A while ago we had a thread about ukagaka. They are 2D desktop companions that was a part of the 2000s Japanese otaku culture, and never really made it to the west outside a niche circle. You can read the wikipedia page for more information on them.

While chatting with pez-san a few days ago, the topic of ukagaka was brought up. Originally I mentioned the idea of simulating a Heyuri-tan ukagaka on Heyuri, but I quickly noticed how much work that would entail. Then I decided on working on a web Ukagaka engine - there were some other similar projects in the past by some Japanese developers, but I wanted to create an engine for Heyuri from scratch. I call it Sumika, it's mostly made to act like SSP. The repo is open source, though it's not very great and there may be some bugs with it. It should support most ghosts as it is, but later on I may improve it to support some more ghost engines. Obviously it's all created with AI too...

I also machine translated some ghosts to put on Heyuri. I hope it won't upset Japanese creators of the ghosts if some are still around - my intention is merely getting more netizens to have fun with what they have created. There are around a dozen ghosts to check out right now, I can expand the list later on. You can also feel free to make requests like "kaguya-san, can you also translate and add this ghost I found online please!" on bulletin boards.

It's enabled for everyone by default right now. It's possible to iconify the feature to tuck it to the corner of the screen, or turn off completely from its controller page. I may also eventually disable it being on by default, making it an opt-in feature of Heyuri. If that happens, you would need to enable it on the controller page. I'll add the controller page's link to the frames in the meantime.

We have a native thread watcher now! It's meant to replace the old notifications webhook server on Dicksword we once had. You can choose what you want to recieve notifications for from [Settings] at top right, where the button for thread watcher is also located at - it also changes its color depending on activity: green for any new replies in watched threads, red if any of those replies is quotelinking your post.

First of all, happy Heyuri day! It marks the 6th year today that Heyuri has truly began, although Heyuri's history spuns further back than 2020 in other forms.

This year will mark the 4th bunkasai event. If this was a Japanese high school, those who were around for the 2023 Bunkasai would already have been graduates but internet gives us the liberty to not mature!

This time we will experiment with spanning it across 2 days of the weekend - we will hold it on the weekend of 2026/09/19 (Sat) and 2026/09/20 (Sun). It's the event where you will show off Heyurizens your unique projects (or small gimmicks) you have been planning and working on by yourself or with a group of other Heyurizen(s). Start thinking what are YOU going to do this bunkasai from now!

You may have also noticed that we are holding it earlier this year. That's because Culture Day in Japan (3 November, which bunkasai is said to be traditionally held around) is too close to the halloween, and it seems Japanese high schools too actually hold it around earlier autumn according to our research. We are going to skip the Cytube stream on September and we may hold a Halloween special for October.

The Monday after our bunkasai (21 September) will be Keirou no Hi (Respect for the Aged Day), a public holiday in Japan. We thought that also fits Heyuri's ojisan nature.

Our uploader software has went through another major update, besides backend overhaul, it includes new features and is now more responsive on modern browsers.
It also has a name now. I will call it TWINTAIL UPLOADER but feel free to be lazy and not capitalize it. It's a reference to its mascot Tenma-chan.
Once again, thanks to hachikuji-san, who was pretty much behind all the development work!

We created a homepage for it, too.

We now have a contact form if you have something to tell the staff, but it doesn't belong to the Site Discussion board.

You can access it from here: https://sys.heyuri.net/contact/

We're keeping up the tradition and announcing the third bunkasai event!

Date: 2025/11/02 (Sun)

Just like before, the day will be about sharing fun activities (think of them!), any kind of original content you have been working on for the day, and user engagement.

If you're unsure what to do, you can always look back at past years' OC archives for inspiration, and discuss ideas on the site, including possible cooperation with other users. Even if you are unable to work on something, just being active through the day helps a lot too!

Speaking of which, the archives of previous bunkasai events were moved to Museum@Heyuri for convenience.

It's the 5th anniversary of Heyuri! Technically our history goes back as far as early 2019, but we usually celebrate the beginning of our "Golden Age" of 2020, when Heyuri truly earned its identity.

To mark the occasion, we're rolling out a major update to Kokonotsuba we've been working on for almost a year. Majority of the changes are behind the scenes - making the code more organized, replacing deprecated HTML with modern HTML, applying PHP security updates, and making everything MUCH faster (especially on bigger boards). That said you will also notice some front-end improvements, UI fixes, new JS features and new stylesheets.

