The OP came up with the ground rules through a process of trial & error in earlier threads. In which several really big spoilers were posted–some “hidden”–some not.
He’s seen The Light. Hallelujah! (I’m sure he’ll post a snarky comment but it would be rude of me to reveal what he wrote in that PM.)
What?
What’s your problem with me?
I feel like I’m barging in on a private conversation. Is this something between Bridget and Snarky?
Wait, I can answer this without spoilers, sort of. Based on the extended cast list on HBO’s site and its inclusion of a character not-yet-seen who is linked to the tree, you ought to get an answer to this question before the end of the season.
Now, I have a question based on that same cast list: what’s the name of the slave girl with the Targaryens? They did mention a name for her a few episodes ago, I think, but I couldn’t hear it. She’s not on the cast list, and I know I’ve seen the actress elsewhere, but without a name looking her up is proving difficult.
I believe her name is Doreah.
Doreah.
Thanks!
If only there were some way to obscure spoilers, so a person would consciously have to click something to make the potentially spoilery text appear. I’m not talking about a separate thread that one has to click through – we’ve got enough Game of Thrones threads around here – but maybe something that a user “clicked” to make the text appear without taking the user to a separate thread.
I would think such an innovation useful. Get on it, Board coders!
We started off with that. People complained about having too much white space in the thread because there would be like 8 posts in a row that were all spoilers.
Is that really any worse than pretending that talking about the slanting of a floor is a spoiler and complaining about that?
Seems the sensible thing would be plot points from book not yet aired in an episode - totally banned from thread, no argument there.
Non plot background info and story/scenes that are changed from the book (but don’t give any future plot info away) - spoiler box.
Piddly little details like kids being older or floors not being slanty enough or Tyrion not having two different eye colors - just friggin allow it.
But if you’d rather just yell “BOOKS DON’T EXIST” over and over, well, don’t be surprised when people get all prickly with you over it.
Is this the general “you?”
The problem with the spoiler boxes (well, one of) was that people were using them without indicating very much as to the contents. So in the same thread you might find;
For some people any spoiler is too much, but it’s annoying if you click a box expecting some unimportant spoiler and end up getting a massive one. Especially when you start off with a little discussion about something trivial in spoiler boxes and then one person drops a major bomb in one post as part of it.
Also, spoiler boxes don’t transfer to e-mails. Now, maybe there’s a setting to fix that, but when I read e-mails from subscribed threads, everything is visible – no spoiler boxes.
I get where TBG is coming from, but the problem is that a non-reader isn’t going to know if the answer to his question will constitute a spoiler. So we end up with threads full of spoiler boxes.
If we follow the simple rule for the episode-specific thread, there’s no need for spoiler boxes. Posters with questions have two other threads to use. Or Wiki, or the HBO site, or one of the gazillion Song of Ice and Fire boards.
Yup, IMO that’s the real problem. You can unwittingly read the contents of the spoiler box in your email notification of the latest response.
The current solution–a thread that goes on for several posts (approaching several pages) in a row bickering about what constitutes a spoiler–is surely inferior to having a bunch of spoilered text, isn’t it? I’m interested in keeping up with the discussion, and would far prefer that admonitions about spoilers, not spoilers themselves, be confined to PMs.
I think so too, but that doesn’t solve the “spoiler boxes don’t work in e-mails” problem. Who coded that, btw? It ruins the entire idea of spoiler boxes. I also don’t remember that complaint, or a complaint about in-thread spoiler boxes in weekly threads for similar series, like True Blood, but what’re you going to do?
I think that since there’s a non-spoiler background thread, I’ll just link to that in the OP tomorrow. If there are still a dozen complaints in each thread I don’t know what the solution will be. Maybe just start a poll and see what the numbers say.
I’d do something like this:
-Please keep your post spoiler free.
-If there’s something that you’re not sure whether it’s a spoiler and you want to post it, err on the side of caution by putting it in spoiler boxes.
-If you want to avoid spoilers, consider not subscribing to the thread by email, as that’ll let you see through spoiler boxes.
-By the seven gods, don’t bitch about other folks’ interpretations of these guidelines in this thread!
How about this?
Let the OP set the terms about spoilers in the OP’s thread. And the rest of us follow them.
What is so fucking difficult about that?
Whatever rules are fine, but it’s the constant cavilling about the rules that’s getting up my nose. (And yes, I’m doing it too, now, because basically this thread’s already a trainwreck; maybe pointing out that whining about whether the rules are exactly followed ruins the thread far more than diverging from the thread rules does will prevent this from happening next time).