The first few episodic game of threads thrones were a mess. A significant number of the posts were discussion about stuff that hadn’t even been touched upon in the series yet, a discussion that someone viewing the TV series and wanting to avoid spoilers couldn’t participate in at all. Other posts just flat out carelessly spoiled future points with no spoiler boxes.
They became a minefield to navigate. Most people who only watched the series and didn’t want to be spoiled had to ignore significant parts of the threads. Not only the spoiler boxes, but the discussion around them could be confusing with the missing information. Even if you just avoided posts with spoiler boxes entirely, someone else might reply to those posts without quoting the spoiler boxed part themselves - which would just make you wonder wtf they were talking about.
Then someone would reveal a spoiler, and someone else would ask them not to do that. At that point, without fail, several people would turn into complete assholes. They’d say that you have no right not to be spoiled - just avoid the threads if you can’t take it. Or they’d say that I don’t really think it’s an important spoiler, so I’m not going to censor myself. Or that they knew better than the person being spoiled what they should know or not. About a third of the thread were posts that most people participating in the thread wouldn’t want to read because they contained spoilers, another third of the posts would be a battle between people asking not to be spoiled and assholes telling them that they’re going to gleefully keep spoiling and that those people can go fuck themselves, and then the remaining third of the threads would actually be about the discussion of the TV show.
When we decided to have two seperate lines of discussion - the episodic threads for watchers of the TV show that only wanted to discuss the TV show, and a threadwhere people could discuss the books, the TV show, and how the two related, things got better. Not perfect, but there was a pretty huge improvement.
It didn’t kill either discussion - the episodic threads were as popular as they were before, and there were over 1300 posts in the spoiler thread.
We’re starting to run into the same issue with The Walking Dead. People are hinting at spoilers, others are asking them not to, the thread is becoming about bickering. So I suggest that we do the same thing - that we split off the discussion for the comic readers into their own thread. But so far it’s not clear if it’s going to take off, or if “I’ll spoil you if I want to, nyah nyah” crowd will fight it out and stay in the threads.
It would help if we could get some sort of general board policy on this issue. If you want, I can dig up the nastiness that was in the GOT threads to show how things can get, but I suspect the moderators remember it.
I just don’t see a downside to this - it curtails the fighting, it makes it far easier for people who only have watched the TV show to discuss it with each other, and it gives the people who want to discuss the show and the comic books a place where they don’t have to worry about what they reveal or using spoiler boxes.