Okay, I realize that some people think they’re sexy, and some people are just trying to be polite.
But I think the new Spoiler boxes are about the most gol-durned annoying thing I have ever seen.
I’m reading through a thread. My mouse is poised over the right-hand scroll button, my eyes are moving smoothly down the page, nicely choreographed with my clicking finger. And then a Spoiler box comes up. Ah, shit. I move the mouse over the box and attempt to highlight the text in the black box. Of course, the wildly overenthusiastic higlighting feature on my POC Windows machine insists on highlighting about half the page. Okay, try again. Oops, missed the first three letters. Try again.
What was a smooth, zen-like experience turns immediately into a click-and-drag, oops, click-and-drag again and again exercise in (admitted minor) frustration.
I’m a big boy. If I see the “spoilers ahead” warning, I can read or skip the next paragraph as I please. I don’t need a big black box to protect my virgin eyes.
The big black box is an answer to a question that nobody was asking. Let’s lose this annoying “feature” before it destroys Western civilization (or at least what’s left of my equanimity.)
See, now wasn’t that annoying? Here you had to highlight the damned box, just to see that there was nothing important inside and you wasted your efforts?
And here you had to do it again. Oh, and don’t tell me that I can just skip over the boxes. Or that I should get a Mac instead. Or that it isn’t going to kill me to have to click-and-drag. The boxes disrupt the flow.
But are they really any worse than the 2-and-a-half miles of blank space people used to leave?
I agree with your general thrust though. Save the spoiler boxes for actual spoilers dammit! Don’t use them just because some neutrino flying through the universe happened to hit your brain in just the right place at just the wrong time!
It’s more annoying if you use Opera (like me), cos the spoilers just show up blank. So then, you have to open Notepad and cut and paste to read the contents of the spoiler box. Of course, after you do that you realise that it wasn’t worth the effort as you’ve seen this movie already and you knew so…
I’ve just taken to skipping them.
I don’t know what version of explorer you are using, but with version 5 you can just double click on the text anywhere in the post, and the whole post gets highlighted.
Yeah, triple click with mine too – I think there’s a setting somewhere.
If you really can’t be arsed moving your mouse that few inches just hit CNTRL + A to highlight all the text, revealing all the spoilers. Presto, mouse still poised over scroll bar.
With the extra time you’ll save over a day who knows what you’ll acomplish …
Ctrl-G’s only for Opera users (I’m using 6.1, a relatively recent version). Ctrl-A is, I think, a standard windows shortcut to highlight everything. In Opera, you still can’t read the spoiler text.
And Francesca, “annoyinger,” when used in this context, most certainly is a word. Perhaps you’ve heard (or maybe not) of its deeply redneck cousin expression, “fucked-upper than shit.”
