I found these statements to be rather interesting and revealing of the differences between English Futallaby/Wakaba/Shiichan and Japanese Futaba/0ch users:
http://www.world4ch.org/read.php/lounge/1104167811/13,15-16
13
Anonymous at 30 Dec 2004: 13:18
On 4chan you put 'sage' in the email field. It adds to the total # of posts on an image thread there without bumping the thread to the front page. Once the thread passes a certain # of posts, no post can bump it to the front page anymore. So saging it is a way of increasing the # of posts to more quickly bury the thread. I'm not sure how much that applies here though, except for the 'does not bump thread' part.
15 (sage)
Anonymous at 30 Dec 2004: 14:56
On 2ch, threads are also saged as a sort of courtesy-- people who post to a certain thread frequently don't really want to bump it every single time they reply to it, because that would keep it up at the top for a long time, and would push back newer threads. Also if a thread is saged more, it can keep out of sight from trolls while still remaining up.
16
Anonymous at 3 Jan 2005: 11:14
Sage is also useful for making a post that isn't really all that interesting.
If an interesting thread has been posted to since someone last viewed world4ch, it will have been bumped higher on the list. It's like the thread is saying, "Read me, Nanashi-tan! I have new posts!" But if your post isn't really worth clicking on the thread to read like this, you can sage it so it's like nobody's posted in it. It is polite to sage if you know your message is boring or irrelevant.
The image boards aren't that different - I've seen folk on futaba channel sage the hell out of offtopic shock-type images too.
and these discussion boards are still too young to have developed a sort of community etiquette yet. Give it time.
It's rather annoying that most people think that sage is only a bad thing.
Very few seem to realize it's true useful uses.
Plus the fact manass.com is the place for all your manass needs.
age for this is important
sage'd for trolls
I believe 4chan is responsible for most of the major misconceptions from the start.
The function of sage has always been (and still is) explained in a exclusively negative context:
"b. Why should I care?
"When a post reaches a certain post count, it cannot be bumped. By saging a post, you are in effect causing it to be pruned faster, and disallowing it from being bumped further."
No word about its other uses. moot probably wasn't (and isn't?) aware of them. Earlier, the rules said you weren't supposed to say "thank you" in /t/ which is just retarded. The users could have been told to sage when saying thanks and there wouldn't have been a problem with threads bumpig to the top because of posts rather useless to the general community.
The new formulation is rather oblivious of sage, too, and reveals again how much 4chan admins want to control every single aspect of the site:
"4. Only make meaningful replies. Useless comments will be deleted."
Nevermind the fact that "useless" can be interpreted in many ways, instead of telling the users to sage if they feel their contribution isn't of much worth (and most users won't because they believe sageing is something you just punish people's threads with) and that thus sage could be useful, deletion by mods is the measure by which content, that's what the users are told, will be judged.
That this tight and strict mod control almost never works is pretty obvious. People post stupid shit since the dawn of time (but nobody bothers with sage), despite moot flipping out over the use of catch phrases (hello Something Awful resentment) or the expression of simple statements (gb2/l/, anyone?). Every once in a while the mods clean up what they feel is shit and hand out bannings (inevitably a few unjustified ones), divert their attention to something else again and the cycle begins anew.
All in all, it's really a minor issue, but it's a good example of how western image board users still aren't aware of how to best use the basic functionality of the given software and how users are made to rely on babysitting mods, even on boards with high posting rates, instead of being encouraged to learn how to moderate themselves on a basic level. The funniest example of this learning deficite is always the screaming horde of "zOMG SAGE" people whenever a blackbob flash is being posted to /f/ - seems like nobody seems to mind one of the most basic rules of 2channel (and also Futaba) - if you reply to a troll and give him attention, you are as bad as the troll himself.
