r9gay

/r9k/ (also known as /rk9/, "Robot 9000", "arcanine", /r9gay/, and /relationships9000/) is one of the final boards added to 4chan on February 19th, 2008. It is 4chan's official board for relationship advice (or rather lack of relationship) discussing childhood memories and hooking up with fellow r9friends. Its current iteration serves as the official wizard board, complete with endless tfw no gf, normie and womanhate threads.

After childhood memories of being ræped by a robot surfaced in therapy, m00t took a page from Randall Munroe's blog and created the board. It is now moderated by the aborted fetus of the aforementioned tryst, a bot named "ROBOT9000" that prevents the same image or text from being reposted EVAR AGAIN. It initially showed a lot of promise as the best general discussion board on 4chan, apparently immune to the failure that contaminated /b/.

However, m00t's little lab experiment has since turned into his Frankenstein's monster, as it has since been populated with millions and millions of angsty teenage moralfags who blow their load every time they realize that what they're saying can only ever be said again with slight variation. Every topic on the board is centered around their liberal, elitist BAWWWWWWfest antics, taking no care to show anything but contempt and disrespect for their /b/tarded elders and superiors. The aforementioned fags bring it with thread sandwiches made of NORPs, Dr. Phil, and AIDS. If you're ever in need of a good ROFL, any given thread on /r9k/ will turn that frown upside down.

The influx of sensitivefags came from the likes of Digg and Enturbulation after reading of 4chan due to Project Chanology. Droves of butthurt LJ and dA faggots soon followed, bringing their constant whining about Anonymous being "mean" to Aspies and other innocent victims, ED being a racist and homophobic attack site, and generally being pots accusing kettles of being niggers. This has rankled the hackles of some oldfag /b/tards, resulting in some very ungentlemanly name-calling. Over the years, r9k changed dramatically.

The Gentlemen of /r9k/

The one thing this board will never achieve, other than getting laid.

/r9k/'s old Anonymous vision.

Initially a haven from The Cancer for battle-weary bonafide Oldfag /b/tards, /r9k/ quickly became invaded with uppity newfags claiming Oldfag status and calling themselves "Gentlemen", "lu/r9k/ers", or "robots".

The term "Gentlemen" is certainly sardonic. It dates back to the days of yore when the denizens of /r9k/ would post in the manner of verbose ding-dongs in order to avoid the dreaded mute. These days, however, an influx of newfags - too new to have even been on /r9k/ since its birth, mere months ago - will refer to themselves as "robots". This influx has also meant that /r9k/ is often nothing more than /b/ with "MUTEBLOCK" on the end of every post and a few pixels changed in every image.

/r9k/ was created to give OC a safe space from memetic shitposting, which is why it had the robot. In the old days there were threads filled entirely with greentext stories. People said "epic" unironically and referred to themselves as gentlemen. The stories about being awkward, dropping spaghetti, and being rejected slowly took on an angrier tone, and the introduction of "wojak" and "Sad Pepe" lead to a proliferation of feelposting, culminating in the board destroying line >tfw no gf. moot deleted the board. When it came back, it returned as a caricature of itself, more bitter and misogynistic than ever. It was very angry for a while, but slowly the most depressed and hateful posters left for wizardchan and /r9k/ became more capable of poking fun at itself. Smug Pepe emerged and this lead to a slew of original content, beginning with manchild stories, then POO POO PEE PEE, then good boy points and tendies and all the other garbage. This drew the attention of reddit and /b/ that this place was a haven for dank memery, not a sewer of sad, depressing greentext stories and bitter virgins who told you to fuck off if you mentioned having a girlfriend. There has always been a decent amount of shitposting, but suddenly the entire board went nuclear. Threads started sliding off the catalog about twice as quickly and the posting quality dropped dramatically. Now, the board is pretty much a tamer mixture of /soc/ and /b/. We don't know where all the feelfags went, wizardchan is even more hostile to them.

