I've been doing this 4chan Friday thing now for a couple months now, and it has come to my attention that not many people around here actually are familiar with 4chan.  Like, at all.  I know it's kind of late to explain it by now, but better late than never I guess. Some people call it hell on the internet, akin to getting raped to satin's penis, while others may say it is the best place ever. Some even call it home. I call it writing material, but that's probably just me.

4chan, in the most basic terms, is an image board.  More accurately, "the largest English imageboard on the web,"  at least according to them.  I wouldn't doubt it thought.  The idea behind an imageboard is that you are required to post a picture to open a post (OP), and then post pictures if you feel to reply.  Whether these pictures are relevant, irrelevant, or contain genitals is completely up to the poster.

This is what the main page looks like.  To the untrained eye, it looks innocent, but that would be horribly wrong for the most part.  What you see here is the list of boards, along with random stats and the three most recently added pictures.  The boards have two different ways to be identified; with the full name as seen above, or the more popular way, by the tags.  Most tags have the format of slash-letter-slash, which is how they are displayed in the index at the bottom of the boards, as well as in a URL (4chan.org/[letter]/).

The most well known board is /b/, or Random.  If you don't know what is in here already, you shouldn't go.  It will get explained when I do my 4chan Friday Finale.  Most other boards contain what they say (for the most part) but there are always people who want to cause shit and post stuff that violates the rules.

Yes there are rules.  Even on /b/ (sometimes).  Some of the boards are even considered work safe, identifiable by the blueish background.  Why people are browsing 4chan at work is beyond me, but if you can get away with it, all the more power to you.  Sometimes I feel like my job IS to browse 4chan, except that I don't get paid.  

As for the people, there are a lot of them.  It wouldn't be the biggest imageboard if it wasn't for them.  Some of them are nice, some of them are trolls, and some of them are there to just make you go "wtf".  And yes, the trolls there are much worse than me, and probably sneakier too.  But if you assume that everything is a troll, you should be safe.  With that, I better not say anymore for fear of getting ripped a new one by my fellow channers, especially after revealing their secrets.  They were never really that secret or special to begin with though.