Spoilers

Cafe Society
1

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?

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I don’t know that it is courtesy to ask others to change consensus rules to meet your own personal tastes.

You’re best argument is that you sometimes go back to the threads because you didn’t bother looking at the clock.

I don’t think we should be held responsible for that.

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So if someone were to post unboxed spoilers for Harry Potter, that would be okay because it’s already been screened? After all, they could just avoid the thread.

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Post #4 If you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t look.

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Whoops, I didn’t mean to come off like a smartass. Sorry about that.

But, basically, yeah: if there’s a thread about the new Harry Potter film and you haven’t seen it yet, why would you open it? I’d expect it to be chock-full of spoilers. That’s why people start film threads - to discuss the film they’ve just seen.

We’ve had this discussion before. It was always my understanding that once a show has aired on the East Coast, it’s within the forum rules to discuss it openly and without spoiler boxes, providing no one starts a thread with the winner in the title (“JUDD WINS!!”).

I think we may need a mod ruling.

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Sorry for the double posting…

Obviously, this doesn’t apply if someone has access to a bootleg tape of the show and has watched it this morning, or somehow knows for sure who wins - that kind of stuff needs to be boxed.
I don’t want to know yet. I want to watch it as it unfolds.

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Spoiler tags aren’t hard to use, but they do break up the flow of a thread, the reading of it and the appearance of the text, which is a big part of a good reading experience, even on message boards…

The spoiler boxes are still there, forever, long after everyone knows what’s in them. If you want to review, there’s the extra seconds time spent clicking and highlighting, and then un-highlighting.

I’d like to do away with the boxes altogether. Putting “spoiler” in the thread title should be enough.

8

If a thread says “Open Spoilers” or anything to that effect, I won’t read it if I’m interested in not having the subject matter spoiled. But often, I’ll be interested in a thread that is about something I haven’t yet seen or read - for example, the latest Lemony Snicket book. I vastly appreciated the spoilers because I wanted to find out what other fans of the series were saying about the books without actually having to have the book spoiled for me.

Also, there are often posts that will come up in completely unexpected settings where someone will completely give away the ending to a movie I haven’t seen yet, and where I had no reason to expect it to happen. If I’m reading a thread about “The Best Closing Songs of All Time” and someone says “Oh, I just love the song that played during the scene where Joe Schmoe died at the end of X Movie”, well, that just pisses me off.

I will grant that there are times when spoiler tags seem a little silly. If there’s a general thread on, say, Lost, and someone says something like “I especially liked the episode where [text obscured by spoiler box]”, it strikes me as a little goofy, since you’d have to read the spoiler box in order to figure out whether it’s an episode you’ve seen.

9

I don’t understand a complaint like this at all.

Before the show the thread is purely speculation and boxed spoilers of stuff people read on spoiler sites.

The show airs at 8 PM eastern time.

Then you want people to post everything about the episode that just aired in spoiler boxes so you can contribute to the thread?

What exactly is it that you can contribute?

Your “speculation” would be surrounded on all sides by spoiler boxes of discussion about what the episode was actually about!

And if you don’t want to contribute, you just want to read, why would you be reading that thread anyway since it will be filled with spoilers (that we have just established) that you don’t want to see.

I hate spoilers probably more than anyone. Twice in the last Amazing Race someone let slip who had been eliminated in that week’s Survivor thread before I had watched my Amazing Race tape. That PISSED me off. But this whole thing just boggles my mind.

10

Yes. If a thread title says ____ //05 you ought to be able to figure out that people are going to be discussing the episode that airs on that date. Threads about speculating what a book/movie/episode will be about are almost always clearly marked as such with warnings about spoilers as well, so it’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for people who go into threads in that 3-hour window before the episode airs where they are.

11

So you want us all to use spoiler tags because you think it’s too much trouble to look at the clock?

The mind boggles.

By the way, I’ve noticed that you bring this up over and over. Do other West Coasters feel the same way?

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West Coaster here. I think East Coasters are a bunch of spoiled brats who think the world revolves around them. :stuck_out_tongue:

Why is the East Coast the magic time zone? What if someone in the UK managed to see something first? The first season of the new Battlestar Galactica aired in the UK first. They seemed to feel they had to wait months to discuss the episodes. But the second an East Coaster has seen an ep, screw the West Coast! Screw Hawaii! Screw everybody, the East Coast has seen it! That’s all that matters!

I say we don’t respect any time zone. Start a thread: [show name] [season] [episode number & name if you know it] [open spoilers]

Then in your first post, do the
.
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thing so people don’t get spoiled on mouseover, then go ahead and speak freely.

People in Canada are now watching Stargate Atlantis before it airs in the US. They should feel free to discuss the show without me popping in there and saying, “hi guys, I wanna discuss the show too but please don’t spoil anything for me!”

Nope, it’s not their job to conduct an entire thread in spoiler boxes, carefully explaining to me what is or isn’t in each spoiler box.

Additional but slight nitpick: Just titling a thread [show name] [date] doesn’t help much. It’s ok for a show that airs today or last night, but what about old shows? If I’m just now watching Six Feet Under on DVD, and I want to discuss season two, episode 4, Driving Mr. Mossback, it does me no good if the thread was titled Six Feet Under, 12/11.