Spoiler tag pony request

October 30, 2006 7:55 AM

If matt is looking for something to do he could whip up a <spoiler> tag, so (competent) people could conveniently hide their spoilers. Or is there already such a thing (I envision a textnode with "Here be Spoilers" text with DHTML magic to switch to the spoiler text upon mouseenter or hover).
posted by Heywood Mogroot to feature requests at 7:55 AM (64 comments total)

preview ate my "<spoiler>"
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 7:56 AM on October 30, 2006

Custom HTML tags are a nightmare. That's why vBulletin and such use their own non-HTML markup language.
posted by smackfu at 8:12 AM on October 30, 2006

When I suggested this a while back the consensus was that we didn't need one because people didn't post spoilers often enough.

*shrug*
posted by twine42 at 8:15 AM on October 30, 2006

Competent people can already type SPOILER ALERT, though.
posted by cortex at 8:17 AM on October 30, 2006

Or post your spoilers in Rot13, as the Usenet community used to do.
posted by agropyron at 8:31 AM on October 30, 2006

D'oh, the < font color=background color> tag thing works in live preview, but when I clicked Preview, nada, so I guess it's not an option. I think it's kind of cutesy and innapropriate for MetaFilter anyway.

So, what cortex blinked.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:53 AM on October 30, 2006

Spoilers are pretty rare, so I don't think there's any need to do anything special.

Can't people use the abbr tag to hide their spoiler?

Like this (mouseover for spoiler)
posted by mathowie at 9:01 AM on October 30, 2006

ntebcleba jevgrf "Be cbfg lbhe fcbvyref va Ebg13, nf gur Hfrarg pbzzhavgl hfrq gb qb."

Gurer'f rira na rkgrafvba sbe SverSbk gung Ebg13f fghss. Juvyr cerfreivat znexhc.
posted by Mitheral at 9:07 AM on October 30, 2006

mathowie: it cuts off after a small portion of text in firefox, though. Maybe something with nicetitles.js could be arranged?

I suggest we just mock people who complain about "spoilers". In many cases, the experience being spoiled is like eating a cheap candy bar from some odd country with no food regulations. It looks rich and delicious, but inside it's sawdust and wax. After the first, it's easy to rationalize the experience as educational ("Now I know", you'll say), but a second bite (or viewing) won't be forthcoming.
posted by boo_radley at 9:14 AM on October 30, 2006

Can people fucking unclench about spoilers, already? If you don't want to know what happens in a movie, maybe you can, you know, avoid clicking on a discussion of the movie on the internets. This is not brain surgery.
posted by Saucy Intruder at 9:35 AM on October 30, 2006

Oop, sorry - could you insert a warning into the comment, mathowie?

And maybe a warning in the post itself, too: users clicking on the second link risk encountering reviews of the film, many of which go so far as to discuss the plot in some detail ;-)
posted by jack_mo at 9:41 AM on October 30, 2006

Maybe something with nicetitles.js could be arranged?

There is already a Show dhtml link titles option in user preferences. That would have to be extended to <abbr>.
posted by Chuckles at 9:45 AM on October 30, 2006

Mocking people who are worried about spoilers sounds good too..
posted by Chuckles at 9:50 AM on October 30, 2006

I am fairly certain Matt is not looking for something to do and anything that let us read the full spoiler behind the abbr haxie will also make all y2karl's massive titles visible, which I don't personally want.
posted by jessamyn at 9:56 AM on October 30, 2006

Jessamyn: how are you on the mocking part?
posted by boo_radley at 10:14 AM on October 30, 2006

There is a Firefox extension ("Long Titles") that keeps abbr tags from getting cut off.
posted by Sibrax at 10:16 AM on October 30, 2006

how are you on the mocking part?

I'm not so good with it personally, but others seem excellent at it.
posted by jessamyn at 10:28 AM on October 30, 2006

will also make all y2karl's massive titles visible

when you misread "titles", that's pretty good for a spittake
posted by cortex at 10:33 AM on October 30, 2006 [2 favorites]

boo_radley: the point of a discussion post about a movie, assuming it's not clearly marked as a spoiler thread, is to find out if it's worth seeing, not destroy the reason to go see it.

