A rant about spoilers

I've noticed a lot of spoilers appearing here and it's getting a bit annoying if I'm very honest. Last year a character was killed off in a book series and a thread appeared with that spoiler in the title. It was a discussion thread on that character but it still gave out the spoiler to everyone on here that the character was dead. It doesn't matter if the person making the thread deliberately meant to spoil everyone, but it happened, and with something that big it's not good.

Anther problem I've noticed is that people don't highlight spoilers properly. A spoiler should be tagged like this:

(color=black)(hl=black)this is a spoiler(/hl)(/color)

This is so that the text is always the same colour as the highlight colour. As it is now the default colour is a dark green so just highlighting the text won't hide spoilers at all. I know it's not a deliberate thing in this case as the user does try to hide them, it's just that they're not always hidden.

I don't like to rant but I've been spoiled on too many things now and I really don't like it.

 

I can?t recall exactly which thread you?re referring to, but thread titles can always be edited. I know that doesn?t help after you?ve been spoiled, though.

Keep in mind, also, that we follow the same spoiler black-out policy as the Literature forum:

One month for novels

One week for comics

If the spoiler was posted after the spoiler period ended, then it?s fair game.

The ?Etiquette? section of the FAQ has been revised with a general reminder about spoilers and also a request that major spoilers not be posted in thread titles.

That is a good reminder that the text color is not always black.

HTR will also work with any color, as long as the text color is the same as the highlight color.

Another option for anyone who is confused by HTR is the good old standby of spoiler space, like this:

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Spoilery discussion here



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It?s not pretty, but it?ll do. Just be sure to give readers plenty of time to close their eyes and scroll past.

 

Apparently, this thread was posted a month and a half after the US release date, but it was also posted less than a month after the UK release date. I'm going on amazon for that, I don't even know if that's right. Had it been in the thread then it would have been ok, I'm not a huge Mara fan so I probably wouldn't have read it, but to have such a big thing so very unmissable just annoyed me.