For /r9k/, there have been three eras.

The Gentlemen Era: 2008 - 2011

The Feels Era: 2012 - 2014

The Normie Era: 2015 - 20??

The change of eras is pretty much solely attributed to the growth of the internet, and consequently, the growing popularity of 4chan. The more exposure it got, the more people looked into it. The more popular it became, the more normie-lized 4chan became. All boards suffer from this, but due to the nature of /r9k/, it was hit hard.

After feelfags ruined it, robots are comprised mostly from these 4 types of people:

Typical Smug Pepe & Wojak content

Virgin betas who desperately want a GF who ask for advice to other virgins on how to obtain said GF, with expected results. More often than not these robots simultaneously profess an unfathomable hate towards women, which brings the question of why they want a GF in the first place.
Cuckolds who hate normies because they're more successful than they are.
"Fembots" attention-whoring because they know pathetic virgin betas will both rage at them and put them on a pedestal.
Wizardchan refugees. The outcasts of the outer rim of society who recently lost their chan and haven't found out it's actually back. They are usually the most disfunctional omega autists on the entire website. They left /r9k/ in the first place because they couldn't handle the idea of normies browsing it; what's left of the ones that didn't commit suicide after the temporary disappearance of wizchan or wander off to "magicchan" has crawled back to /r9k/, where they slowly infest it with stories of pooping in their pants, while using feces-ridden "Smug Pepe" & "Wojak" image macros.

Some common terms used by robots are:

KV - Kissless virgin.
Wizard - 30+ year old virgin, usually a failure aside acquiring pussy.
Lich - 40+ year old virgin.
Wraith - 50+ year old virgin.
Chad Thundercock - The named personification of the stereotypical ‘fraternity’, sexually active alpha male.
Stacey Thundercunt - The female equivalent of Chad. The unrequited love of the Robot.
Gentle Femdom - A constantly remade thread comprised of faggots who want to be the girl in the relationship.
Rose - Some camwhore no one but obsessive, lonely robots care about.
Katya - See above.
Smug Pepe/Smug Frog - The personification of /r9k/'s war against normies and Wojak's worst nightmare.
Wojak/That Feel Guy - Visual representation of a robot's FEELS. Constantly abused by Smug Pepe.

It's not hard to see where this one's going: once the likes of /b/, /k/, and /h/ get a whiff of the bunched panties emanating from /r9k/, Anonymous will likely eat its own.

The old rules from era one

Evolution in action.

/r9k/ ~~was~~ is an imageboard where there were no reposts. ~~Rules back then~~ (disregard that, the robot was reinstated):

RULES:

gleep glop zeig heil!!1!

/r9k/ is an imageboard where there are no reposts. Rules/observations/etc:

If you attempt to post something unoriginal, it is not posted, and you are muted temporarily.
The time with which you are muted for doubles with each transgression.
Each mute time is 2^n (thanks, mathsfags) in seconds where n is the number of times you have transgressed. So, your mute time doubles each time you fuck up.
Quotes, eg >>1, are not viewed by /r9k/. So "lolwut" and ">>2 lolwut" are the same post, in the eyes of /r9k/. (This also applies to >quotes)
Gibberish at the end of a post to force originality is punished with the full force of the banhammer. Even testing R9K's parameters seems to draw the ire of the mods.
Images are included. Slight changes in exif data, etc, however, seem to circumvent this rule, but like with text if you break the filter the REAL LIVE MODS will banhammer you.
Your mute count never resets or goes backwards. (This will probably be changed eventually) Mute counts decrease slowly.
You cannot post a picture without text.
Unicode is blocked. Sorry, too many exploits (Cyrillic letters, etc).
The too low in content filter was broken for a while, resulting in a lot of crappy mutes. Sorry. Mods have twice reset the mute counts because of this.
Post sane, real content, well thought out replies, and mutes are unlikely.
The original algorithm was designed by XKCD: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/
/r9k/ cannot self-terminate.