So screw you and the horse you rode in on. I thought I might be interested in that movie, and I was reading to see if other MeFites liked it. But, thanks to jack_mo, there's no point now. He's an asshole for doing it, and you're an asshole for dissing people who expect some modicum of polite behavior online.
posted by Malor at 10:42 AM on October 30, 2006

Gotta agree with Malor. As to the original question: look, if people cared, they wouldn't post spoilers, or would do so with due warning. How on earth is Matt's provision of a tag going to make any difference?
posted by languagehat at 10:49 AM on October 30, 2006

I always liked the method of making the text color the same as the background color so that the text shows up only when you select it. Since that method seems to work in preview but gets stripped when live, making a <spoiler> tag have that functionality seems kinda neat (but also ripe for abuse I guess.)
posted by gwint at 11:07 AM on October 30, 2006

Go knit a cozy for your wounded sense of entitlement before you catch cold, Malor. If the movie's ruined because of what jack_mo posted, well, there's no hope for you.
posted by boo_radley at 11:09 AM on October 30, 2006

I'm sorry - I have to disagree with Malor and languagehat. It's not reasonable to expect a thread about a movie to not discuss the content of the movie, expecially when the post links detailed reviews. Posts about movies aren't vetting venues for those considering the film, but are about the movie itself. (Reviews are another matter).

I'm sympathetic to the spoilerphobe community, but there are limits. Expecially in a community like this, where there's no real cultural standard about the horror of spoilers, it's not "everything is spoiler-free unless noted otherwise" - it's "spoilers will be discussed unless noted otherwise".
posted by Karmakaze at 11:20 AM on October 30, 2006

That thing doesn't work here (latest version of Safari). But technology is not the answer here; it is already easy enough to keep spoilers off the front page, and put a SPOILER WARNING ahead of potential spoilers in comment threads. Anyone who is still springing spoilers on people is doing so because they want to, not because there isn't a clever way to hide them.
posted by nowonmai at 11:24 AM on October 30, 2006

He's an asshole for doing it

Jesus, Malor - I didn't deliberately set out to ruin your enjoyment of the film, for crying out loud, I just forgot that on this site there's an angry faction of people like you who apparently don't read newspapers or magazines, and don't even follow the links posted in the MetaFilter post they're commenting on, in case they are exposed to the ending of a film. So I discussed this film as I would anywhere else - and this is the only place I know where people are angered by 'spoilers' - by referencing the plot. Honest mistake. I'll try to remember in future that talking about a film in its entirety is on that long MetaFilter list of things that make people behave irrationally along with fat people, big cars and declawed cats.
posted by jack_mo at 11:39 AM on October 30, 2006

It turns out after Vader cuts off Luke's hand in the battle, Vader reveals that his is act..

F*ck! What is it?!!! What does Vader reveal?!
posted by yeti at 11:42 AM on October 30, 2006

nowonmai - putting the words "spoiler warning" in front of a comment without "spoiler space" after it does nothing. Most people read too fast for two words to keep them from scanning ahead. And, trust me, we do not want to encourage "spoiler space" as a habit in mefi threads - it's an incredible pain for everyone.

There's "springing spoilers" in the case of the folks who were posting Fancr xvyyf Qhzoyrqber (they didn't rot13, naturally) in huge blinking text everywhere they could before the last Harry Potter book came out, and then there's "springing spoilers" in the sense of talking about any media, anywhere, where anyone at all might conceivably overhear and become upset. The first is obnoxious, the second is just someone who wants to have a conversation.
posted by Karmakaze at 12:07 PM on October 30, 2006

Karmakaze wrote, "Fancr xvyyf Qhzoyrqber"
Abbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb!!!!
posted by boo_radley at 12:27 PM on October 30, 2006

I've been doing my best to make sure all threads are content free, yet very verbose. If you all would just knuckle down and add more content free text, we could banish the evil menace of spoilers to the pit from whence they came.

alternate ideas: Is there a website that lists exactly what is and what isn't a spoiler? These sort of things vary from film to film.

plan 2b: Maybe Matt should keep a massive database of all movies, articles, tv shows, newspapers, novels, etc that have not been seen/read/viewed by each user, and one by one we couldeacvh check them off on the preferences screen and then MeFi would automagically filter any references to those pieces of media, thereby protecting our delicate psyches?

plan 6f: The MeFi page template could include a big red flashing warning saying "THIS PAGE MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. CECI N'EST PAS UN SPOILER-FREE ZONE!"
posted by blue_beetle at 12:32 PM on October 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

technology is not the answer here

For once, I disagree with this statement.

