What’s your goal here? To destroy the episode threads? What’s a win for you?
There’s already a thread where spoilers are open and welcome, so people who’ve read the books are free to discuss it. There’s another thread for people who are watching the tv series who don’t want it to be spoiled. You want to eliminate the latter, and then tell people “if you don’t want spoilers, then you can’t discuss the series”. Why? How does this benefit you or anyone? Where’s the upside here?
The intent of those threads is clear and the majority of people partaking in it honor and appreciate the rules. It’s only a certain group of people who seem to somehow think somehow that they are performing some sort of valiant public service by threadshitting, hijacking, and revealing whatever spoilers that they feel is appropriate to give to people who don’t want to be spoiled. Any extra moderation is due to the deliberate efforts of people to try to justify their spoilers or criticize the people who don’t want to see spoilers. If those intentional troublemakers weren’t in the threads, we’d be unlikely to encounter any problems. I don’t know what gets into people, but so many people turn into this I’LL SAY WHATEVER I WANT petulant child whenever you ask them to respect the intent of the thread regarding spoilers.
Can you find any thread in which the intent of the thread is clearly and explicitly not to discuss foreknowledge about a series of works, but that this was violated with no intervention?
Maybe those things weren’t treated comparably because they aren’t comparable. Maybe there wasn’t any group of posters that wanted to speculate about what would happen in the Bourne movies over the course of several months. Maybe everyone who would have been really interested in Harry Potter by the time the 7th movie came out had already had plenty of opportunities to actually find out, Harry Potter having not entirely flown under the popular radar when it was in book form.
This is also a TV show, not a movie, and that’s another difference. There’s always a new thing to be spoiled. I just searched for a couple of minutes and found several threads where moderators had to go in and change thread titles and add spoiler boxes for stuff like Survivor, and plenty of arguing and name-calling about what is and what isn’t a spoiler, and moderators got involved in that stuff. So what’s the special new burden? I guess I still don’t see any special treatment. Telling people not to spoil it is just telling them not to be jerks.
And, for what it’s worth, I think that if there were a bunch of people totally into speculating about the last Harry Potter who hadn’t read the books, and they started a thread about it, that would be exactly the same situation. Only that group of people doesn’t seem to exist, which seems to be the real difference.
A goal? I think it’s about fairness. The story has already been written. It’s not a reader’s fault that large numbers of people are just becoming aware of it. So why should a reader bear the burden of ensuring they don’t say anything that a watcher might be surprised by? If the watcher doesn’t want to be exposed to the story the onus is on them not to be around people who may know it. It’s certainly not on the staff of the SDMB to be on constant vigil to ensure people who only know the story through watching it can remain in their unspoiled bliss due to the moderator’s hyper vigilance and post-editing of any inadvertent slips by those who read the books over a decade ago. If people choose to talk about the latest incarnation of a storyline online, well, that’s their risk to take. They might be exposed to information about it in its previous forms, and they need to accept that instead of demanding to be sheltered from it.
I don’t really have a dog in this particular fight, not being an active participant in these threads, but the flamewars in CS are getting silly and the whole concept of people who have been enjoying the Westeros universe for over a decade having to muzzle themselves around the newcomers boggles me. It’s driving people like NAF1138 and jayjay out of the threads and causing a bunch of drama. Enforcing it with warnings and having moderators redact accidental spoilers seems a high burden to place on both participants and staff.
Maybe, maybe not, but would you agree with handing out warnings, suspensions, or even bannings to people who talked about the books in the movie speculation threads? That’s where I draw the line. It’s fine to ask people to voluntarially restrict their discussion of the story as incarnated in another medium, and for the most part that will work. Flaming someone over unintentional “spoilers” is just as jerkish as posting a major spoiler in 72 pt font on the first post of a new page in a thread which politely asked for no book spoilers.
From my point of view the hostility has largely been driven by the series watchers who don’t want book info in their threads. I’m fine with respecting that, clearly I haven’t been posting spoilers in those threads, but I’m not fine with how they’re handling it. If people respect the request, fine and good, but if they don’t, well, it wasn’t like you had some sort of right to censor them. That goes double for flaming someone for an accidental slip. They have no obligation to honor your request, but they were trying to, yet still ended up treated like shit for something they did without any malice. Seriously jerkish.
So just to be clear then, your goal here is to destroy the existance of the non-spoiler threads by making spoiler an issue that can’t be moderated. Your attitude is “if you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t ever read discussion about this show you’re interested in on the SDMB ever”, right? And this is superior to the agreement of almost everyone on the board that we can voluntarily discuss the show in a way that doesn’t ruin it for the majority of the potential readers?
