[poll] What kind of limitations should we set on spoilers?

[Jiss]

[user]

I think spoilers are okay, but I would like to see some sort of spoiler delimiter. I guess the conventional ones which are used in the newsgroups (spoiler header and lots of blank lines before the spoiler, or ROT-13 [does anyone even use that anymore?]) wouldn't work as well in a forum.

But what I've seen on some sites are people using HTML to set the spoiler text so that it's the same color as the background, thereby making it effectively invisible unless the reader decides to highlight the space where the text is to reveal it. However, I wonder if this might not work when someone's browser has been set up to always override colors with the user's own settings.

Hmm, let's see..

This text should be more or less invisible...

Ack, I guess that didn't work too well....

[xo]

[Tobias Rieper]

I don't mind about spoilers, but other people do.

So I vote for the color trick too.

Is there a way to specify the currend background color of the post as text color? Or maybe it is possible to set the background color of the text?

T.Rieper

[Melchior]

I vote for the background-colour trick as well! That's a pretty neat way of hiding stuff so that people don't accidentally see something they didn't want to!

[xo]

[user]

Pretty neat, I didn't think of using the "quote" bbcode. I wonder if the bbcode relies on Javascript to change the colors; it seems to not hide the text in Netscape with Javascript disabled.

[Keikai]

Okay Jiss knew I'd respond to this one. I, as some of you know, am EXCEEDINGLY paranoid about spoilers. My following rampage is going to be somewhat vehement and while I have always tried to keep my tone very measured in our discussions no matter how riled I might get, this is one for which I just can't manage a completely level-headed response.

I despise spoilers...pure and simple. For those of you who aren't freaks about this like me, let me explain. A spoiler is exactly that. It spoils the experience of the anime or other medium. When I hear something about an anime it embeds itself in my brain and I can't stop thinking about it until I've watched the anime in question. Imagine you are finally getting to watch "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" for the first time in a theater while a baby is crying in your ear, someone is kicking the back of your seat and, to top it all off, it's a dub with Chihiro voiced by Britney Spears (hmm...maybe the baby crying is a good thing). Now that is roughly equivalent to how much an "innocent" spoiler can ruin my experience of something I haven't seen.

And just because you think something is a not spoiler doesn't mean someone else feels the same way, so I urge as pleadingly as possible that people aim for caution on this point. As a matter of fact, some of the most annoying spoilers I've ever heard weren't even true, but I assumed they were while I was watching it and it had the same destructive effect. Spoilers are what drove me from IRC anime channels.

All that said, on usenet, all you have to do is not put the spoiler information in the subject and also include the name of the anime and *spoiler* or *slight spoiler* there and all is safe. People like me know to steer clear if we haven't seen the anime before. And if we have, you can bet we'll be in there chatting it up. Heck, even if you don't put in the *spoiler* warning its easy enough to tell if its a bad one to read just from a well written subject. If its any type of discussion about something one hasn't seen, its a good one to avoid. I've never read a spoiler on usenet that wasn't some newbie putting a spoiler right in the header, so there it's not been a real concern.

As for on the bulletin board, since a spoiler discussion might come up after the main subject is already set (the individual message subjects are kind of hard to notice), I do vote for the white text on white background method like xo demonstrated. The only problem with this is any discussion of something not yet seen can spoil. So it would be good to be able to mark when a discussion tangents off the original subject into something that is a discussion of the content of an anime itself. Usually when this happens, though, it starts with a question discussing the content of the anime and those who haven't seen it yet can steer clear. Of course that means that they'll miss the rest of the original conversation. But I guess thats a different problem: one of how to handle tangents in a non-threaded discussion. But that's a tangent so I'll drop that discussion now.

All in all, this is a situation where it takes nothing but a little bit of caution to prevent something that is irrevokable. Of course, since people who feel as I do seem to be a significant minority from my own discussions on this in the past, you'll probably not be upsetting too many people.

Phew, okay I actually restrained my emotions on that one pretty well.

[Jiss]

Mwahaha I thought you might respond to this.

Well having sat in a crowded cinema watching Grave of the Fireflies (and in a state of shock as (a) it was playing in a cinema, albeit small, and (b) it was crowded), I wasn't too impressed with the people behind me whispering in that loud whisper that people can only do in cinema's (the one that everyone in a three-seat radius can hear audibly), exactly what was going to happen next. I'd seen the film before, but still it's annoying.

But actually I think the hidden text in quotes is good, works just as well as the spoiler warning and gap of ng posts (that no one seems to use nowadays).

Oh, yeah, and if you got the raws of Hale nochi Guu you find out in the end that it's really just.....

[xo]

[xo]

OK, I added a quick little guide to hiding spoilers to the Welcome/Guidelines for this forum. And since everyone reads what they should, it shouldn't be a problem anymore