Hello, serv here (admin of operatorchan.org)
I have long wondered the long-term usefulness of the 'sage' feature on many imageboard software.
The feature is meant to be used to reply to thread without bumping them.
However users seem to only use the feature to reply with derogatory, off-topic, and possibly troll comments. Sometimes a 'sage' enabled post will derail an otherwise good thread. In fact this has become the defacto 'sage' enabled reply and therefore a 'sage' post itself is derogatory in nature by association.
Following the old adage "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all." I propose the elimination of the sage feature all together.
Please voice comments.
perhaps if you ventured out of 4chan once in a while, you'd see sage being used properly. not using sage is impolite unless you're adding something to the thread that people who aren't already following it would be interested in.
>>2
I agree with this. 4chan has perverted the way that the sage function is suppose to be used and understood. Even on world4ch (4chan's textboards), people there ask me "why did you sage?" when replying to a post. I usually respond with "because I didn't want to be rude and bump the thread up to the top."
I also have noticed that a lot of those who populate kusaba based boards often carry this same notion of how sage is suppose to work; that it's suppose to only be used when you're replying to a thread in a negative way. Wakaba based boards on the other hand, largely don't suffer from such silliness.
I don't know honestly how to fix this problem. It's quite the conundrum.
I admit that I don't venture out of wakaba or kusaba based boards very often. However from my experience a 'sage' is mostly used improperly.
Sage has gained a new meaning and now basically means "fuck you". Anytime a word changes meaning, it is futile to fight against it, because it NEVER works. Ever. Even if every chan owner made it against the rules to use sage in hostility on threat of permaban, it would still be used that way.
If you wish to have the function of sage without the insult, you need to create a "new" fuction. Call it "nobump" or "pnb" (polite no bump) or something. Keep in mind, as long as people see an underlined and color changed name, they will think it's a sage. A function to not bump a thread should not be stuffed into the email field anyways, it needs a check box.
>>5
the word hasn't changed meaning. it's just that a very large group of idiots doesn't know the meaning of the word.
img2 has something like this. There is a "bump" checkbox which is checked by default, and non-bumping posts look just like bumping posts.
I know where you're coming from, but it's not like that at all.
The only thing that makes people thing 'sage' means 'fuck you' is because you let them.
How?
Because of this shitty board mechanism that highlights your name in blue everytime you sage that announces very brightly the fact that you sage'd.
Sage's should be private and personal. Sage should be to post without bumping. Not for making your name blue with a mailto:sage link.
>>8
Also, I'd like to add my suggestion:
Remove e-mail field, it serves absolutely no purpose.
Place a checkbox for sage field. Make all sage be silent. That is, no announcement at all. The only way for someone can tell it was a sage post was because it didn't bump the thread.
This is a feature I use on my text board software, which it inherited from Hotaru's original TinyBB.
Seriously, the solution is so easy, I cannot believe people have stuck to the standard model for so long.
>Seriously, the solution is so easy, I cannot believe people have stuck to the standard model for so long.
Because they're purists. Well, the one's who are fans of Wakaba. Me being part of that group, myself. Although this is a good idea.
>>9
Actually the email field is quite useful on my site especially on the /trade/ board to facilitate firearms selling.
I do think that only emails belong in that field and that there should be separate checkboxes.
>>11
Yeah, because you couldn't just place your email on the comment field. It has to be a blue link on your name or else the whole system breaks down. rolls eyes
>>12
To be fair, if I wanted my email address to be attached to all the posts I make, it would be pretty annoying to have to type it in every time. Plus, putting your email address in the comment invokes connotations of forum-esque signatures.
Anyways, let's talk about sage. We all know sage's true purpose: If I want to carry on a discussion without the rest of the board noticing, I put "sage" in the email field and no one notices except the people actually watching it. Makes sense.
I would argue, however, that this is only useful on 2chan. It's the only anonymous BBS (that is, text-based) I know of that could be considered popular. In this kind of place, where there really are people browsing the main page of a board that you don't want to join your conversation, sage could be a useful feature.
The average English BBS, however, receives not even the tiniest fraction of traffic that 2chan does. Boards are populated by small communities; in a good English BBS, the majority of the userbase can be trusted to make good posts. What's more is that the small size of these sites allows moderators (who are often posters themselves) to simply ban people that the community doesn't want posting. An enormous site like 2chan (similar to 4chan, in this aspect) cannot rely on that luxury, and so methods of user-based quality control (like sage) have to be exercised to keep discussions civil.
When we take all of this into consideration, a "saged" post in an English BBS becomes almost detrimental. Since we can trust the majority of the userbase to "know how to post," there's no need to hide a thread from the front page. In fact, doing so would deter discussion, as very few BBS browsers tend to "watch" single threads. Doing so would be silly, since new replies trickle in very slowly ― instead, users just check the front page every so often for new replies.
In this ideal BBS where everyone is a good poster and mods can keep unwanted elements at bay, sage just encourages people to hide replies from the community. I understand the other viewpoint of "I didn't think my reply was worth bumping the thread over," but the way I see it, if your post wasn't worthy of a bump, why did you make it in the first place?
