The Overbooru

About

The Overbooru is a small project I started over summer 07, designed to be an index of (hopefully) all the boorus on the net. I started it partly out of boredom but mostly to make things easier for myself. That's right, I'm a selfish bastard. Credit where it's due, the inspiration for this idea came from the Overchan which indexes chans instead of boorus. Incidentally, the Overchan has since been more or less superceded by 2ch.us and Filterchan.

FAQ

1. I'm new to all this stuff. What is a booru anyway?
A booru is a new breed of imageboard and is essentially a tag based image archive. Most, if not all, of the current ones are based loosely around anime. Because the idea is still relatively new there are not that many of them around compared to, say, forums or more traditional imageboards. The name is derived from danbooru, the first booru.

2. What is danbooru?
danbooru was the very first booru, coded and admined by rq. Bandwidth was largely provided by image server donors, of which I was one. The site got more and more popular, in large part due to rq's lenient policy on mature content, untill eventually the site couldn't take the strain anymore and rq pulled the plug. The old images and user favs can still be found at Foone's Tinyboofoo though. In the vacuum left by the death of danbooru many new boorus sprung up, most notably Sagubooru which is the closest to an "official" successor there is to danbooru. Some of the sites which started around the time of danbooru's death use the original danbooru code (or at least a modded/hacked version of it), but most of the new ones use Shimmie instead. danbooru has since revived, but mature content is now members-only.

3. Shimmie?
Shimmie is a rewritten version of danbooru coded in php. Thanks to its easy installer, it now forms the majority of boorus on the web.

4. Any other types?
So far the most notable (and probably most extreme) example of an independently developed booru is Sagubooru's newest beta, which is flash based. Akibakko seems to be independently developed now too.

5. So boorus have been around for a while now. There must be some plugins floating around by now.
Indeed there are! The two that I know of are danboorup, an uploader, and Atachi's unnamed plugin, a search plugin. Both are for Firefox.

6. Wtf? Where'd all the links go?
To better cope with expansion, the Overbooru now uses Wakachan-style toggle menus. Click the headers to toggle the categories.

7. Why does the Sagubooru link in the index go to a different site?
Sagubooru itself is still solidly in beta and looks to be staying that way for a good while yet. In the interim, an ajax interface is there instead. Sagubooru does in fact have its own ajax interface, I just prefer Svarteper's one thanks to its random search function. In any case, flash sucks and ajax is simply more user-friendly so an ajax interface of one form or another is likely to remain the Overbooru-endorsed one for the forseeable future. More interfaces can be found on Sagubooru's forum.

8. I know/have started a booru which is not on your list. Can you add it?
Sure, drop me an email or post on /kareha.

9. I've got a cool idea for a booru that hasn't been started yet. How do I start my own booru?
First off, get some hosting. Free hosting isn't really an option with boorus because of the amount of bandwidth they generally use, as well as other requirements freehosters usually don't offer. With that in mind, I recommend DreamHost. If you expect your booru to be fairly small scale, Fused Network and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET might be worth a look too. Once you have hosting, grab a copy of Shimmie, then you're pretty much set. The installation of Shimmie itself is, apparently, largely self-explanatory. If anyone feels like writing a tutorial (since I haven't been able to find a decent one online and still haven't got around to properly testing Shimmie personally), I'll be more than willing to host it.

10. I have a question which isn't answered here!
First of all, check Pinochan's general FAQ. If your question isn't answered there, feel free to drop me an email and I'll do my best to answer your question.

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