Suggestion
Ive got a suggestion, is it possible to make sageing bump a thread down so as to make it actually effective rather than a mute protest?
Then effectively the whole site would mod itself.
I am not actually familiar with how this works here because nobody ever sages anything, but i was assuming its the same here as it is everywhere else.
Theoretically possible I guess.
Sage does work here, you have to put it in the Link field like on any other board. However unlike other boards no one knows you’ve done it because it doesn’t show up as the poster’s email address.
Having the site moderate itself is a nice ideal but impossible to pull off perfectly.
I don’t think legit, on-topic threads should be bumped down. However spam threads or threads posted in the wrong place should be. However if I give every user a the ability to bump down any thread he or she likes then both kinds of threads suffer.
Well the option should be given whether to bump, not bump, or bump down. Also a limit on how many times a single person can sage a thread would keep people from bombing legit threads.
Your idea isn’t bad, but I don’t think I’m going to implement it.
The original purpose of “sage” was to add to a thread without bumping it. Over time it’s taken on a negative connotation, but in reality it’s exists so one can add something minor to a thread without bumping it. It’s actually meant to be an act of courtesy. 4channers have turned it into a way to display disapproval which is OK I guess but it gives a lot of people the wrong impression about sage.
The best way to “bump down” a thread is to bump up another thread, whether it’s starting a new thread or participating in an older one.
If the thread is spam it’s another moderator’s or my job to clean it up. If the thread is retarded but not spam then I feel that it’s the job of the users to simply ignore it and post around it.
Whether the thread can be bumped down or not, all it takes is one person making an age-post to shoot it back up to the top of the page, anyway.
I have had the experience of stealth bumping every other thread on a board just to kill a certain thread. It aint fun. People will never learn anyway, the function sage should reflect its popular usage. All technology must evolve to suit the needs of its users.
Also some people would undertake the effort to sagebomb a thread, to literally bump it over the board limit thereby condemning it to death. This is a fairly widespread practice, and the wasted resources from this are phenomenal.
A simple acknowledgment of the direction culture has taken us, would save much time and money in the long run.
>Whether the thread can be bumped down or not, all it takes is one person making an age-post to shoot it back up to the top of the page, anyway.
in the old system, yes. However in this new system, the sages and ages are expressed through the ratio of the two. Therefore 15 sages and one age means the thread is bumped down 14 times, and thats not even counting the other competing threads.
However 15 sages and 15 ages has the same effect as zero posts altogether.
This is somewhat difficult to do from a programming perspective.
The way bumping works now is like this: there are topics, and there are posts. All posts belong to a topic. When a post is added to a topic (and it’s not a sage), then the topic’s “bumped on” date is updated to the current time. When the topics are fetched from the database they are sorted by their bumped on time, which makes it pretty easy to display them in the correct order (as well as paginate them). This is the most simple and effective way to properly order threads.
That means, to bump down a topic, I have to find the topic that would appear underneath it, take that bumped on date, and set the topic that’s being bumped down to a date at least slightly earlier.
This feature exists but it can only be used by me because it’s kind of a hackish way of going about things. “bumped on” should be just that — the date is was bumped on, not some roundabout way forcefully reordering threads. Trying to raise a thread by precisely one notch would be equally hackish.
I don’t know how much of this you understand so far. But anyway, it’s important that I retrieve the threads from the database in order and not try to sort them afterward. So any complex sorting logic can’t really take place.
Modifying what sage does will lead to confusion. People wanting to hurt a thread will possibly be pleased, but people who simply want to quietly add to a thread will be doing more harm than they intended.
Thanks anyway Eleo, most chan admins wouldn’t take the time to explain this stuff to the proletarians.
I have too much time on my hands.
Anyway I was thinking of a way to hurt threads called a “supersage” where a certain about of “supersages” would permasage a thread, i.e. prevent it from ever being bumped again. I haven’t gotten around to it, though, and still question whether it’s worthwhile. This would, however, allow me to not fuck with bumped_on dates and would accomplish a similar goal of user-moderating threads.
However I feel like, so far, on this site it’s not yet an issue. There are a lot of shitty threads, sure, but right now the site is so not-active that even if a shitty thread exists there aren’t enough non-shitty posters to deal with it.
Maybe someday.
There’s sound reasoning behind this behavior. Instead of attempting to remove something people find boring or distasteful, why not instead constructively begin or support a thread that is interesting and enjoyable? Why fight in one mediocre thread when you could start or participate in so many better ones?
