On another message board they have what are known as spoiler tags , but they use Ultimate Bulletin Board as oppossed to vBulletin board. What it does is “blacks out” the text contained within the tags and then you can read it by selecting the blackened area, highlighting the text to be able to read it. Is there any way to get such a thing for SDMB, or are you at the mercy of vBulletin board capabilities?
It’s possible. I could see it being misused for “hidden” insults in GQ though.
Sure, it could be done, if the SDMB Staff wanted it. In fact…it’s a damn clever idea, and I’m going to put it on my Board tonight to test it out.
Arnold,
I respect that it could be abused, but I would think it would be a useful feature to at least tried and see if folks can behave with it. After all, you can’t really hide the insults fully.
One thing you can do is use the Symbol tag. Reading is then done by copying and pasting the text into Notepad or the like, which will display it in a nice, legible font. Of course, Symbol isn’t the best choice for this, since most of the symbol characters resemble their Latin equivalents, and the font is therefore readable with some difficulty. This has been mentioned as a potential advantage to supporting the Wingdings font, but that might not be enough justification for the admins to add it. Symbol font helps in the eradication of ignorance, by facilitating equations and such, whereas Wingdings would mostly just be a bread-and-circuses type of thing.
Best guess? Just type “SPOILER!” in nice, big letters, and add a healthy dose of space between that and the actual spoiler.
Since the Mods(in MPSIMS) have said the posts in French, morse code etc. are too much to deal with i.e. c&ping them into a translator. I doubt they’ll go with this idea.
That’s the point, C-dawg: Make people have to want to read the spoiler, as opposed to subjecting them to it as they scroll on down the page.
[sym]Can you read this as easily[/sym] as you can read this?
[sym]Could you read this without meaning to?[/sym]
That’s the point.
Yes, but with the symbol font, all you have to do is click the “quote” button…
I was just reading the Something is eating the changing table! thread and saw the “spoiler box” and was wondering if that was something new…so when I searched I came across this thread.
Is this something that is ok to do??
I don’t have any really revealing information…I just wanted to try this!
I sure hope so…cause I just did…and it sure was fun!!!
Polly
Just putting a note over here too…
TubaDiva has posted in the other thread not to use this tag. It has a serious problem if the end tag is not put on, in that it uses an HTML function that vBulletin 1.x will not automatically close. This function was only supposed to be enabled so the Admins could test it in their private area.
We’re still testing it, it’s not perfect,it screws up in some browsers and if not properly set up, it messes up formatting in the rest of the thread.
Whether we choose to implement this or not remains to be seen, in the meantime, unless and until we tell you it’s good to go, DON’T USE IT.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
[Edited by TubaDiva on 11-26-2001 at 06:48 PM]
Sorry about the post…I had not seen the message about not doing it! Now, I know…
So…Please forgive me?
Polly
It hadn’t happened until after you posted, Polly, I’m sure Tuba will forgive you for not reading her mind. 
Perhaps TubaDiva will forgive you, but I never never will. Unless you send me $20 in small unmarked bills.
I gotta say that based on the example in this thread, this is an incredibly cool function. For whatever my .2c is worth (.2c…duh!) I hope it becomes available for use!
Fenris
Interesting. Very interesting. I await the day it is officially released.
BTW, I’ve figured out the HTML behind it. Very clever.
Fenris - check out ATMB on my Board. You can use it there, because it works in vBulletin 2.x much better.
Thank you. I invented it for my Board this weekend, and tested it on there, and gave it to the SDMB to try out today.
Unfortunately, Version 1.x of vBulletin does not close the TABLE tag automatically. Thus, if you leave the closing tag off, the threads get all screwed up.
Wouldn’t it be possible to make it like the [url][/url] tags, where the first one won’t be transformed into html unless the last one is there? That capability does exist on this version of vBulletin, but I have no idea how to implement it at will.
Yes, it is very possible, but it involves php coding, which the SDMB is loath to do (for very good reasons). My thingy didn’t need any php code to work - or work in 99% of the cases, for vBulletin 1.x.