>>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.