How to troll /r9k/

/r9k/ is one of the easiest boards to troll. Known methods for trolling include:

Make a thread containing only >Tfw no gf
Say Atheists are wrong and gay.
Say abortions are wrong
Say you're from /b/.
Say you're from ED.
Say you're from /cgl/.
Express conservative or racist opinions.
Express liberal opinions.
Guro or Shock Images - Gentlemen are not true Anonymous, and thus have not been hardened to the realities of the world.
Post as a girl.
Give them Constructive Criticism about how to improve themselves and be more appealing to the opposite sex (Points extra if you recall that nobody will pity them and the more they isolate, the more implausible is to them to have a normal life and having normal social relationships)
Post as Pepe, Peepe, P3epe, P3eepe, or any of the variants; This is guaranteed to make you a successful troll.
Bring up a moral debate about child pornography.

Any of these guarantee at least 100 posts.

Workarounds (Muteblocking)

Average Gentleman.

m00t prepares to be boarded by his latest creation.

When the board was first created, you could work around the bot for text by quoting a few previous replies as this added uniqueness to your post. The mods quickly fixed this part of the code and the bot now strips quotes and replies before running the post through the database.

Images can be reposted by changing the exif data, resizing, using a HEX editor, etc. before reposting. However, there are still actual mods on /r9k/, and they will issue swift and painful banhammers to anyone who would oppose the new robot overlord.

The most common cheat is known as muteblocking. Just add "muteblock" (or mootblock or any other variation) at the end of your post. This only works if the post is a short one because the robot only checks the first thirty some characters of the message. For copypasta, one must muteblock at the beginning.

Although technically you could get b&, the mods don't seem to give a shit anymore.

Differences from /b/ back in the day

The chaps of /r9k/ considered themselves to be far more sophisticated than the rabble of /b/, and refered to themselves as "Gentlemen". Of course, being the smartest and most sophisticated of the users on 4chan is roughly equivalent to winning gold at the Special Olympics. Another somewhat popular label is "lu/r9k/ers," which is a gross misrepresentation, since the majority of /r9k/ users are more likely to lurk LJ than 4chan.
/r9k/ gets far less traffic than /b/. While this does amount to fewer posts, it has its advantages. For instance, one can have actual discussions on /r9k/ without the thread being spammed by forced memes and kicked to page 10 by unoriginal material and camwhores.
The most obvious difference is, of course, that /b/ has had absolutely no original content whatsoever for about two and a half years. /r9k/, on the other hand, had nothing but fresh, new, and never-before-seen material.

As seen above, /r9k/ users are far more politically correct and sensitive than average /b/tards. (Basically meaning they frequently say coons instead of niggers. This really makes a massive difference.
E-psychiatry is common practice on /r9k/ and it's never difficult to find an overzealous or enthusiastic "troll" (the term is used loosely in this instance) offering an FBI profile on any given poster. If you're feeling depressed or have any personal issues, /r9k/ has an army of individuals ready to serve your needs around the clock.
/r9k/ perceives every woman that is slightly attractive or has an unusual nice appearance as a trap.

RIP /r9gay/

Warning!
R9K is back. Oh me gawwdz!!!1

m00t being ræped by r9000's daddy.

moot realizes what the rest of us knew months ago.

On January 17th, 2011, moot deleted the /r9k/ board from 4chan. The two types of robots found refugee in their respective new homes: the robots who seek gentlemanly discussion went to the new /r9k/, which was created within an hour of moot's mercy kill, while one other person decided to be FOREVER ALONE and went to the other /r9k/, and the bawwfags who seek depressing discussion about bitches and hoes went to bawwchan and now everyone is happy, forever alone, or sad(in the bawwfags case).

On October 23, 2011, it was resurrected, but that is pre-ancient history by now.

Like all boards on 4chan, /r9k/ is not without its problems. Because the board's population is made of aspie nice guys and white knights, /r9k/ has not generated any worthwhile memes or even anything mildly lulzy over the course of its lifespan.