Many sites use spoiler tags to good effect; it allows people to discuss things that might be potential spoilers without ruining the fun for people who don't want to be spoiled.

It won't correct the "I'm a jerk, so I will spoil the end of the movie for everyone" problem. It would correct the "I'm not a jerk, but I would like to discuss the end of the movie with those who've seen it without spoiling it for everyone else" problem. ('SPOILER WARNING' isn't really good enough; personally I can't scroll past something without at least skimming it; spoilerspace or background-color text is annoying, and rot13 is a pain in the ass.)

Also, they're not difficult to implement. And won't get in your way if you don't want to use them. There's no drawback to adding them, and some potential advantages. (Well, ok, there would be one drawback to adding them, which would be all the metatalk threads that would immediately ensue: 'X misused the spoiler tag!' 'Well, Y didn't use it, but should have!' etc. But that would be temporary, until everyone got used to it.)

Yes, some idiots will continue to be jerks no matter what you do, but that's not a good reason not to add something that makes it easier for people to not be jerks. If that's enough negatives in one sentence for you.


All that said, as priorities go, this one's probably pretty damn far down the list.
posted by ook at 12:34 PM on October 30, 2006

yeti, Vader reveals that he is acting in a stage production of Hairspray, playing Edna, the role originally played by Divine in the film. It's shocking, I know.
posted by amarynth at 12:46 PM on October 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

jack_mo,

You're in the UK so this movie has been around for a couple of weeks now, rendering it spoilerless for most Ukers.

However, it hasn't even arrived in most cities in the US yet, so barring extensive reading of UK-based websites, most Americans won't be "spoiled" by reading their newspapers. So your argument, while certainly true for someone in Glasgow, isn't true for someone in the States.

That being said, I didn't think your spoiler was that big of a deal; I personally think that it's pretty predictable.
posted by Deathalicious at 1:17 PM on October 30, 2006

I'm with the "if a post is about a movie, one should assume there are spoilers for the movie in the thread, and not read it if one does not want to be spoiled" crowd. Which is exactly what I do if I have the slightest interest in possibly seeing the movie some day. I try hard to remain unspoiled for movies/books/etc., yet I don't think there's a need for special markup for spoilers here. As long as the spoiler isn't on the front page, I'm OK with it.

(And I'm even one of those who believes there should be no statute of limitations on spoilers. I first saw Citizen Kane in 1989 and had already been spoiled, and I would have preferred to have the experience of seeing it unspoiled.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:29 PM on October 30, 2006

SPOILER ALERT!

The President dies in a show called "Death of a President."
posted by Falconetti at 2:04 PM on October 30, 2006

jack_mo: Giving away the major plot twist when essentially nobody in the United States has seen the movie yet is rude.

And, despite your dismissive comments, this is not particularly irrational. Nor is it unusual. It sounds like it was ignorance in your case, rather than deliberate assholery. If you didn't know, you didn't know, but realize that this is most emphatically NOT a MetaFilter-only standard. Most online forums work this way, at least if they have any concept of civil discourse at all.

boo_radley: I see your rudeness isn't just superficial. In real life, you wouldn't announce the ending to a movie before making sure that everyone in the group had seen it. At least, I hope you wouldn't. Maybe you're that asshole who always tells people the ending.
posted by Malor at 2:29 PM on October 30, 2006

Hey, you've called me an asshole three times now. We had a minor disagreement, and now this. Congratulations. And don't talk to me about real life because none of this would have gone down in real life remotely like it has.

Fuck your cockshit in the dickass, Malor. You greatly exaggerate your right to be entertained in a vacuum while simultaneously engaging people in conversations about entertainment. If I were looking forward to a movie I would avoid people who were talking about it. Further, I realize that a movie's value doesn't necessarily come from a shocking plot twist that breaks up an otherwise tedious series of cliched movie formulas.