Because they know what will happen when most of the audience doesn’t, and people’s enjoyment of the show will be ruined if they share it. FFS, do I really need to explain the very concept of a spoiler and why people might not like them?
Do you believe that spoilers in general should never be something that are off limits? In your view, what legitimately counts as a spoiler?
OR… OR… I have an idea! We have a thread where people voluntarily decide to discuss what’s been on the tv show, so that people can discuss a show they’re interested in without having it ruined for them. Wouldn’t that be awesome?!
The TV show is a seperate work from the book, even if they’re following the story. I would suspect that the vast majority of people watching the tv show are new to the story and haven’t read the books. Why would discussion of the TV show be limited to only a small minority of audience?
And it’s not as if we’re asking anyone just not to talk about it. There’s a spoiler thread for discussing anything you want about the show.
I have no idea how the most basic idea of a spoiler-free discussion “boggles” you. Your attitude is quite frankly bizarre.
No one has been flamed over unintentional spoilers that I can recall. If they’re let fly, people will ask others not to reveal spoilers, and may ask mods to put them in spoiler boxes. The only people that have been flamed have been intentionally being a jerk. The reason this thread was started, for example - that was no unintentional revealing of spoilers, quixotic78 is clearly and intentionally being a huge jerk.
So do you advocate that there be no enforcement mechanism? What if someone comes into every episode thread and tells us exactly what will happen in the immediate future? What if someone comes in and says OH YOU LIKE THAT NEW CHARACTER INTRODUCED THIS EPISODE? WELL IN 2 OR 3 EPISODES DOWN THE LINE THEY’RE GOING TO BE RAPED AND KILLED BY CLOWNS HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, what would happen?
Posting repeated major spoilers with obvious malice and glee would run afoul of the first and doesn’t need any special pinch hitting moderation, etc. So there’s already a remedy for the situation you seem to fear without establishing a police state complete with flamethrower-wielding junior mods as it seems the current approach is trending towards.
Please cite where someone was “flamed” and/or “treated like shit” for an unintentional spoiler. At least with this most recent debacle, any jerkish behavior most certainly didn’t originate from those who were anti-spoiler, quite the opposite. To make it convenient for you, here’s a handy reference point to the reasonable, polite and very well-written:p request that touched
off all the madness. Keep reading from there down and note where the jerkish behavior begins.
IMO, you are right that he was clearly and intentionally being a jerk, particularly by continuing that BS of feigning innocent and WAY over-literal interpretation of the OP in the new thread. But IIRC, he didn’t actually reveal any spoilers, intentional or otherwise. Though I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse, since he just wanted to argue about what constitutes a spoiler after it had been covered endless times.
And that’s the thing. In order to try to avoid any confusion, disagreement, and ultimately, arguments about what does and what doesn’t constitute a spoiler, it was long ago decided by effective consensus that ANY book knowledge in the NON-BOOK series episode threads WAS a spoiler. That’s just the only practical way to make it work. Yet some people just don’t see the slippery slope problem and want to continue to rehash the same argument.
There’s AT LEAST one kind of thread for everybody, but certain people can’t handle the fact that there is JUST ONE thread where they might not be able to post everything they might want to. (for some odd reason) Then there’s a subset of people who (for some VERY odd reason) decide that they must piss all over this ONE thread in protest of this intolerable oppression they’re asked to suffer. I just don’t get it.
It’s not just a show, it’s just a messageboard. You’re under exactly the same “just relax” strictures as everyone else. Which is to say: none. You’re free to get bent out of shape over something totally irrelevant to your life, just as everyone else is.
I think the best comparison would be to a book club starting on a messageboard. If a bunch of people who never read “To Kill A Mockingbird” in school decided to read it together, and they wanted to read a chapter a week and discuss it without discussing anything at all from future chapters, it’d be jerky for someone to come along and talk about how such-and-such foreshadowed the Hallowe’en-attack scene at the end.
It doesn’t matter if the story is already out there, because one of the great pleasures of narrative is the slow move from ignorance to knowledge. We read good books, or watch good shows or movies, because the artist does a great job at letting our knowledge unfold. A spoiler comes along and ruins that experience.
Folks who think the rules for a thread are ridiculous are welcome to their opinion. It costs nothing to start your own thread with different rules. What’s the percentage in breaking the rules of someone else’s thread?
In that case, your point of view is unreliable. The requests have come from the series watchers, yes, but the hostility has absolutely and undeniably come from the book readers.
Agreed. But I will note that there are plenty of people who have read the books, understand the reasonable request for a thread with no spoilers, and still manage to participate in the “no books” thread without issues. Jimmy Chitwood is one such example, and he’s weighed in reasonably in this thread, too. So I would amend your statement to “some book readers” for sake of accuracy.
I just don’t get it.