I don’t want to hijack my own thread, which is about the Survivor finale, so I’ll post my thoughts about spoilers here. This is not specifically about that show, but about spoilers in general.
Someone posted ‘Once the show has aired, it’s fair game.’ He also said it was a ‘huge PITA’ to use spoiler tags. The point is that shows are have not been aired on the West Coast until three hours after they’ve aired on the East Coast. And using spoiler tags is no more difficult than bold or italic or
tags.
Survivor is a bit of a sore spot for me, since I really enjoy the show. The first season I tried mightily to avoid all spoilers… only to see a message on an eBay board (I was looking for something completely unrelated to the show) with the title ‘RICH WINS!’ :mad:
I don’t have a problem with Deadwood, Rome, and others because they can be seen on the west at the same time as on the east. We on the Left have the option to watch the shows at the same time as those on the Right. But we don’t have that option for shows such as Survivor or most other shows that people like to watch.
The Olympic Games are even worse. Not only do American broadcasters fail to actually show most of the games, but they are usually time-delated for the East Coast and then delayed a further three hours for the West Coast! Spoilers are particularly difficult to avoid.
But back to the ‘if it’s aired, then it’s fair game’. Imagine the furor that would ensue if someone posted unboxed spoilers to the next Harry Potter film. After all, if someone wanted to avoid spoilers they could watch the movie at its first showing. ‘It’s already in theatres! You should have watched it!’ But instead people box their spoilers. That way people can enjoy the threads without the game being given away.
Should people be ‘banished’ from threads until they have seen a show or a film or have read a book? I don’t think so. In the case of television shows that are broadcast three hours later for the West Coast, many of us do not pay that much attention to what time it is. In the case of a movie, many of us can’t get to the theatre on a given day. In the case of a book, some people read more slowly than others. (I like to order my Harry Potter books from amazon.uk, so I have to wait a week before they arrive.)
Spoiler tags are here for a reason: So that people will not spoil things for others. It’s common courtesy.
Or is courtesy no longer common?