God only knows.
Your question is either a straw man (and I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply) or a non-sequitor. What said in this thread has implied that discussion of an episode as it airs is inappropriate?
This thread is about people trying to find the best way to handle a situation.
It is not placed here as a opportunity for you to snipe.
If you have a problem with this topic or any of the people commenting in the thread you are welcome to start another thread delineating your concerns – in the more appropriate forum for such comment and not here.
Please accept my apology, Tuba. I know better, and should behave better.
I added a warning to the thread that Liberal mentioned. I didn’t read it, and now that I read on, I’m not sure whether his suggestion was serious or not. It’s early morning and I haven’t had my coffee, I’ve developing a cold and I’ve got a headache from lack of sleep from airline travel, so I’m grumpy, sleepy, sneezy, and several other dwarves. Another mod can correct if that title isn’t needed.
The proper thing to do if you find a thread that should have a spoiler warning but doesn’t is to hit the REPORT button, so that the appropriate mods can take action. Posting elsewhere is iffy, and usually takes longer.
I disagree. Just because you’re not in that category, there are plenty of people who want to enjoy a show/book/movie/whatever for the first time and want to experience the author/auteur/artist’s work without foreknowledge. There’s an experience where you see enjoy some show a second time – no one going to see Wagner’s Götterdämmerung is surprised at the collapse of the world, although the particular staging may well be a surprise. But there’s also enjoying being taken along by the work and wanting to enjoy it the first time, without having the drama or outcomes revealed in advance.
And yet people like to discuss the work. I can certainly see an Agatha Christie reader wanting to discuss her work, yet not having read them all yet. Wanting to know which are the best, which ones people didn’t like, etc and yet not wanting the endings spoilers seems perfectly reasonable. And since that’s exactly the sort of discussions that goes on here at the SDMB (especially Cafe Society), we want to try to accomodate.
When you see someone in the middle of reading an Agatha Christie novel, it would be incredibly bad manners to blurt out, “Oooh, I read that one, it’s great, you’ll never guess that the doctor did it.” OK, yes, in the grand scheme of thing, such a premature revelation is nowhere near the magnitude of frustration as an auto accident, earthquake, or government tax audit, so I suppose it’s arguably a temptress in a teapot. But by the same token, every discussion on these boards (and 99% of all discussions) are to-dos over nothing: in a hundred years, we’ll all be dead and it will be irrelevant.
Meanwhile, we’d like everyone here to have an enjoyable time, and that means we have some common courtesies that we extend to others and hope they will ditto to us.
I completely agree. A thread titled “Production values of American Idol” would be the wrong place to spoil what happened last night. But if the thread is titled “American Idol - 11 Feb 2008” it would be clear to me that participants are discussing a particular episode. It seems to me that it would be rude to bind their hands and make them discuss things with mime and charades just because someone wants to glean something about the show’s general character. And that’s exactly how the new rule seems to apply, as I read it. Maybe I read it wrong, but I don’t think a half dozen people out of thousands constitutes some sort of consensus. It seems to me that it was much simpler when the spoiler rule was basically to procede at one’s own risk, but if you spoil something in a thread marked “no spoilers”, then you’ve gone too far.
And if I may comment on this as well, how can it possibly be appropriate to comment on an episode as it airs when it is inappropriate to comment on it after it airs? Isn’t a spoiler a spoiler whether it’s posted 1 minute after the event or 1 hour after the event?
I can only believe you’re being deliberately thick headed. In any post, in any of these discussions, where does anyone content that the content of an episode that has aired in a thread about the discussion of that episode is a spoiler?
You can’t be seriously asking that question.
That doesn’t make any sense.
A comment about a preview is discussing something that happens in an episode that hasn’t aired yet.
Discussing an episode as it airs in a thread specifically created for discussion of that episode cannot be a spoiler. It would be like considering the scoreboard at a baseball game as a spoiler because you went down to the beer stand for an inning. But you’re still at the game.
Obviously, we don’t make sense to each other; otherwise, we’d have an understanding. I’m asking questions for the purpose of trying to understand. Admittedly, I was snarky before, but Tuba called me on it, and I’ve apologized. Meanwhile, calling me “deliberately thick headed” seems just as out of place here as anything anyone has said.
I’m trying to understand why it’s necessary to spoiler something that has already happened when it’s an hour or two later, but not when it’s a minute or two later. My question wasn’t about previews. Those comments were earlier.
Now, if it’s the case that I can’t even ask questions here while SenorBeef can read my mind and call me names, than a mod should let me know.
The previews of the next episode are considered spoilers, as many people here attempt to avoid them for the same reason they avoid other spoilers. It does not matter if they’re being dsicussed 1 minute after airing, 1 hour, or 1 day. The time after airing is irrelevant.
People want to avoid them for the same reason they’d want to avoid being spoiled by an entertainment gossip magazine or someone telling them the ending of a movie - they enjoy the work more without the foreknowledge, especially given that the previews under discussion here are made by network ad executives rather than the creators of the content, and therefore aren’t made with regard to maintaining the quality of the experience.
I have no idea where you’re going off the tracks here. You’re either making no distinction between previews for future episodes and the content of current episodes (which is what this whole discussion, which you’ve participated in lucidly, is about) or are bringing up the idea that there’s stuff we can talk about 1 minute after it airs, but not one hour, totally out of the blue. If you detail your thought process that lead to your current misunderstanding I may be able to understand and answer your question more completely.