However, it still functions as a moderately good discussion board, and is still a good idea in theory. While one may still have to wade through a knee-deep pool of shit to get to the good content, this is really no different than any other board on 4chan. How long the board will stay in its current condition is unknown, but the fact that the board went from great to rather shitty in about two months is not exactly a testament to its potential.

4chan's crack team of experts has yet to determine how long the board will last in its current state. However, given how long /b/ has managed to survive while being terminally ill with cancer shows that there is still some hope for /r9k/. The best solution, obviously, would be for some sort of actual moderation and chemo on the part of moot and the 4chan mods. Of course, knowing moot, it is perfectly reasonable to expect two more World Wars and an Ice Age before any real help is provided.

Followup studies are grim, showing that /r9k/ has been fully overtaken by relationship bullshit, dating advice, and hookup threads. Yes, you read correctly, fucking hookup threads. /r9k/ is also full of long-assed threads with "Is ED down or what?" every time ED breaks for a few seconds, that get about 200 replies from both anonymous and tripfags.

Recently moot announced, via a sticky, that he was planning on setting up an individual relationshit board on 4chan. IF this happens, /r9k/ might get slightly less faggotty for a while. Plus, newfags will have a whole new board to troll. Everybody wins. Except not, as /r9k/ sucks anyway, and the relationshit posters would come back after they realize that threads in their personal LiveJournal board don't get many replies.

moot on being a massive faggot.

But I think you ought to know /r9k/'s feeling very depressed.

UPDATE: With the creation of /adv/ice for the s/adv/irgins and /sci/ for the /sci/ducks, some tolerable level of lulz have indeed surfaced on /r9k/, much like bacteria covered in polysaccharides float to the top of a wastewater plant. With the reappointing of several briefly-retired janitors and at least one full-time mod in /k/ and several previously hidden boards mainstreaming and drawing off the newfags, the board is getting back on its boil-strewn legs. /r9k/ is nothing but "Ask a (insert type of person different from lonely virgin here/lonely virgin)", relationship/sex advice and kids worrying about penis inspection day.
UPDATE: As of 1/17/11 /r9gay/ is no longer a part of 4chan. moot said this is because all of the Robots are whiny, pussy faggots, and then he went to make soup.

Oh God its Back

On 10/22/11 Moot did the unthinkable and returned his evil creation, along with a politics board (/pol/), a DIY board (/diy/), and Harcore (/hc/). His explanation was that he had called out GirlVinyl for being a greedy whore and shutting down ED, and was therefore a giant hypocrite because he had shut down R9gay. Of course there was one huge difference; OhInternet is vastly inferior to ED, while 4chan post-/r9k/ is vastly better than 4chan with /r9k/.

/r9k/'s only last raid

Was always going to be a complete success.

Gallery

/r9k/ About missing Pics

Onwards to original content
The original incarnation of /r9k/ as per moot's sticky.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlord.
R9K has human slaves to do his dirty work.

[Collapse GalleryExpand Gallery]

The 9K and 9K1 Gets.
Original content, in my /r9k/?
Rule 34 on /r9k/.
A wise man tells it like it is.
Typical robot.
Typical fembot.
another fembot
Normie-hating robot.
/r9k/ before he was put on Prozac.
100,000 GET
I KNOW MY BOYFRIEND GOT THAT GET!
A supposed /r9k/ mascot.
r9k lays out an unwarranted mute
ALWAYS CHECK FOR QUOTES~!!
Robot 9000 is ultrapopular with ladies.
Is originality really something to strive for?
The top hat and monocle distinguish not only /r9k/ users, but also their patron deities, from those of other boards.
Demotivator of a thread from early /r9k/.
Serious discussions.
/r9k/ is THE BEST.
Yep, that about covers it.
Yes, they do think of themselves this high.
Rare Pepe collectors card
400 hours in Photoshop
r9gay user irl