Spoiler alert: [spoiler] dies

Question

Technically, does that count as putting a tag in the title? ♪ I mean, beyond the actual literal tag in the title.

Jeff consulted me to bring up this subject on Meta in advance. spoiler is, by many means, a terrible tag. There are a number of reasons for this.

1. It's an actual meta-tag. That is, its purpose is to describe attributes of the question rather than the problem in the question. The elements themselves in the games are not spoilers - it's the unleashing of their existence to the unknowing public that makes them spoilers. And that is purely contained within the text on the site.

2. The purpose is conflicting with the entirety of the tag base. Also explained in the previous discussion, a tag whose sole purpose is to be ignored is unexpected and confusing. Seeing as it lacks all the other utility which a flag is meant to possess, it just is a poor fit in the tag base.

3. Consequent of the above, it is also not very well known that it is used for this purpose. There are only 28 users across the site who have the tag ignored. New users rarely know about the ignored tag feature, fewer still know how to hide them. We don't advertise this fact, and I've mentioned this. The purpose of the tag only comes up whenever someone asks about it. We never teach anyone, which leads both to its lack of use, and the abuse that I'll discuss in points 5 and 6.

4. Excepting spoilers inside the title, the existence of the tag is moot. We have spoiler syntax in posts to handle everything outside the title.

5. The vast majority of the ~300 questions marked with the tag don't have a spoiler in the title. See the following examples:

   • What's the effect of winning the Civil War?
   • Do weapons have level-dependent unique item stats? When to pick them up?
   • Why is there a helicopter flying over Arkham City?
   • How am I supposed to kill the final boss on the Deus Ex difficulty?

   
   This is how the majority look. Titles for spoiler questions follow a couple different formulas in general: what happens after X, does X exist, and how do I do X. Very few go about revealing dangerous details, and very few actually lose anything in their titles to accomplish this deed. The largest defense of this tag's existence has been to allow freedom in titles, but in many cases, the freedom isn't exercised largely because it is unnecessary. The titles remain concrete and identifiable.

   As such, the majority of questions with this tag are identifying content inside the posts. Content that can be hidden by the aforementioned spoiler syntax if it isn't clear from the title that it contains spoilers.

6. On top of point 5, whether or not the majority of these classify as spoilers is extremely subjective. Namely, the degree of what counts. The full gamut of questions ranges from questions about how to fight final bosses and about endings or important plot points, to the location of items in early game dungeons and what rewards are for quests. Extended logically, we're hitting every boss fight, item strategy, dungeon help, puzzle solving... well, logically extended we're hitting the entire content of the site. Which, actually, isn't all that surprising - the entire point of the site hinges on giving people information prior to their in-game discovery.

   We don't have a strong metric for determining what is truly "spoiler" worthy, but a lot of metrics we could make, there's a much better tag. endings if you're discussion ending stuff, boss-fights for how to fight bosses (final or otherwise). There's always just a better tag, that most importantly isn't a meta tag.

7. This actually stacks on point 4 in a different direction than the previous two. Which is, even if people did wisen up and use this to allow a freedom of identifying spoilers properly and only in titles, we're hosing the anonymous visitors if we practice that. Remember, tag preferences only exist for users of the site. If we allow spoilers in title just to allow this kind of tag, we'll spit on the faces of passerby visitors who are bombarded with front pages that may have spoiler titles. It's counter-productive if the intent is to allow people to avoid spoilers if we're going to do it in a way that encourages it being shoved into the faces of the majority of our traffic.

The tag is bad, its purpose is narrow and dangerous, and furthermore it's not even consistently used due to a lack of education about it. If we want to prevent spoiling information, we should have clean titles and use the syntax that we ended pushing into existence. Using the tag system simply isn't going to work.

Answer 1

I have no problems with this, except for this thing here:

Should text with the spoiler markdown appear in question summaries?

The other meta thread referenced there says pretty much "write your questions better" but we don't really have control over the questions most of the time - they're contributed by (generally) people who don't read obscure Meta threads before posting.

Agreed that it's a terrible tag whose time has come, but can we work to improve the other spoiler mechanic as well?

Answer 2

If you are going to kill the spoiler tag, at the very least make it more obvious that there is a way to hide spoiler text. Adding a way to easily mark a block of text spoilers via a button above the answers box will make sure more people are aware of the feature and use it.

Answer 3

And so it came to pass that the Countess, who bathed in the blood of...

Wait, wrong thing coming to pass.

And so it came to pass that [spoiler], who rested itself atop the bodies of 297 questions, did breathe its last on Thanksgiving Day of 2011. At least, if you live in the United States. Those who don't, well, it wasn't Thanksgiving to you. To you, it was just a normal Thursday. A normal Thursday, and the end of [spoiler].

Answer 4

I'm one of those users that have spoiler ignored, but I agree with Grace Note here, this tag should go, as it is anyway not used as it should. Instead, I propose the following policy:

Question titles which contain something which could be considered as spoiler should be edited to exclude it.

As discussed in Proper usage of spoiler tag?, this isn't always simple: deciding what is a spoiler and what isn't is problematic and subjective, and some question titles may become nearly-useless after this sanitation.

Nevertheless, as someone who got burned, this is the policy I believe in. There was some question of "how do I kill X" where X was an ally at that point of the game; a single glance turned out to be a serious spoiler :\

I'd definitely understand if others don't agree with me on this, though, since as far as Google-users are concerned, "how do I kill X" is an excellent title and "how do I kill this character" isn't. So the question is sort of "do we cater more for our users or for random Google users"? I'm usually on the side of random Google users here, but I just hate spoilers so much...

Answer 5

Could we have some kind of automagic flag that puts [spoiler] at the start of titles that contain spoiler text in the question? If the asker is whiting out parts of the question, any discussion is going to be spoilery.

Making 'spoiler' ignored is kind of a bad solution anyway because whether or not someone cares about spoilers usually depends on if they've finished the game in question.