About

Not Your Personal Army, often shortened to "NYPA", is a catchphrase used to imply that the community a person is requesting aid from refuses to assist them in any way. It is often used as a reply to site raiding threads.

Origin

The usage of the phrase begun on 7chan's now defunct invasion board, otherwise known as /i/.

Noticing the success rate of /i/, people often sought for help from this board for their personal problems and vendettas. As these issues do not usually matter to anybody else on the board, the phrase was often used as a reply to the original poster to signify that the board doesn't want to help.

Prevalence

The phrase eventually spread off to other sites and chanboards, most notably 4chan (/b/ is not your personal army.) where it is now a commonly used phrase.

Somewhat ironically, it has been claimed that 4chan was a primary motivator for the creation of 7chan's /i/ board.

Eventually, the phrase was seen as a humorous catchphrase, being used in image macros where the phrase's original intent is not even implied.

A definition for "NYPA" was posted to Urban Dictionary on December 8, 2007.

Acronym for "Not Your Personal Army". An old phrase used by /b/tards to newfags who wish to cause a ruckus with raids and pranking. Essentially saying that Anonymous isn't a resource to use for your own personal vendettas. ^[1]

Google Insights For Search

Search queries for "not your personal army" have not been significant enough to show up on Google Insights. Queries for "personal army" saw their first brief spike in April 2009, and were fairly insignifcant until another brief period for March and April of 2010. Since November 2010 there has been a steady amount of moderate search activity.

External References

^[1] Urban Dictionary – "NYPA"::https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=not%20your%20personal%20army