8chan - The infinitely expanding imageboard.

About

vichan is a free light-weight, fast, highly configurable and user-friendly imageboard software package. It is written in PHP and has few dependencies.

vichan is a fork of Tinyboard, a great imageboard package, actively building on it and adding a lot of features and other improvements.

Support and announcements: https://int.vichan.net/devel/

Requirements

1. PHP >= 5.3
2. MySQL/MariaDB server
3. mbstring
4. PHP GD
5. PHP PDO

We try to make sure vichan is compatible with all major web servers and operating systems. vichan does not include an Apache .htaccess file nor does it need one.

Recommended

1. MySQL/MariaDB server >= 5.5.3
2. ImageMagick (command-line ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick preferred).
3. APC (Alternative PHP Cache), XCache or Memcached

Contributing

You can contribute to vichan by:

• Developing patches/improvements/translations and using GitHub to submit pull requests
• Providing feedback and suggestions
• Writing/editing documentation

If you need help developing a patch, please join our IRC channel.

Installation

1. Download and extract Tinyboard to your web directory or get the latest development version with:

   git clone git://github.com/vichan-devel/vichan.git
   

2. Navigate to install.php in your web browser and follow the prompts.

3. vichan should now be installed. Log in to mod.php with the default username and password combination: admin / password.

Please remember to change the administrator account password.

See also: Configuration Basics.

Upgrade

To upgrade from any version of Tinyboard or vichan:

Either run git pull to update your files, if you used git, or backup your inc/instance-config.php, replace all your files in place (don't remove boards etc.), then put inc/instance-config.php back and finally run install.php.

To migrate from a Kusaba X board:

Support

vichan is still beta software -- there are bound to be bugs. If you find a bug, please report it.

If you need assistance with installing, configuring, or using vichan, you may find support from a variety of sources:

• If you're unsure about how to enable or configure certain features, make sure you have read the comments in inc/config.php.
• Check out an official vichan board.
• You can join vichan's IRC channel for support irc.6irc.net #vichan-devel

Tinyboard support

vichan is based on a Tinyboard, so both engines have very much in common. These links may be helpful for you as well:

• Tinyboard documentation can be found here.
• You can join Tinyboard's IRC channel for support and general queries: irc.datnode.net #tinyboard.
• You may find help at tinyboard.org.

Donations

Do you like our work? You can motivate us financially to do better ;)

• Bitcoin:

You can also ask us to develop some feature specially for you <3. Join our IRC channel and ask for a quote (there are a few of us, who work with the codebase and are skilled enough to develop such features pretty quickly).

CLI tools

There are a few command line interface tools, based on Tinyboard-Tools. These need to be launched from a Unix shell account (SSH, or something). They are located in a tools/ directory.

You actually don't need these tools for your imageboard functioning, they are aimed at the power users. You won't be able to run these from shared hosting accounts (i.e. all free web servers).

Localisation

Wanting to have vichan in your language? You can contribute your translations at this URL:

https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/tinyboard-vichan-devel/

Oekaki

vichan makes use of wPaint for oekaki. After you pull the repository, however, you will need to download wPaint separately using git's submodule feature. Use the following commands:

git submodule init
git submodule update

To enable oekaki, add all the scripts listed in js/wpaint.js to your instance-config.php.

WebM support

Read inc/lib/webm/README.md for information about enabling webm.

Static Pages

Some pages like /faq.html need to be pre-generated:

$ php faq.php > faq.html

vichan API

vichan provides by default a 4chan-compatible JSON API. For documentation on this, see: https://github.com/vichan-devel/vichan-API/ .

License

See LICENSE.md.