Ever since 8chan was de-platformed in August, in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting, the company that owns the site, NT Technology, has been promising to bring it back. Last week it unveiled 8kun as the successor to 8chan, and it's been trying to get its old users back on board.

For the past week, a battle has been raging in the dark corners of the internet. It’s a fight between the owners of the hate-filled message board 8chan, who are trying to revive the controversial website, and the site’s founder, who's doing everything in his power to keep the site — and QAnon — offline.

8chan was taken offline in August because, in the wake of the El Paso Walmart shooting, web infrastructure companies like Cloudflare refused to host the website .

“I don't want there to be any more Q drops. I think the whole Q thing is awful and should stop,” Brennan said.

QAnon supporters regularly appear at Trump’s rallies, and the FBI has warned that the movement could inspire domestic terrorists.

So when 8chan went offline in August, the QAnon community was left adrift. Brennan fears that if 8chan is revived as 8kun, it will allow the insidious QAnon conspiracy theories, which have been embraced by President Donald Trump’s right-wing MAGA supporters, to spread online, possibly to other “free-speech” platforms like Gab and Voat.

The conspiracy theory's mysterious leader “Q” told his followers that his communications would never occur outside of 8chan and that 8chan was the military's chosen platform for leaking intel.

“One of the reasons I am trying to get this done, preemptively, is so that QAnon cannot come back,” Brennan told VICE News from his home in the Philippines. “It is critical that 8kun does not come back at all, in any form, for any length of time.”

Brennan is clear about why he never wants 8chan and 8kun to come back online: QAnon.

In recent days, 8kun.net has briefly flickered online before disappearing again, thanks mostly to the work of 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan, who has been pressuring hosting and networking companies to drop support for the site.

The man suspected of conducting the massacre in the El Paso Walmart on Aug. 3 posted a four-page rant to 8chan attempting to explain his actions. In March, the man who allegedly killed dozens of people at two New Zealand mosques posted a screed to the site just before the attack. Weeks later, the suspect in the shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, did the same.

NT Technology and 8chan are owned by Jim Watkins and run by his son, Ron Watkins. Since August, they have been working to get 8chan back online, telling Congress in September that it would only reappear when he was “able to develop additional tools to counter illegal content under United States law.”

The name of the new site appears to be an attempt by Watkins to show he is fulfilling that promise.

In Japanese, the suffix “chan” typically refers to a child, while “kun” typically refers to a young man. However, Brennan described 8kun as “lipstick on the 8chan pig,” saying Watkn's decision to ask all old 8chan board owners to come back shows that nothing has changed.

In a series of off-the-wall videos posted on YouTube this week, Jim Watkins said he was aiming to get the site live by Thursday, Oct. 17, but that effort failed when a UK-based provider he had been using, Zare, dropped support.