Of spoilers, plot twists and our mission

Question

Given that:

• Spoiler tags are not very accessible on mobile platforms.
• Putting answers at the fingertips of googlers is the main way we make the internet a better place to be and are no justification to have posts like this or this.
• If you are a user and don't want to be spoiled about a game you can put it in your ignored tags list.
• If you are not a user but Google for a question with spoilers you likely want to be spoiled anyway.
• Spoiler tags aren't designed to host a whole lot of text in the first place anyway.

we could conclude that:

This is a questions and answers site and while we can strive to avoid accidental spoilers, it shouldn't get in the way of the actual questions and answers mechanism. Googleability is a big deal. Accessibility is a big deal. Question titles and incipits are an even bigger deal.

...and thus:

• We should make efforts in avoiding questions that are completely spoiler protected.
• We should only use spoiler protect the parts of answers that, for sake of completeness or clarity, are likely to be unrelated spoilers on their own.
• We should limit spoiler protections of questions to extraordinary cases where the question title doesn't make it clear already that spoilers lie after the jump.
• We should make question titles as clear as possible. If making the question title spoiler free requires excessive contorsionism, maybe making the title spoiler free isn't worth it in the first place.

My question is:

What do you think?

Answer 1

Spoiler tags are not very accessible on mobile platforms.

Works fine on my tablet and my phone, one tap and the spoiler text appears. If spoiler tags are broken on any of the supported browsers, we should collect detailed information on where they are broken and ask SE to fix that.

Spoiler tags get in the way of search engines.

They're just some CSS, search engines don't even notice them

Putting answers at the fingertips of googlers is the main way we make the internet a better place to be and are no justification to have posts like this or this.

True, and I agree that there is a significant conflict between useful titles and spoiler-free titles.

If you are a user and don't want to be spoiled about a game you can put it in your ignored tags list.

This is something the very active users here know, but the option to completely hide ignored posts is absolutely not obvious and I bet that most casual SE users don't even know they can do that. If we decide to stop caring about putting major spoilers in titles, the way to avoid them has to be far more obvious or we'll annoy a lot of users.

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I agree that there is no point in spoiler-tagging answers to questions that assume that there will be spoilers, unless you spoil more that one can reasonably expect from the question.

Spoiler markup in a clearly spoilery question is often necessary to prevent spoilers from being visible in the question excerpt. Don't know if there is a better way to do that.

Titles are an entirely different problem, and I think we should put some effort into trying to keep them free from major spoilers. Even ignoring and hiding questions won't save you in all cases, they'll still appear in title suggestions when asking questions or in the list of related questions in the sidebar. They also appear in the question feed on the Bridge. I don't like how that often mutilates the title, but I now tend towards favoring avoiding major spoilers in titles at the price of having bad and hard to find titles.

To be clear, I'm only talking about major spoilers, significant plot twists or posts about the game ending. Anyone who wants to avoid even minor spoilers has to stay off the internet until they finished a game anyway.

There might also be some technical solutions that could help with this, but everything I can come up with would be complicated enough that I doubt SE would ever implement it. I think I proposed in the past something like being able to spoiler-tag titles, but that's also a rather ugly solution. Something like being able to indicate that you don't care about spoilers in some tag could minimize the annoyance of the spoiler tags, but that would be a per-user preference and SE is well known for absolutely hating those.

On the topic of spoilers in titles, we should have a clear decision. Either we allow them clearly and make sure everyone know to ignore tags if they don't want to get spoilers, or we do our best to avoid major spoilers in titles. Anything in between is madness.

Answer 2

Spoiler free titles and spoiler tags in questions and answers are important, especially when it comes to game endings and 'major' plot twists.

The last thing we want to be doing is discouraging people from coming to the site because they're afraid they might be spoiled on a major point of a game. If someone is seeking help for level 4 of a game with 50 levels, there's no way for them to avoid accidentally seeing spoilery stuff if it's in titles of questions about that game. Also, new users might get spoiled before having the chance to Ignore a game. This might annoy them enough to make them decide not to use the site.

I don't think the Ignore Tags feature is intended to be used to avoid spoilers. I use it to hide questions about very popular games I've got no knowledge of or interest in (such as League of Legends for example). Even so, questions with these tags still appear in the feed, just shaded out.

You shouldn't need to 'Ignore' every single game you might play in the future. I have a ~lot~ of games. However, there are a LOT more out there that I've not played, but might play in the future. I don't want to have to Ignore every single one, just to try and avoid spoilers. Minor spoilers as stated previously are unavoidable, but I firmly believe that we should be able to browse without the risk of major or end game spoilers.

Answer 3

I agree one hundred percent. Spoiler abuse is dumb.

So is @badp. But I won't hold that against him. You shouldn't either.