Your moist, pathetic sniveling about how I might hypothetically be an asshole make me hope and pray that somebody grafts M. Night Shyamalan onto your back to whisper a never-ending litany of plagiarized, boring screenplay ideas until you are driven mad by his underlying banality.
posted by boo_radley at 2:55 PM on October 30, 2006

this is the only place I know where people are angered by 'spoilers'

Don't get out much, do you?

Fuck your cockshit in the dickass... Your moist, pathetic sniveling...

Well, that certainly clarifies your views and makes them more persuasive.
posted by languagehat at 3:27 PM on October 30, 2006

Similar to my suggested CSS for making inlined images less obtrusive, here's a spoiler tag:

spoiler { background-color: black; color: black; }
spoiler:hover { background-color: inherit; color: inherit; }

See it in action at http://xio.com/metafilter_css.html
posted by xiojason at 3:33 PM on October 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

languagehat: Yes, yes. I believe we (Malor and myself) have gotten past the point of clarification and persuading.
posted by boo_radley at 3:36 PM on October 30, 2006

And, despite your dismissive comments, this is not particularly irrational. Nor is it unusual. It sounds like it was ignorance in your case, rather than deliberate assholery. If you didn't know, you didn't know, but realize that this is most emphatically NOT a MetaFilter-only standard. Most online forums work this way, at least if they have any concept of civil discourse at all.

No, they don't. In media fandom, there's a spoiler standard, and even then, most places have to lay it out specifically, because no two people can agree on what constitues a spoiler. In most online fora (outside of media fandom sites) it's considered perfectly normal for a thread/post about a movie to contain commentary on the whole movie, without requiring a spoiler warning above the fold.

You are, in fact, being irrational -- not in the fact that you prefer to avoid spoilers, but in the level of hoops you expect everyone else to jump through to humor your preference.
posted by Karmakaze at 3:47 PM on October 30, 2006

metafilter: fucking your cockshit in the dickass
posted by quonsar at 3:50 PM on October 30, 2006

You are, in fact, being irrational -- not in the fact that you prefer to avoid spoilers, but in the level of hoops you expect everyone else to jump through to humor your preference.

"Don't give away the ending of the movie" is a major hoop to jump through? Sheesh.
posted by Malor at 3:52 PM on October 30, 2006

And consider that the movie isn't out yet in most of the US. That is way different from spoiling the ending to a movie that's been out a few weeks already. I don't agree that it's considered normal to spoil the end of a film in most online fora -- because in my experience, it's just not true. People will post spoiler warnings, at least.
posted by litlnemo at 3:56 PM on October 30, 2006

Would a magazine or newspaper ever spoil a movie without excessive warnings beforehand? Think about why that is.
posted by smackfu at 4:10 PM on October 30, 2006

Warning: spoilers.
posted by flabdablet at 4:12 PM on October 30, 2006

"Don't give away the ending of the movie" is a major hoop to jump through? Sheesh.

In a post about the movie, after links to detailed reviews, which has already been shown several places, where the ending is germane to the debate about its quality? Yeah, it is.

And it's certainly not worth directing the sort of vitriol you've been spewing.
posted by Karmakaze at 4:34 PM on October 30, 2006

Would a magazine or newspaper ever spoil a movie without excessive warnings beforehand?

They do all the goddam time. I'm not sure if you were being drily sarcastic or not, but if you weren't: yes. All the goddam time.
posted by cortex at 4:38 PM on October 30, 2006

xiojason's spoiler tag implementation idea is pretty good, I think. Or we could just use span to color the text and background black, and then you can select it to see what it says. Not as cool as the hover, though, and requires people to know some html/css.
posted by litlnemo at 5:07 PM on October 30, 2006

Or I guess we couldn't, because it stripped out the tags when I posted. *sigh* Matt, if you could consider adding xiojason's code to the style sheet... it would be way useful.
posted by litlnemo at 5:08 PM on October 30, 2006

this is the only place I know where people are angered by 'spoilers'

Don't get out much, do you?

