zichan - A lightweight and full featured PHP textboard.

About

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

The vichan documentation can be found on the wiki and will work . (feel free to contribute)

History

Zichan is a fork of vichan designed primarily for textboard use. It is highly experimental and may contain leftovers.

Maintainer timeline

1. The zichan fork is created and maintained by an anonymous developer
2. Community support for vichan by @basedgentoo, and @RealAngeleno - vichan
3. Development Commission lead by @basedgentoo, @kuz-sysadmin, and @RealAngeleno. (2023 - 2023 )
4. @h00j (2021 - ???)
5. @ctrlcctrlv (2017 - 2021)
6. @czaks (2014 - 2017) (The author of vichan fork)
7. @savetheinternet (2010 - 2014) (The creator of Tinyboard)

Requirements

1. PHP >= 5.4 (we still try to keep compatibility with php 5.3 as much as possible) PHP 7.0 is explicitly supported. PHP 7.2 works as well, but may cause as yet unreported bugs.
2. MySQL/MariaDB server
3. mbstring
4. PHP GD
5. PHP PDO
6. A Unix-like OS, preferrably FreeBSD or GNU/Linux

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

Recommended

1. MySQL/MariaDB server >= 5.5.3
2. APC (Alternative PHP Cache), APCu (Alternative PHP Cache), XCache, Memcached or Redis

Contributing

You can contribute to zichan by:

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

Installation

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

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

2. run composer install inside the directory

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

4. 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.

Support

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

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).

vichan API

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