Major thanks to hachikuji-san (who has virtually done all of the PHP development), anonwaha-san (responsible for most UI updates), and pen-san for paying for our ChatGPT subscription. COW-san gets a shout-out for fixing some perplexing JS issues and spotting some security vulnerabilities too.

Thanks to everyone who's been part of Heyuri so far. Here's to five more years!

Two days ago, our previous registrar (Epik.com) permanently suspended our domain and banned my account, citing a violation of Code 1466A (a law concerning "obscene" visual representations involving minors, ie. loli pr0nz) - all without any prior notice or warning. They initially intended to permanently seize heyuri.net, and stated their decision was final. However, after some persistence - and citing Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition - I managed to persuade them to allow a domain transfer to a new registrar. Thus Heyuri survives yet another near-death situation. Onward!

Thanks to anonwaha, we now have a Heyuri Calendar hosted on Heyuri★CGI. You can use it to view upcoming Heyuri events like anime streams or gaming days, along with other important days. Like all our other scripts, it's based on a Japanese script - though this one comes from a more recent source. Check it out!

As last year's bunkasai was quite successful, we decided to turn it to an annual event.

Date: 2024/11/02 (Sat)

Mark in your calendars and start thinking of fun stuff to do through the day, OCs are always welcome! You can look through last year's OC archive to get inspiration. Even if you can't think of anything special to do, user engagement is everything, so try to spare some time for posting more actively through the day.

We've had several flash board instances in the past, but they were all lost to too many bugs or inactivity. For a long time, I've wanted to give it another try - this time with a better software, overboard support and more features: Flash@Heyuri

Once again, thank you Hachikuji for its development!!! There may still be a few minor issues, but things will only improve from here. Feedbacks are more than welcome!

As announced during yesterday's townhall, we won't be able to keep the ayashii.net domain for very long so Strange World@Heyuri is moved back to https://dis.heyuri.net/sw/.

I brought back Anime/Manga@Heyuri, 2D Cute@Heyuri, 2D Ero@Heyuri and 2D Lolikon@Heyuri boards as trial boards. The lolikon board is originally from another site, also lolis aren't banned off the 2D ero board, nor creation of these boards mean the topics covered in each board aren't welcome on the Off-Topic board anymore. Contribute if you want them to be permanent!

Also, plz use Overboard@Heyuri to follow new posts so you don't miss threads from these boards.

Overboard is finally back after 4 years! You can from view the latest posts from Kokonotsuba boards on Overboard@Heyuri. It doesn't include Oekaki and Strange World boards, but there is something to display when was the latest posts were made on them, which should come in handy. There is also a board filter which you can use to filter out threads from boards that you aren't interested in. Possibly this feature may allow us to add more bulletin boards to Heyuri someday.

Once again, thx hachikuji for developing the software!

Our uploader script is now open sourced at https://github.com/Heyuri/Uploader/.

This is not only the first Western instance of the Japanese-style uploaders that used to be commonplace on Japanese internet during 2000s, it's also (most likely) the best existing software of its kind with modern PHP support and many new features. Examples of the same kind of uploader include a Futaba-related site archived on Heyuri's museum and Futaba Channel's own file uploader. Everyone is free to host their own instances as long as they give proper credits to us and the old Japanese developers came before us. Many thanks to hachikuji and penman who did basically all the development for this release!

I found out few days ago that a large archive of our 2021 threads were still intact in some dusty hard drive. Making a Heyuri-themed internet museum has been a longtime desire of mine, so I'm using this opportunity to launch it, coinciding with my second adminversary. Enjoy your browsings! Museum@Heyuri

For now I added few interesting stuff other than the big Heyuri archive, I'm wishing to grow it more over time.

With all the ups and downs along the way, Off-Topic@Heyuri has reached the 100.000 posts milestone. w00t!

Next up: 1 million posts!

The initial downtime was caused by a DDoS attack on kereste.moe, a site that I've been hosting on the same server as Heyuri. While we were working on enabling our protections, our provider, in the middle of the night on new years day booted us off while citing unnamed and unreferenced "continued copyright complaints" and ambiguous "unlawful activity". We had never received a single copyright complaint from them, and always dealt with other illegal stuff quickly and deleted them.

It is more likely that Terrahost, our colocation provider, decided to terminate our 2 year relationship in the middle of the night because they did not want to deal with the DDoS attacks, since they also said we were "too resource intensive" and we didn't have any incidents with Terrahost for over 2 months prior to this termination. They suspended all of our servers and did not answer our tickets for around a day until we requested to retrieve our data. Our total storage capacity across our servers were over 20TB and moving so much data in 24 hours while we were all on vacation was an impossible task. Also you can follow or bookmark my Twitter account NOW COMPROMISED, it's where I give updates in events like this.

