Zedsville points out an article at Wired proving that plenty of people (at least in Japan) are willing to brave BBS environments without all the fancy layers to screen out spam or online provocateurs: "It's a profile of Hiroyuki Nishimura, the man behind the plunge bath site 2channel. Nishimura set up the simplistic BBS in 1999, when he was an exchange student in the USA. The site has no registration or web handles or moderating, no mechanisms to filter out flames and trollish behavior, and no mechanisms to help users find the most intelligent score and topics. But this ugly, lo-res site gets about 500 million pageviews a month. Nishimura doesn't police the shipment of posts to his announcement board, which has resulted in numerous libel claims. 'I used to show up in court,' he says. 'Then one day I overslept, and nothing happened. So I stopped going.' Nishimura has lost about 50 lawsuits and owes loads* of dollars in penalties, which he has no intention of paying. 'If the verdict mandates deleting things, I'll do it,' he says. 'I just haven't complied with demands to pay money. Would a cell phone carrier feel responsible when somebody receives a minacious phone call?'"

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