that some anon users would later speculate came from inside UTV's flat. There was definitely a sexual or at least romantic component to this obsession, although according to the Archiver he didn't feel that way. At least...he never physically harassed or came near UTV in person?

The fallout.

Around October 6th, the Archiver made his last known posts to /sp/. For months he had been "secretly" collecting information on UTV. Although many 4channers were by this point probably aware of what he was doing, nobody was quite aware of the extent of his madness.

In his final post, he detailed that his family had found out about his obsession and were forcing him to remove everything, to never do something like it ever again. They were also apparently monitoring his activities to ensure this would stay the case. In order to protect his work (97 pages by this point), he had to release it. And release it he did. Right into a random thread.

His last words were" "I am sorry to UTV and hope he sees this and understands".

Holy *shit* everyone freaked out. 97 pages of pure madness focused around one trip user? The story spread like wildfire, UTV himself only responding once with

?

before vanishing off of 4chan, never to be seen by /sp/ again. It became a tale covered by the Daily Dot as an example of how nutty 4chan users could be, and a cautionary tale by 4chan users of the protections that anonymity granted you. It also made /sp/ the focus of much mockery by the other boards, who often engaged in mostly lighthearted rivalry with each other. The document itself is still archived on many harddrives and stored in many places, but its main home is still up.

Consequences were the vanishing of UTV from the site, many tripcode users no longer using trips to avoid a similar scenario and much entertainment for years to come.

I leave you all with a link to the document itself, in all of its 97 page glory. I hope you read it, it only goes downhill from here. If you don't want to read, there are other articles that give summaries of the situation a bit further below.

LINKS

The Philmarilion

KnowYourMeme article

Daily Dot article