A trip code is a sort of identifying feature unique to the message boards in use in Japan and now in the West. Basically, it's a password of sorts but somewhat better than that. Trip codes work universally across the *chan spectrum (BUZZWORD, motherfucker) on both sides of the Pacific. You can identify yourself on 2ch, 2chan, 4chan, and the other ones that no one cares about and the trip will look the same on each one. Basically they look something like the bold portion of the below text:

moot!Ep8pui8Vw2

To get a trip, you need just put your name/alias in the Name: section followed immediately by #text_string (in the case above: moot#faggot). The text string can be anything. It's basically a password. This text is passed through a one-way function and spits out garbage. Can it be hacked? Yes, but with great effort and the usual rules to passwords apply. This is 4chan, not the fucking NSA so you don't need to be paranoid.

The trip code has fallen out of favor and certainly did during the era of forced_anon. That aside, it has some uses:

• Say you're telling a story/doing something awesome and don't want your thread to be hijacked by people writing alternate storylines.
• You're an attention/draw/whatever whore and don't want doppelgangers to hijack you.
• You fail to realize that a trip code is usually a unique series of letters and numbers and easily searched on google and thus will haunt you the rest of your life.

You often see people running around with lololol!LOLlol47^g and such. The function by which the trip code is made is easily copied from the board code (to do it the lazy way) and put into a program that spits garbage into it and records what comes out. If you're in to that, that's fine. Back in my day the program was in Japanese, though… and it was used it in an attempt to hack trip codes, not to come up with clever ones.

As computers grow more powerful, the concept of the trip code becomes less and less secure. There's only so many things you can type up there…

As I keep saying though, this is not to be taken seriously. If anyone ever guesses mine, I really won't care that much.

• Secure tripcodes are where you put in two hash marks intead of one. This should be more secure than your usual trip. Again, do we really care? No.
• Trips of famous people. Fuck that. You can find it yourself.