I like how you can get banned for sageing in /r/ in general or in /b/ when you do it in a Snacks thread. 4chan mods are control freaks and 4chan users are crybabies. Oh yeah and Snacks is liek huge faggot lol!
the /r/ mystery-mod seems to be mostly sane, at least he is much less annoying than the mod-brats on other boards (/c/ and /k/ come to mind)...
the description of sage is not the only less-than-good part of the 4chan docs, the "how to delete" in the faq only tells 1/3 of the truth-of-deletion, and shuffling around some part of the rules could help to avoid the frequent "does this rule apply only to one board or all of them" crap.
i mostly gave up pointing those things out to staffers though since there was very little interest in getting stuff fixed/improved in the past. :(
(see also: size limitations, stale thread html, raceconditions)
Haha, a mod just deleted all comments from a thread in /f/ in which I pointed out how retared sage in /f/ is and how it just fuels the trolls, what with the whole Blackbob flashes et al.
4chan mods are retards (exception maybe Mr VacBob).
>>11
"
: that guy's message was entirely yellow and had linebreaks removed
: and looked like a long paragraph of pissing and whining
: and somehow instigated a bunch of drama in the thread
: so i don't know how he thinks he was helping jack shit
"
he says "don't sage a Snacks-lead thread" or, to use the common term, "around snacks, NEVER RELAX"
The linebreaks were removed by the broken script in /f/ and just for the first post, it was still readable. What's funny is that the first post wasn't removed but the subsequent discussion.
And I didn't mean to instigate drama. I wanted to show how sage in /f/ just causes drama or helps keeping drama alive, that it contributes nothing to the board since all you do on there is troll feeding, there is no other use for it.
Snacks should just drop the E-Mail field in /f/.
I don't know if this is new or not, but 4chan now refuses to safe your E-Mail if it's just "sage".
It will just revert to the adress last put in by you, even if it contains sage and something else.
Jesus, this is retarded.
>>16
just use SAGE if you want it to be "saved" and still sage.
the glorious boardscript uses different matching for the "bump or not" and "save this in a cookie" code.
highly useful.
really.
Why don't they just switch to wakaba? With post speeds as they are now, it'll take, what, a few hours to get everything filled back up with DQN-ness?
I mean, who cares about /b/'s post count, anyway?
> just use SAGE if you want it to be "saved" and still sage.
I dunno, that seems retarded to me.
Snacks, plz 2 fix!
Pretty much all of 4chan seems to think "sage" is a bad thing,
some kind of flamewar term which "makes the thread go down".
Bunch of retards, the FAQ is biased and idiotic in that regard.
What's worse is that the users spread that misconception
instead of taking a look outside (at Futaba Channel or 2channel,
for instance).
sage is more or less superfluous, on a slower board you can imagine powersaging to kill undesired threads.
ZOMG SAGE
age for people to read & learn (´・ω・｀)
I always knew what sage is about
reading this thread was useless to me
Something that was brought up recently on WAKAchan:
Most imgboards (including 4chan) have a limit of posts on each board (not on pages or files).
So if you sage a thread (typically just including "sage" and sometimes a random flame as a comment) you efficiently cause all content of that board to be pruned faster. Of course it makes no difference whether you use sage or not when it comes to pruning through speeding up of post limit saturation, either.
In short: If you just include "sage" in your comment on imgboards, you are probably trading in a potentially valuable contribution for a totally worthless one.
I wonder how many people are aware of this.
sage
>>32
You're doing it wrong.
Also, this isn't an imageboard.
I kind of wish SAGE was a feature of modern forums. Sometimes you just want to tack dumb shit onto the very bottom of an old thread.
>>34 same here. I always wish I could tack one onto worthless posts.
Like this one!
The Using Sage paragraph from the ancient 4-ch.net/wiki adapted in french : http://underfool.net/board/imgb/kareha.cgi/1176138121/
i have come to age
（￣へ￣） Hello. I am "Mr. Likes To Sage Threads". I do believe this is a thread in need of Sage, so I would like to sage it. That is why my name is "Mr. Likes To Sage Threads".
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