If the news of an actor or actress leaving a show is all over the entertainment news outlets, then IMHO it should be allowed to be mentioned here without any kind of spoiler warning.
The same goes for any info about an episode that is in the “official” episode description in the newspaper TV listing.
I disagree with the “all over the news” exemption. What may be “all over the news” to one person (who reads the headlines on the supermarket tabloids or visits numerous online news sites) may be brand new information to someone who hasn’t engaged in those activities, sometimes intentionally. I can’t tell you the number of times that something has been spoiled for me with an offhand, “Well, everyone already knew that, all the message boards are discussing it,” etc., when I had no clue about the spoiler, sometimes because I had specifically avoided the potential information sources. I agree that once you’re in a thread about a specific show, spoilers are bound to come up, but a simple thread title that indicates that a particular show will be discussed allows everyone to choose whether or not to participate.
I’ll take that further by being in the “We’re grownups talking about books, movies, and TV shows, ferchrissake! Dump the spoilers entirely!” camp. I was “meh” about it until there was a thread in which plot points of “To Kill a Frikkin’ Mockingbird” got spoilered. That was the last straw. Spoiler tags are stupid and are for people who place too damned much importance on the crap they read or view.
Oh, I agree with you about that. If a thread is marked SPOILERS then it contains spoilers, end of story.
What I’m talking about are things such as what-I-saw-on-Entertainment-tonight or what-I-saw-in-the-previews-that-some-people-don’t-watch being mixed into a NON-spoiler thread. Or, more commonly, something that would spoil episode 17 being discussed in the SPOILER thread for episode 16.
The most contentious example of this is discussion of stuff-in-next-episode-previews in TV show threads. On the SDMB, some shows (24) require spoiler boxing of preview discussions. Some (Lost) do not. Given that there are a non-trivial number of people who do not like to watch the previews (and I find it hilarious that people are always complaining about how the episode was less fun because of something misleading they saw in the previews… guess what, DON’T WATCH THEM!!!), isn’t it just erring on the side of courtesy to put such discussions in spoiler boxes? Similarly, ABC may be running ads every 15 minutes in every one of their shows saying “on next week’s Lost, SOMEONE WILL DIE”, so you think it’s quite reasonable to discuss who that might be; but I watch no ABC shows other than Lost and fast forward through ads, so have no idea that someone will die and do not WANT to know that someone will die, because then as I watch the episode, I’m constantly feeling jerked around every time someone is in danger.
Now, plenty of people obviously feel differently, but that’s why spoiler boxes exist… so people can read what they want and not what they don’t want.
I don’t get it. What’s your point? What does being grown ups have to do with it? If anything, I’d say that the more mature you are, the more likely you are to realize that different people have different preferences for how they view/read things, and different people have read/seen different things.
Isn’t there a difference though between a movie still in the theaters or a show just shown and something that is over a year old?
I agree, nothing about “To Kill the Mockingbird” needs to be spoiled, neither the fact the Beauty killed the Mockingbird nor that Nosebleed was the gun. 
Some sort of time limit should be acceptable with a few odd exceptions. In a thread where the Op says, *“I am in the middle of reading the Hobbit and I was wondering how come Biblo did not just turn back”. * No one should blurt out that “then he would never have helped killed the Dragon and find the Ring.” That would be an exceptional circumstance and should be spoiler tagged if mentioned at all.
Jim
How is this possibly hypocritical? The two things have absolutely no relationship to one another.
And older yet you start thinking, “It’s just a TV show! Quit investing so much of yourself in it that finding out how it ends ruins it for you.” And just a wee bit older you say it out loud.
Another thing you have to consider is that, what may be popular knowledge to the US audiences, as it’s the episode that’s coming up within a week or two, is often not going to be broadcast in foreign markets for possibly many months yet. So pre-bombshell plot points are often not even known to those audiences, let alone the big one the thread’s about.
So having a less explicit thread title including the word spoilers is definitely a good idea for that situation.
What does “it’s just a TV show” even mean? There are things in my life that do purely for entertainment… watch TV, read books, post on the SDMB. They are somewhat important to me, but less important than, say, my health. When something happens that makes them less fun, that makes my life less happy. Not in some massive way where I can’t survive woe is me yada yada. But why wouldn’t I want my life to be more fun? And why shouldn’t I attempt to convince people of this, when there are very simple steps they can take to effect it?
If only. I actually had someone complain once about open spoilers in a thread I had made with “(OPEN SPOILERS)” in the title about Big Brother speculation for the final four. Part of the pisser of it was that there are a few of us, maybe five or six, who routinely participate in those BB spoiler threads, and this guy wasn’t one of them. He could have started a thread of his own if he didn’t like our established format. But I feared risking contentiousness in Cafe Society, so I folded like a cheap rug and had the title changed. But the thread smelled like it had been shat in from then until it died.