Something has screwed up the spoiler tags. We hope that Jerry the Tech God will have things fixed up in the morning (that will be Tuesday morning, Feb 21, Chicago time) …
In the meantime, if you are sensitive and don’t want to see spoilers about a specific show or whatever, I suggest you keep away from any thread about that show until we get things fixed.
For those who are new here: the spoiler tags are used to hide endings or other information that someone who hasn’t seen a movie might not want to know in advance. In Cafe Society forum especially, we tend to care about this. For more info (on how they’re supposed to work and normally do) see Forum Rules and note post #4.
hehheh, I’m deriving way too much perverse pleasure from this. Though I’m also a bit surprised that this type of bug is even possible. Did somebody turn on an accessibility feature?
I can’t stand spoiler boxes. I read threads with the little trackball click-in scrolling on the mouse, and clicking the scroll off to triple click the spoiler boxes is annoying in the extreme.
I don’t understand the mindset of wanting to talk about something I haven’t seen yet, especially if other people have already seen it. The desire to participate in the discussion of something where you contribute pointless speculation amidst other people discussing what they actually saw, and then to expect them to encode their conversation so as not to spoil it for the pointless speculators…well, my mind boggles.
I’ve certainly never in my life had an actual conversation with somebody about something that either they or I had seen, the other had not and didn’t want it spoiled, and had it become a coy speculation game. It’s always been an abrupt “don’t say anything; I haven’t seen it yet” change of subject.
I suppose it would be too much to hope for that spoiler boxes go away forever, and we just simply use “spoilers” and “no spoilers” warnings in thread titles, or “spoilers follow” as posts in the thread once a show has aired on the east coast. A guy can dream, right?
Well… let’s say the discussion starts out about something sort of neutral, like Agatha Christie’s writing style. If you’re in a conversation, and you want to make a point, you ask the other person, “Have you read The Murder of Roger Acroyd?” and she says, “No! Don’t spoil it for me!” … and you continue the discussion, avoiding that book.
Online isn’t a conversation. The other person can’t say, “Wait! Stop! Don’t say anything!” … it’s too late. I agree that it’s much easier to use SPOILER warnings in the thread title, but note that often it’s not possible. The discussion could be about something else entirely – film techniques, an actor’s career, cigarettes in b&w cinematography, movie music, whatever – and someone tosses in a comment about crying when [character] died at the end of [movie.] So, there’s a spoiler stuck in the middle of a discussion that was ostensibly about something else.
Again, in real life conversation, you could just ask the other person: have you seen Old Yeller? But online, that’s not possible. Hence the use of spoiler tags.
I need to add that, as forum Moderator, I’ve had almost everything spoiled for me, because I have to read all the threads where they give away the secret. I was heartbroken to learn in advance that Snow White wasn’t really dead, just sleeping.
I’ve gone into threads about books/movies/whatever I haven’t seen to see how people react and whether they like it. Unless there’s an upfront spoiler warning, I figure that spoilers will be boxed for at least the beginning of the thread.
That’s a great tip, thanks. It helps in that I won’t have to triple click, nor will I have to move the mouse anymore. (Using the trackball scrolling works best on the far right of the screen.)
The only downside is that reading white text on a dark background is hard on the eyes, so I won’t be selecting the whole page for normal reading. Still, a great tip I found useful, so thanks.
(Especially in a thread will tons of spoiler boxes; that type I probably will just Ctrl+A for the entire thing.)
As Rysto already pointed out, the idea is to use quote tags instead of spoiler tags to avoid the exact problem you noted.
I see that a whole day has passed with no change, so the quote tags with white text may be our best bet for the time being.
