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I'd rather have a set of default rules and include the possibility of having special spoilers guidelines like the Downright Boring, I mean, Downton Abbey thread has. Clearly stated in the thread's title.

And this no major change and hasn't been caused by anything in special. There's always been a spoiler policy in effect.. well, actually three different policies in JCC, SF&F and Amph. We're just ironing out the different policies of the merged forum, and thought posting the spoiler policy in advance would be useful, if only to see everyone's reaction to it. Maybe it was a mistake to post it as a separate thread. I guess it's giving people flashbacks of the "JCC REFORM AND STOMPING OF POSTING HABITS" threads of the past. It's not like that, at all. It's just an attempt to fuse and streamline the existing spoilers policies and make them clearer and easier to understand for everyone. And it looks like we failed at that. Ah well.

As always, feedback is appreciated. Honestly. Expect updates when I'm not hungover.

This is going to sound really bad, but I'm all about transparency so I'll just say I have no idea what we meant because I haven't checked the policy discussion lately.

That said, I would personally assume that we mean spoiler tags because having two threads for everything would be silly; two threads should only occur in special circumstances, like different media types (ASOIAF vs GOT for instance).

Sorry, Kris, but I totally disagree with you on that. Maybe this thread wasn't our brightest moment but yes, we do need a spoiler policy and yes, it needs to be enforced. Take my word for it: I've been a mod for three years now, and been spoiled or not knowing whether spoilers could be posted has been the number one reason for angry or confused PMs from users, bar none.

Well, people complain when we run the place on the basis of understandings, unwritten rules, and just past practice.

But I guess people complain when we try to give people some guidance on what the rules might be too.

Just can't win.

The issue, I think, is more spoilers posted outside of spoiler threads - say, for example, I post an un-spoiler tagged detail about... I dunno, Thor 2 in the comic book thread the day after I see it because I'm a huge ****ing nerd. IMO, there should be a well-codified way of dealing with that situation.

And then you might be getting a "it's not a spoiler, duh, welcome to the Internet, grow up" reply. Because that's what happens.

Not to mention different people have different standards for what constitutes an acceptable length of time. For some, it's next day, for others, it's two months. Again: codification helps prevent these issues, and while I'm not completely sold on the specific lengths of times in this iteration of this policy, I think it's a step in the right direction. To say nothing of increasing moderator action transparency, which I'm always a big fan of.

You mean what's been happening so far in JCC?

Well, usually the user either mopes or complains to the mod. In that case the mod checks the JCC rules; this thread says the standard JC rules apply to the forum but, hey, said rules are outdated and refer only to Star Wars spoilers. The mod can decide to apply the rules by analogy (and thus apply some severe banning, because the rules were meant to apply to spoilers about the prequels, to some user that wasn't aware he was doing anything wrong), to ignore the complaint (and telling the guy that had the LOST finale ruined for him "tough luck dude"), or to just delete the spoiler (arbitrarily editing a post that wasn't doing anything against the rules and probably being labeled a fascist -happened to me the first time).

So you can basically say "okay, by default it will be considered a spoiler if the media has been released X days ago" and thus everyone is on equal footing, or you can say "peace bro" and just keep doing what we've been doing so far: feeling that you're being unfair to someone no matter the option you've chosen.

I mean, maybe what we posted wasn't that great, no contest here, but I'm going to do everything in my hand to make sure there's a clear spoiler policy.

I don't really see how it would - otherwise we'd see that happening now, since this is really just a formalization of what's already been in place for the most part. Going purely off of observation, there isn't too much demand for spoiler-free discussion threads (GoT excepted, but that's kind of a weird case) - most folks who are big enough fans to participate in discussion threads are generally keeping abreast of events as much as possible, anyway.

We're discussing all of that. We simply "released" this because we thought it was something easy and we rapidly agreed. Too rapidly, apparently.

It's listed as "Not Allowed" with no qualifiers. Although I think it's probably one of those ones where direction at another user is important. Probably.

Narc.

I totally didn't suspect this was a "but you edited me!" thing. Honest.

That said: back on topic. Right?

Also, to be fair, if that was allowed, there's a nonzero probability that would've been my title at some point.

So yeah I think that TV show time is too long. I can't see a reasonable guideline on that being more than, like, 72 hours tops.