Another way to do this that might work better with opera, as well as being more intuitive - instead of displaying as black-on-black text to be highlighted, display it in a small 2 line textarea with two leading blank lines and a READONLY attribute. The textarea would display a scrollbar, so people wouldn’t have to figure out to highlight.
It appears that the message display is currently outside the scope of any form elements, so you would have to wrap a <form> around it, too - the action wouldn’t matter, as you would not be providing a submit. Actually, that’s good, as if it was inside the scope of an existing form, the spoiler would then be adding extraneous (albeit harmless) data to the form request.
Just a suggestion. It’s a nice addition in any case - kudos.
BTW, I can’t quibble with the way Opera chooses to highlight - they complement both the foreground and background colors. Seems like a reasonable thing to do, though it doesn’t produce the desired results in this case.
I’m at work and behind a firewall right now, but what I just tried was replacing your whole spoiler table for the “rosebud” spoiler in this thread with something like:
<br><center><form>
<textarea wrap=soft readonly rows=4 cols=60>
****** SPOILER ******
Rosebud was his sled.
</textarea></form></center><br>
Using the initial rows of the textarea for the “spoiler” message to dispense with the table row. Obviously, you would season the size of the textarea generated to your liking. You wind up displaying a little window in the center of the message that allows the user to scroll down to the spoiler. Displays OK in Netscape, IE and opera on Windows.
The drawbacks:
1 - it’s fixed width, rather than sizing to the message display, meaning people with small browser windows will have a horizontal scroll bar forced on the page, and people with large windows will see empty space.
Fixed number of rows, too, which means you have to scroll to read long spoilers.
2 - further markup won’t work in the spoiler text, since it’s inside a textarea. In theory, the browser should honor only </textarea>. I don’t know what kind of control you have in massaging the user’s text when doing these custom tags, but you might want to escape it to be safe, if you can.
3 - Netscape doesn’t honor the “readonly” attribute, and you can uselessly focus on and type into the textarea. It works on IE and Opera to prevent user input. Netscape seems to need to be told to wordwrap or it will simply construct very long lines with a horizontal scroll bar. “wrap=soft” and “wrap=hard” should be identical here since we are never actually going to submit the input.
BTW, yabob, when I tried your method, I found that every blank line in the “textarea” showed up as <br> when the post was displayed. It doesn’t seem like replacing <br> with <p> makes a difference - you end up seeing <p> in the “textarea”. It must have something to do with the way vBulletin retrieves or stores the HTML in the database. I’ll talk about it with Gaudere when time permits, but I don’t know if she can come up with a solution. I think she had the same result.
A long, long time ago, back in the days of Ubb and early vB, there was no spoiler tag. Evil posters would give away the plot twists and endings to everyone’s favorite television shows and movies. Some people put the word ‘spoiler’ in the title of their threads, but this was an imperfect solution; for other Dopers failed to do this, resulting in much anguish when Dopers read endings that they didn’t want to read. For, if someone wanted to read the thread, then they had to read the spoiler information. And if they didn’t want to know the ending of their favorite television show or movie, they had to bypass the thread altogether. This caused much unhappiness throughout Doperland. And then, using his wonderous powers, the great wizard Arnold Winkelried enabled the use of the spoiler tag. There was great joy in Doperville at Arnold Winkelried’s accomplishment. No more were Dopers forced to bypass threads that they really wanted to read because of the fear of reading endings. The Dopers rejoiced and all was well in Doperville.
And so it was that it came to pass, that all Dopers began using the spoiler tag. At first the people were wise, and used the tag wisely. Then, without relaizing the hazards that lay within, some Dopers began experimenting with the dangerous magic of the spoiler tag. They attempted to put smilies in there. And colored text. And nested tags. The strain on the server kept growing and growing until one day, without warning, the spoiler tag on one post burst, flooding the boards with it’s darkness. And that is the reason, dear children, why, to this day, the boards are engulfed in darkness, awaiting the day when a redeemer will come and return light to the boards.
Y’know, back when I was a moderator, one of the things I was dreading was for someone to post spoilers to the fourth Harry Potter book in GQ. Didn’t happen, thankfully. I do have to wonder, though, how Euty and Uke can handle it.