Maybe it would help if I give you my starting premise, based on how I’ve always understood CS spoiler theory. It has been my understanding that the onus of spoilerism is on the OP, and that the OP should indicate in his thread title something like “Open Spoilers” if spoilers are to be found, and that as a courtesy, he should even so avoid spoilers in his OP for mouseovers. This seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
My understanding of threads otherwise was that a person should spoiler anything about any specific plot element or element that a person might not encounter in ordinary day-to-day life. So, I could say something like, “I found Rand’s writing in Atlas Shrugged to be dreary and heavy” without any spoilering. But I should spoiler something like, “Dagny’s monetary gift to the old man was an example of philanthropy versus altruism”.
But it seemed to me that people began to demand more and more spoiler-boxing for things that didn’t seem to me to be particularly compelling. I hope you won’t make me spend hours searching things out — I’m just giving my impression. I do recall a specific example of someone chiding me for not spoiler-boxing my own personal speculation! I was dumfounded by this. I mean, there was nothing published about it. It was just my own opinion about what I thought would happen. (I even tried to accomodate this with a recent thread I opened about who I thought would be the winner of this year’s Bachelor).
And now, I open this thread to find Dio fighting to stop spoiler-boxing of things that haven’t even aired yet, but are merely speculative on the part of marketing departments unrelated except tangentially to the shows. Clearly, the shows themselves wouldn’t spoil their own stuff, at least not intentionally. And frankly, I don’t know that we’ve established this marketing preview business as a fact. Where was the citation for the claim? And is it true in every case? It is hard to imagine, for example, Mark Burnett allowing an outside source the opportunity to spoil Survivor.
So all I’m trying to do is ask people to hold on for a minute while we examine this a little further. I can live with whatever rules surface, even if I personally find them to be silly. But having been suspended before for not even breaking any known rule, I’m a mite skittish about screwing something up even while not meaning to. A rule that is difficult to understand is worse than no rule at all. And while it may be easy for you to grasp, I submit that that is because you are coming from a similar set of premises as the rules makers.
I know I wouldn’t be missed if I stayed out of CS altogether, but if I can’t post without worrying that a warning might follow despite my best intentions, then surely you can’t blame me for opting out. So there you have it. Those are my thought processes in a nutshell.
This post from earlier will hopefully put your mind more at ease.
They aren’t speculations on the part of the marketting department, nor tangenital. They have access to the source material. They know what’s going to happen. If someone involved in the production blurbed to an entertainment blog what would happen in next week’s episode, it would certainly be classified as a spoiler. This isn’t the same but is similar.
Now - the intention of the marketting people is to get you watching the show. So they may truthfully convey what’s going to happen in the next episode, or they may mislead. Either way, I find it to be a detriment to my viewing experience to know ahead of time. If I see a “You. Must. Watch. Someone. Will. Die” preview, I spend the episode trying to figure out if they’re just going to kill off a red shirt or if a beloved character is going to die. Either way, it detracts from my enjoyment of the program, so I avoid even seeing those previews. The marketting department doesn’t have the motivation to preserve the quality of the experience like the actual creators of the show do - its their job to stir up attention and get people watching. Their goal is not to enhance your experience.
And I avoid them successfully - between DVRs and online viewing, I almost never catch a preview to a show I care about. And I’m not alone - quite a few people do the same thing and have made the same request. My biggest risk for spoilers (and look at the term itself - it’s information that spoils the experience) now comes from people talking about the previews of future episodes in the SDMB threads. I could start avoiding the threads (and in some cases I do), but it seems like the less painful way to go about things is for people to be courteous and simply spoiler box these things. It’s not even being asked that people don’t discuss this - simply that they label them so that people can choose whether or not they want to view that information. Many of us don’t and we’d appreciate our wishes being respected. The gleeful tone that some people take of “NYAH NYAH it’s not technically against the rules, so screw you guys!” is juevenile.
Many of us have a better experience avoiding these things. Please be courteous and help us do this by giving us a warning and a choice to read or not - which is what a spoiler box is for.
The only relevance this thread has for me is to find out that the reason the spoiler boxes don’t work me has nothing to do with the source, but must lie somewhere in my own computer.
Okay, break it up, you two. If you’re going to argue between yourselves you’ll need to take it elsewhere, this is not the Argument Clinic. (That’s Room 12A, just along the corridor.)
WHAAAT!!!
Man, you’re 14 hours into an opera, then somebody goes and spoils the last thirty minutes for you.:mad:
Next you’ll be telling me that Mimi dies or something.
Labeling a thread “open spoilers” seems to be a perfectly valid practice to me, one I have done myslef.
However, the question is what is being spoiled. The implication is usually “open spoilers for events depicted in the episode under discussion.” Those of us who have asked for promos/previews to be spoiler boxed believed that the promos/previews are not part of the episode under discussion. that’s why the “open spoilers” notice doesn’t apply to it.
Absolutely. A thread for discussion of a show that is currently airing should be marked “Open Spoilers” in the title, and probably should indicate that this thread is for simultaneous watching and discussion.
People speculating about an upcoming event does not need a spoiler warning or tags, that’s pure speculation.
However, a person having information or knowledge about an upcoming event (not mere speculation) should be warning others about spoilers.
THIS IS THE WAY THE GUIDELINES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN UNDERSTOOD AND ENFORCED. [Upper case used for emphasis, yes, it’s shouting to be heard over the din.] THERE IS NOTHING NEW HERE.
Previews are concocted by persons having information/knowledge about the upcoming episode. Persons who have watched the previews thus also have some information about an upcoming episode. Their posts are not mere speculation. Thus, they should be spoiler-warning the preview. Previews are not covered by the “open spoilers” title in the preview because they apply to a different episode.
I guess I’m beginning to agree that this has now degenerated into a foofaraw over nothing. There is no change in the rules/guidelines. There is no change in how they’re being administered. There is only a clarification.