On a related note, the sage function complicates board software. It's not too much of a problem on flat file solutions by nature, but if you're going with the choice of using a plain old relational database, sage adds a whole new layer of complexity.
Logically, a thread list would just be displayed by taking the list and sorting it by date of last post descendingly. Sounds pretty straightforward to implement, right? The sage feature is a spanner in the gears of this simple design. Now you have to differentiate between bumps and non-bumps.
The simplest way to implement this would be to have a "date of last post" field, as well as a "date of last bump" field. You would then display the list by sorting by the "date of last bump."
This works, of course, but I just can't shake the feeling that it's an ugly design. You can make it look like most BBS software does, and not display the "date of last bump" while still sorting by it (look at http://wakaba.c3.cx/soc/subback.html to see what I mean), but this results in the aesthetically displeasing sight of a "last post" column that isn't properly sorted. You could also display both fields in separate columns, but that manner of thinking tends to lead to "information oversaturation," where there's more than you want to see for general usage. Then you can open a whole new can of worms if you want to allow the user to choose whether or not they want to see both fields, and so on...
In any case, the removal of the sage system is an interesting idea for a discussion board, most of which so far have been at least partially influenced by their Japanese counterparts. If I ever get around to writing the BBS script that's been stirring around in my head, I'd have to consider doing without it.
>>13
I don't even know how to begin dissecting your post. I started off agreeing with it in some ways (for one, your reasoning behind the use of sage on 2ch, which is accurate), but at the end I had pretty much come to the conclusion that I disagree with a lot of your points but I'm finding it hard to put my finger on why.
But, I'll try anyway:
And regarding your more technical comments:
update threads set bumped = bumped + 4294967296 where id = 1261177331, and simply mask out and reapply that when posting -- and none of the thread-sorting code needs to know that you did this.)Slightly related: it would be very very nice if kareha had per-thread RSS feeds.
Sage is useful even on small boards. There is a psychological factor which tells you that the threads on top are the most important. This factor could also be explained just by the frequency with which you visit a page (you visit often, but only to look at the latest posts at the top). If you are just making a post to say "very cool >>23!" Then that's not really something interested that the normal browser cares about reading. Additionally, it might bring a less important/interesting thread up to the top. The location of threads on small boards is very important. Your feeling of what the board is about is mostly defined by what threads seem to be "popular" or are just at the top.
>Why would you put your e-mail in every post?
There isn't much of a use for an email field in most anonymous communities. If a project is being organized, it could be useful to have contact information attached to each post. Most boards, however, don't have this sort of activity happening in them, and thus wouldn't benefit from an email field. Of course, if you're going to mix "discussion" boards with "project" boards on a BBS, you might as well keep the site uniform and let the email field remain, hence why it's still common.
>There's many reasons to post without bumping the thread. Maybe someone wanted to answer a question made in a previous post, but it's a simple yes/no that doesn't merit a "HEY EVERYONE, I REPLIED TO THIS THREAD" announcement, for example.
I hadn't thought of this. The way I saw it, if your post wasn't good enough to bump to the top of the board, it wasn't worth making anyways, and if you add in a "sage" feature, you're just promoting worthless posts. When you put it that way, however, I guess there are posts that are worth making, but aren't worth bumping.
>Sage doesn't complicate anything. You're only making it complicated. The general idea for a board without sage is... ...Hot damn, nothing changed.
When you word it like that, of course they sound like the same task! You're right, though; I was being short-sighted. I was only thinking about defending the idea of a bump-only anonymous forum, and so I allowed myself to make a silly claim like "adding in sages significantly complicates board software," just for the sake of argument.
>stickies
Why do people do this shit? If you want to make announcements, add in a "blotter" or something next to the board description area.
>By the way, putting threads and posts in the same table like Futaba/Wakaba/everything else did is dumb...
I'm not interested in making an imageboard (partly because of bandwidth concerns), but that did always bother me a little. Imagine what it would be like if we had people aiming for "thread number GETs" as well as regular GETs, though.
Having thought about this a little more, I'll have to admit that sage does have a use. After all, if someone is humble enough to understand which of their posts aren't worth bumping a thread over, it wouldn't be good to discourage people like that, would it? It does bother me when people "misuse" sage by saging perfectly good posts (since we've agreed that the 2ch "stay out of my discussion" usage doesn't apply to smaller forums) that deserve to be read, but perhaps that problem can be solved in some other way, by means of board culture.
>per-thread RRS feeds
One of the benefits of a non-flatfile textboard would be that it's pretty easy to implement such an RRS feature in one.
On another note, does anyone else hate the tiny reply fields that Kareha (well, just about everything else out there, as well) uses by default? Even worse is the fact that it expands when you click on it, but contracts whenever you need to copy-paste something.
> On another note, does anyone else hate the tiny reply fields that Kareha (well, just about everything else out there, as well) uses by default? Even worse is the fact that it expands when you click on it, but contracts whenever you need to copy-paste something.
i used to hate them, but that was before i had a browser that lets me resize them (and have them stay at whatever size i resize them to).
> thread number GETs
Insert the post first, get the post ID from it and use that as the new thread ID. No need for two separate auto-increments.
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