reviving the imas only uploader

idolmaster celebrated a 20th birthday recently, making it old enough to drink. at this age, it’s also an uncomfortable amount of history for a contents franchise to sit on top of. most franchises don’t enjoy a longevity that allows them to realize any influence or forces them to make difficult choices about attracting new audiences. few can be considered as much of a blueprint for a successful media mix. what is now a sprawling giant of multiple branches initially started as an arcade game that sent you mobile mail. the 360’s brief star in japan (and the best reason to JTAG one stateside) leaned on the success of an arcade game’s home port. it proved pivotal to japanese online video, thanks especially to a miki communication event and a blue screen cheat code. it presided over a social games service boom that saw an entire class of gacha game outlawed, and while it has often ebbed from spectacular mismanagement and failure to read the temperature, the modern era for it has never really ran without a leader on the app store charts. much of that success and influence is captured by how it has been molded by fans, especially in its formative years, though equally so today from any calendar or catalog of doujin events, anikura setlists, or meme exploitables. today, I’m recovering one slice from its formative era by reviving the imas only uploader, a file uploader that acted as a hub during its initial boom.

the imas only uploader (マスロダ, colloquially) is a particular antique of the franchise’s early history and growth. while nico’s role in developing the fandom is well known at this point, nico being a descendent of 2channel is a more thorough trace. the home port’s release in early 2007 came just as nico was graduating from its provisional era, still relying on youtube for hosting. with aggressive endorsement by hiroyuki and a similar enshrining of anonymity, it found itself seeded as a colony for 2ch users. even as nico was still months away from establishing an independent account system and video hosting with the γ closed beta, the relationship was lodged enough that dwango was attempting to recruit developers off of 2ch’s programming boards, well before youtube forced their hand and blocked access. 2ch’s popularity at this time would align with a model of the web where links were still currency, and although it had become its own destination for content, a text focus means it was primarily fashioned for commentary. external uploaders, hosts, and file lockers became necessary social glue and indeed were considered so integral that links out to them were deliberately obfuscated to prevent hotlinking, forcing direct access without a referer to keep administrators blind to where traffic was originating from. the sprouting of numerous home grown 2ch uploaders, too varied to list in total, though consolidated enough to have recognizble heavyweights like viploader, was born out of a need for stability. the imas uploader is only one example of these communities coalescing on a common uploader, just as its 2ch general thread for the home release was taking root, and still before its regulars would begin building up nico as an attractive destination.

cgi-bin, the container for guest books and asyncronous games, is an old incantation of a web powered by forms and now mostly in ruins. most web servers today don’t support CGI scripts without workarounds or touchups. the majority of these scripts, older cousins to PHP, are stuck on old hardware that has never been patched, and are likely dwindling towards extinction as more of them break without being noticed. their security is tremendously naive, when such indifference was allowed when exposing a service to the open web. with new horrors that have made it possible to run full applications in the browser, they have also lost most of their allure except as a diminishing nostalgia, more obscure of a character than under construction GIFs or marquees, less celebrated than creative frontiers like flash, and less scorned as an obsolete web technology than SOAP or activeX. they’re too simple to have ever earned that ire, and even covered in cobwebs, they have a good chance of responding if you manage to stumble into one and poke it from slumber. japan exists on a lagging timeline, so some solutions like the sangoyomi calendar are still being developed today. the wishful nostalgia has even seen some of the rubble collected and polished for display. further remnants, like the sn uploader once powering this uploader and many others, are full of so many complications, bad SJIS encodings, and broken line terminators that deploying them into a production environment would be like asking for an even more comically large hammer to hit you over the head than offering open uploads already is.

social media platforms have been deemed town squares of the web. most actual websites without fake valuations have always been sane enough to not have such lofty ambitions. while CGI uploaders like this one were born out of a specific 2ch utility, they represent to me how a focused area online really expresses as more of a collaborative playground. removed from their context, these uploads are a collage of eras during idolmaster’s boom, but they’re also tremendously entertaining to return to today, particularly if you can point to macros that have long outlived their original host. as a premiere destination relied on by matome sites, there’s a great fount of promotional materials, game screenshots, and seichi junrei that does not huddle in any other collection. many uploads end up in conversation with each other. character merch, mostly for birthday shrines, dominates. raw assets, fan art, and data sheets all manage to coexist here without a usual sorting by karma or shun of algorithmic destiny.

