GikoHistory, #0

From: gyudon_addict
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2025 15:53:44 -0700
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There isn't much to teach beyond what you can learn by just going
through the sites themselves, but if you want a bit of context on where
gikopoi's "community" came from, I'll give you a short history lesson:

Around 2005 or so there was a flash chatroom called Bar Giko. There were
several similar kinds of sites around then, and they were popular with
2channel users since they were anonymous and used their characters. At
some point 4chan /b/ users discovered the site, and although rich
cultural exchanges were recorded, they were quickly segregated off to
their own section of the site. This tradition continued for a while
after the opening of Bar Gikopoi, the successor to Bar Giko. These are
the earliest traces of the Gikopoi International "_for" community.

I think Gikopoi saw its renewed interest from 4chan on /jp/ around 2008,
and this carried on for a few years. This is where a lot of the older
guys like Archduke came from. You can go on warosu.org/jp/ and search
"gikopoi" and sort by ascending date to see the old threads. There's
also a lot of screenshots of flash Gikopoi and a few of Bar Giko on
booru.gikopoi.com.

So Gikopoi kind of just existed peacefully in this state for several
years. It was somewhat popular with the old /jp/ and textboard crowd,
and it was a successful community. Until flash died.

(The servers for flash giko didn't shut down until fairly recently, you
could still play it if you had a browser with flash. It was a ghost
town, but a few of us went back there for kicks a couple times.)

With flash on the chopping block, Gikopoi needed a modern replacement.
Apparently this wasn't a task for the much larger Japanese community, so
international user "iccanobif" made Gikopoi2 (later renamed Gikopoipoi).

This modern HTML5 replacement subsumed the remaining users, both the
western and Japanese community (which the owner of Gikopoi apparently
wasn't too happy about). This is the site known as gikopoipoi.net.

Archduke, one of the original users kept up the tradition of organizing
parties for /jp/ around the holidays, and this is where I and a couple
others came from. I think I found it around October 2021, and started
being a regular around new years.

Around the summer of next year, Archduke and a few others weren't too
pleased with the way iccanobif and his friends were running the place,
so with Gikopoipoi being open source, he forked it and started running
his own server, Gikopoi.com. There wasn't really any drama involved,
there's a small group back on poipoi that doesn't like Archduke for some
reason, but iccanobif is cool with it and has been known to show up and
stream on odd occasions.

Archduke runs it pretty lax, and he likes working with everyone else to
do new projects for the site. There's been a lot of unique users over
time, and it turned out to be a distinct community. 

The wiki and BBS kind of exist for our own entertainment. A lot of us
have a penchant for creative writing and a connection to the old text
board scene, which used to do a similar thing (see: tanasinn.info).

Hope that answers some of your questions.