In this thread manhattan said
How come? I know that sometimes different rules can apply to different forums, and that a spoiler in a title in Cafe Society would be bad, but how come this isn’t true in other forums?
Is it just because there’s no rule against it (for GQ in particular), or something else? Just seems to me that a spoiler (not identified as such) is bad in a thread title, no matter the forum… right?
There’s no rule against it in any forum. Courtesy would dictate that you not post spoilers in a thread title.
Do you think it should be a rule?
No.
dan, you hypocrite! From your thread title alone, I just knew this was going to be about posting spoilers in thread titles. How can you expect others to behave if you don’t lead by example?
bite me!
Wouldn’t courtesy also dictate that mods change the title when it contains spoilers?
It’s probably a matter of practical enforcement.
I think that the popular notion of moderators waking up in the morning to take their shifts, positioning themselves in front of a wall full of multiple monitors, scouring every thread in redundant cross-footed formats, revving up their PCAnywhere and watching people post live, all the while hovering a twitchy finger over The Button is pretty much a myth.
The administration has found that, like Libertaria with its solitary law, things are much easier to monitor when moderators are charged with common sense dispensation of arbitration based on a solitary principle, i.e., the famous “don’t be a jerk”.
Well sure, common sense has to be the ruling principle at work here. I think it would be foolhardy and not a little pushy to expect the moderators to change thread titles every time a spoiler appeared. But what if, during a thread, a few people point out that the title does have a spoiler in it? Or what if the moderator comes across an obvious - to him or her - spoiler in the title? Wouldn’t common sense then behoove a moderator to change it?
The use of spoilers is very tough to police, since no one’s seen everything and no one reads every post on here - heck, I don’t even know how they manage to get to as many threads as they do. Over at IMDb, they’re a lot tougher on the issue, and they can afford to be - they actually forbid a reviewer from posting another comment if spoilers are found in a review! But that’s just them; that process involves the reading of every single review. A bit much to expect here.
Yeah, plus IMDb is expressly FOR reading about movies. Here, it could very well be that the factual answer to a question, for example, means stating what happened in the ending.
I think Arnold has it right that, in most circumstances, it is courteous at least to warn of a spoiler, but the user who fails at this isn’t really a jerk. He’s an asshole. And more often than not, the other users will rip him a new one if he crosses over too far.
I’m sure there’s a fine line between your definitions of jerk and assohle, but for me, if you’re one, you’re likely to be the other, too. 
Anyway, by the time people might rip the poster a new one, 200 people might have read the title - and not necessarily the thread content - and had the movie ruined for them.
Again, I know this is something that has to be taken on a case-by-case basis, but it’s still kind of irksome when it does happen. Maybe the best course of action is that if one of us normal folk sees a thread with a spoiler in the title (which, to me, is far worse than having a spoiler in the thread, since you can warn there), one should click on “report this post to a moderator.”
Apparently, there’s one in General Questions right now, in re the Sopranos.
That’s the thread I linked to in the OP.
This also came up a while back concerning LOTR TTT, IIRC, the thing about “Gandalf”. Some people were furious that it was mentioned right in the thread title, and they were like, “Well, now I don’t have to SEE the MOVIE, do I, thank you SO much, NOT,” and everybody else was like, “Sheesh, he’s right there on the TTT poster, what did you think?” and “Well, if you had READ the BOOKS…”
We do not have unlimited amounts of time. And sometimes the complaint is about movies that have been released in the USA but not the other country in which the complaining member lives. Sometimes it’s about a movie that’s been out for a while and the complaining member is waiting to see it on video. In the case of The Lord of The Rings, as Duck Duck Goose says, some people complain about spoilers for a book that’s been written almost 50 years ago. In the case mentioned in the OP of this thread, someone is complaininig about a plot point (not even something that would ruin a surprise ending) of a TV show that he won’t see until it’s released on video. I think at some point the posters will just have to grit their teeth and bear it.
Yep, except for those who would then not want to watch the TV show or movie, since it’s been spoiled.
Then they could read a good book instead.
This is a spoiler? How would a mod, say me, for instance, who’s never seen a single minute of The Sopranos even have a clue that might be a “spoiler?”
There’s a bigger issue here: the nature of GQ.
We’re all about the facts. Sure, some facts, like how to freebase one’s cocaine, are verboten. But generally, facts are to be encouraged in GQ.
We do not prohibit telling how to do a magic trick, to my mind a much more controversial subject. We certainly are not going to prohibit telling what’s going to happen in the next episode of some TV show.
Well, UncleBeer, the answer is you would not (as I didn’t) know. But who knows, maybe there’s a mod out there who’s a Sopranos fan, and maybe he or she would recognize that thread as a spoiler. In this hypothetical situation, would it behoove this mod to change the thread, or leave it be? And, further, if said mod actually received an email from a member complaining about the spoiler, would it behoove that mod to change the thread?
I realize, of course, that changing thread titles is time-consuming - it sounds like a pain in the ass, to be frank. And yet it does happen (albeit rarely).