the underappreciated aspect of these uploaders, and perhaps the part I reflect on most fondly, is that by catering to a specify category through a public gallery, they’re allowed to emerge with their own canon of jokes and habits. following along with new uploads became a ritual for me in its heyday, and especially in an unorganized period for the fandom overseas provided a useful window to the target audience. monotonic IDs are considered a liability when hosting a website, but they also make for great quotation with an imas prefix, which allowed them to worm their way into nico video descriptions for file distribution. undoubtedly the most famous example ended up being an early entrant with imas9393, featuring a grumpy chihaya. so versatile was the chihaya zoomer stare that linking out to it became shortened to “9393” as slang among fans, with the -9393 suffix later becoming a coveted GET on the uploader. while idolmaster has never exited conversation with fans, dire1 played the field better than anyone else, dropping a quote in a dengeki playstation interview that elevated it beyond mere uploader canon: “sometimes she has a 9393 face, but that’s part of her charm.” with this, it is only one more piece of semi-expired net slang that deserves an explainer video, with dwindling uses to be found if you know the right double quote search terms. as much as I would also like to continue linking out to the vanity site featuring her, complete with a bonus URL shortener, it unfortunately vanished only just last year.

for as brittle as the implementation is, this uploader and the management behind it was astoundingly resilient. the original imas.ath.cx domain lapsed in registration on the first year around, allowing it to be snatched up by someone impersonating themselves as the admin and sending traffic towards amazon affiliate links. the interim had people advertising and accessing it directly via IP, until a new dynamic DNS service was settled on with imasupd.ddo.jp. the years after saw it weather multiple direct attacks and endure collateral damage from 2ch attacks, yet even the irregular downtime, often across multiple weeks at times, would always see the site come back from the brink of death. the uptime graph embedded on the landing page, it is fair to presume, likely never achieved three nines.

the imas uploader did eventually fall to a fate similar to most others at the end of april 2014, sunset by a disinterested admin. retrospectively, this would be an inflection for idolmaster and a huge moment of upheaval for 2ch, likely to be classed as comorbidities in this case. cinderella girls was even more of an ascending star by now, earning an anime announcement, while million live and a much troubled sidem were launching. some of the hurt feelings from idolmaster 2’s lead-up and launch on the 360 had been soothed by this point, and one for all had corrected many of the wrongs enough for it to now be considered one of the better main console entries, but the franchise no longer wore one face. the gal game elements that had wreathed it were starting to recede. a ten year anniversary and a concert to celebrate that triumph was a natural exit for many that had rode the wave this far out.

as for 2ch, jim watkins had mostly completed his seizure of the site in february, the month after enacting a blunt ban on matome reprinting that began a mass exodus. users that had remained loyal to 2ch at this point opted out to smaller forums, or more chiefly, treated twitter as an equal substitute and abandoned the BBS format entirely. dedicated CGI uploaders had little incentive to stick around and either keeled over quickly from abuse or limped until a registration expired or a hosting bill lapsed. there is not much reason to badge one’s pride in a similar manner today, now that we largely live in walled gardens that offer free and unlimited embedded image and video uploads. the chigyu were otherwise content to settle up with imgur as a substitute.

rather than patching the existing uploader, this is a minimal reimplementation that borrows the look and feel while ditching some cruft and bringing a few styles into the present, mostly to be responsive and accessible. uploads are also behind a CAPTCHA and a few other protections, though you should be able to scrape without hitting anything. on a web crawling with spiders, bots, and agents, this is also an invitation to have my window smashed in by a proverbial brick of egress fees. the thumbnail view will be reimplemented eventually, although you’re not experiencing a CGI uploader organically unless you’re relying on the element of surprise that comes from blindly clicking links. some of these holes will hopefully end up filled with enough procrastination.

to set expectations, this is as much of a living museum as similar efforts. while it’s mainly a trial for me to experience what headaches may be hurled at me by 2025 that were nascent in 2014, it’s also a trial to see if it attracts any uptake. there are undoubtedly people with personal collections more storied than mine that may help fill in the voids, in which case they should probably get in touch with me. if I find myself entirely fed up, the worst you should expect is the site being frozen and pushed as a collection to the internet archive, but I’m already entering with an expectation that it may require a heavy moderation hand.

after a decade delayed start to third vision, idolmaster has found new footing with audiences entirely foreign to its first vision roots. the roots that got it to this stage, now frayed or rotting into broken links, haven’t disappeared entirely at this point, though the weight of age on them is starting to show. many of the fans that have walked alongside idolmaster for this long breathe with its beating heart, practicing many of the same rituals as they always have by drawing art, making MADs, and attending concerts. other exercises too, the antenna sites and mock travelogs, exist primarily as legacy curios. with this step, I’d like to think I’m rehydrating some of that legacy, as many of the fans I consider even wiser and more dedicated than me did when stewarding a new fan that found themselves kneeling before a specific L4U catalog. click around and see what you can dig up. if these files could talk, they’d have a lot of useless otaku trivia to tell.