Season 5 of Game of Thrones debuts tonight (hurray!). For previous seasons, we’ve had the following basic setup:
(1) for each episode, a spoiler-free thread. NO spoilers from the books, or from any source other than what was seen on screen. In this thread, the books do not exist and never existed. Don’t even do things like comment on differences between scenes that have already been broadcast and the version in the book.
The thread does discuss the episode as it airs, so if you open it before you’ve seen the episode you risk spoilage, because different people see the episode at different times.
(2) A season-long thread full of book spoilers for people who have read the books. This thread pretty much assumes full knowledge of everything, don’t venture into this thread if you don’t want casual mention of events that have not yet happened in the show but likely will
(3) A thread for background information such as “hey, what’s the deal with those cities over on that other continent, why do they all have harpies?” or “I’ve forgotten the relationship between Theon Greyjoy and the Stark family can someone remind me?”. This thread has a more amorphous spoiler policy, because sometimes the background information comes only from the books. In general you should be able to read this thread without massive upcoming plot developments being suddenly and unexpectedly revealed, but there will be information from outside the TV show.
I think this system has worked fairly well in general. Comments?