General thread

General threads (colloquially, "generals") are long-term, recurring threads about a specific topic. Generals are like any other user-created thread where posters of mutual interest agree to congregate inside one thread, and there is usually no moderator involvement. When a general hits bump limit or is archived an interested poster can create a successor. There is no organization or agreement of who will make the new thread. It is etiquette to link back to the previous thread when creating a new one. A happy side effect of this is long chains about the topic can be browsed by archivists.

There is a sense of mundane in the frequented meeting space like there is in the board, but at a much smaller, personal scale. Despite anonymity, posters occasionally recognize each other by posting style across the recurring threads. The social dynamics in general threads are comparable to a chat room like IRC, or even to a real life pub.

General threads bud in high-activity boards. Competition for the thread slots in the board is fierce, hence, posters with mutual interests and desire for slower discussion cooperate inside the general. When a new post is made in the general, all previous posts—and all the unanswered questions or simply informative posts which aren't meant to get replies—are bumped together. Generals can be summarized as unions of posters towards a common goal or space, where individual posts needn't compete with each other—in contrast but nonetheless within the chaos and competition for virality in a system (i.e. 4chan boards) that prunes threads based on lack of replies. Generals enable a posting style that could not survive in the wider board.

Examples

• /vg/ - Videogame Generals is spin-off of the high-activity board /v/, created in 2012. /v/ prohibits generals since the creation.
• Threads behave like generals in boards for dumping images such as /c/ and /w/ (or most pornography boards), for organization.