2ch Chronicle/Repossession
On February 19, 2014, Jim Watkins, from the San Francisco-based N.T. Technology web hosting service, repossessed the 2ch.net domain and all servers, claiming that the "previous administration" failed to pay the bills (perhaps after getting showered with lawsuits), and announcing that he himself would take over as the new admin. Since many users believed this was a joke, ZUN (creator of Touhou) had to explain that the situation was real.
To whom it may concern: The previous management was not able to generate enough income to pay the bills for the expenses of running 2ch. Previously I allowed some autonomy to them. During that time my name has been slandered. The ability for 2ch to generate enough income to stay open was damaged. I hope that with proper management that 2ch can recover.
2ch.sc
editThings quietly end; time has passed like this.
Hiroyuki expressed regret on the decision, but did not pursue charges or make appeals. However, he did scrape the entire 2ch.net website and its massive thread archives to build a new website, 2ch.sc. This would have been fine, had Hiroyuki not done it in a way that sucked up much of Jim Watkin's bandwidth and cost Jim lots of money.
- Hiroyuki Scrapes 2ch.net into 2ch.sc - warning - very biased