Anyways, happy 2024!

I think everyone can agree that it was a huge success. The activity was four times of the usual, and a lot of OC was created: I archived OCs of the day here.

Thanks to everyone who has participated, let's have another next year!

If you attended the 8th townhall from this year (logs here), you probably remember that we talked about holding a bunkasai (eng: culture festival) on Heyuri. If you watched some high school anime, the chances are you already know what that means. I also remember there were some users during the townhall meeting who didn't know about it, so just look it up if you don't either.

Date: 2023/11/04 (Sat)

It's about the time we need to start doing preparations for the event. Since we are a website and not a physical place, holding some traditional activities like haunted house or cafes are obviously not feasible. The activities instead would need to be stuff we are able to do over internet, as well as individual or group projects for the day (which would count as original contents). I am planning to make an archive of new OC posted during the day and some screencaps in a special page.

You can share your ideas for the day.

From now on if you try to use emoji on boards, they will get wordfiltered to SoftBank 2004 emoji

The last domain we used as our uploader, 2ch.sh has expired so after a poll on Polls@Heyuri, I decided to move it to up.heyuri.net.

A new part of Heyuri has been launched on cgi.heyuri.net! It's being maintained by one of our moderators, currently there are 2 scripts but there are more to come soon.

"This new area of Heyuri will house various CGI/Perl scripts from the Japanese web of the 1990s and 2000s, many of which have never been seen on the English-speaking web before.

There will be bulletin boards, games, and many other fun novelties! ヽ(´ー｀)ノ"

Our old Polls@Heyuri have been archived on here.

WTF, it has been a year already!?

So it has been an entire year since I took over as the administrator. If we speak about the site stats a little, a year ago on the Off-Topic board there were around 18000 posts, and now there are around 50000 - this means more than 60% of site activity has been generated in the last 365 days. It's all thanks to you, Heyuri users. I am happy to be accountable for this but more importantly, I am proud to be a part of this community. Thx everyone!

There are some little changes we believe will benefit the boards in terms of being more fun:

• Enforce Rule 8 more heavily on needlessly angry posts: We can have serious discussions(See Rule 1), but Heyuri is not the place for getting angry/argumentative. Even you think your raeg is directed at a single user, all posts you make are direct contributions to Heyuri's content base and if they suck, Heyuri would suck too.
• Ban discussions about Trans stuff: Internet is full of this discussions for the past decade, we don't want it to spill to Heyuri. This became a very politicized topic anyways, so Rule 7 is now more strictly enforced for this topic. The only exception is when the topic is the gender of a fictional characters.
• No more board dominationz allowed by a single user/topic: This has been an issue lately. Don't try to "force" characters or franchises you like onto boards. Keep nu-4/jp/ style threads about certain 2hu characters(or other characters, such as desu spam) with uncreative texts like "Mai waifu youmu-chan looks cute today! :D" to minimum. Thread hijaks are also quite annoying when it's excessive or on unrelated threads (eg. 2hu hijack lol in some tech thread). The exception is for special occasions like threads about certain shows (or characters in shows) from recent CyTube streams taking over the board, since we all would be familiar with the topic.

Also, as Heyuri is getting more active, I am also looking to hire one or two new staff to help us, currently there are only me and one moderator as staff. Please look into this thread if you are interested.

I'm excited to announce that I've added /jp/ - 日本語 to Heyuri. This board used to be hosted on another site called nihongochannel as multiple separate boards, but I've migrated it over to Heyuri as a single board. Although it wasn't very active in the past, we're expecting some of its former users to join us on /jp/ soon.

Please welcome any new users well. As for the board-specific rule, note that posts disrespecting Japan or its culture will be deleted on /jp/. Also, we will be using a flag system on this board. At first, it will only show whether if you're from Japan or not, but in the future, I want to replace it with a system where users can show their country for each post if I figure out how to do that (I also made this an issue on kokonotsuba's GitHub).

I'm looking forward to seeing all users interested in Japanese language on the new board. English posts are not banned, but I encourage using DeepL in case you aren't comfortable writing in Japanese.

1. MySQL support
   

   Should make things much, much faster

2. Various bug fixes
   

   Such as the blank loading screen, the threadview mode on the textboards, the replylinks not showing up on replied-to posts. (Confused? We are too)

3. Thread and Catalog cache
   

   Reduces server load and speeds up load time. The downside is that it makes posting a little slower

4. Fixed admin tools!
   

   Believe it or not we didnt have a working ban function for over 5 months.