Plenty thanks ;-) Honestly and truly, I've never heard of it being considered such a huge problem anywhere but here. I mean, I read Sight & Sound and they run a full synopsis of the plot before the review, newspapers and film festival catalogues always feature full 'spoiling' reviews - it's just completely standard to cover all aspects of the plot when discussing films (or books, for that matter), in print or down the pub, especially when there's a twist. I don't understand how spoiler-phobic people decide what to go and see at the pictures - do they just go by the titles?

...it hasn't even arrived in most cities in the US yet, so barring extensive reading of UK-based websites, most Americans won't be "spoiled" by reading their newspapers.

The Rotten Tomatoes page linked in the post lists reviews from the NYT, Rolling Stone, Variety, no less than three Chicago papers and tons more US-based sources. All the ones I read before I commented mentioned the 'twist'.

jack_mo: Giving away the major plot twist when essentially nobody in the United States has seen the movie yet is rude.

If I'd been doing it maliciously, then yes it would be very rude, but I wasn't, which is why I took umbrage at being called an asshole. Anyway, sorry for mucking up the film for you - I'll defo remember to add a warning next time I'm talking about a film.
posted by jack_mo at 5:15 PM on October 30, 2006

"I don't understand how spoiler-phobic people decide what to go and see at the pictures - do they just go by the titles?"

Many reviewers, if not most, will allude to plot twists without saying exactly what they are. "The murderer revealed at the end was implausible" as opposed to "The revealing that the murder was Colonel Mustard, in the Library, with the candlestick, was implausible." IIRC, Roger Ebert does this sort of thing frequently.
posted by litlnemo at 5:23 PM on October 30, 2006

Actually, the NYTimes review by A.O. Scott is a good example of the dancing around the plot that is done in most reviews:

Then, after the fatal shots are fired, consequences start to unfold: a frenzied investigation leading to an arrest, a new version of the Patriot Act, rumbles of war-talk if a foreign government turns out to be involved.

posted by smackfu at 5:35 PM on October 30, 2006

Malor: I really don't see why you'd want to read in-depth about a movie without anyone mentioning the ending. I mean, I can see not wanting to read anything about a movie before seeing it, but your demand to read just so much about it seems a little ridiculous to me.

Also, you're being a jerk. Instead of expressing your views, you're calling people assholes, and hoping that discerning readers will thusly be able to understand what you think. I believe that's going about things backwards.
posted by koeselitz at 5:39 PM on October 30, 2006

metafilter: fucking your cockshit in the dickass since sometime in 1999
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:53 PM on October 30, 2006

"I mean, I can see not wanting to read anything about a movie before seeing it, but your demand to read just so much about it seems a little ridiculous to me."

koeselitz, seriously? Because it seems pretty normal to me. Most people want to know something about what a movie is like. Finding out what The Sixth Sense is like does not require that you find out the twist ending before seeing it -- or even to know that there is a twist. (I was lucky, I saw that one without even knowing I should be expecting a twist. And it was a lot better that way, I think.) A good review will give you enough so you have some idea what the movie is about and whether it's something you would be interested in, without giving away aspects of the film that would be better discovered in the film itself.
posted by litlnemo at 6:12 PM on October 30, 2006

Movies that depend on twists to be entertaining are crap anyway. The good stuff in a movie is the stuff that's good no matter how many times you've seen it. That's what I'm saying.
posted by koeselitz at 7:13 PM on October 30, 2006

For me, at least, it's not about depending on twists. When I know about a major plot element of a movie before seeing it, the expectation of it messes with my enjoyment of the rest of the movie, because I keep wondering when it's going to happen and how it fits in with everything else. Watching a movie more than once is different, because in that case I have a sense of how the whole thing fits together.

But I also know that MetaFilter has spoilers occasionally, and that it's my job to avoid them.
posted by moss at 7:40 PM on October 30, 2006

Vader reveals he is actually what? I need closure!
posted by oxford blue at 7:40 PM on October 30, 2006

A sled.
posted by cortex at 8:01 PM on October 30, 2006

He was dead for the whole movie! He only thinks he's alive!
posted by litlnemo at 8:04 PM on October 30, 2006

ZOMG SPOLIER HERE










WAIT


















































WAIT FOR IT









































Snape kills Dumbledore! zomg
posted by exlotuseater at 8:27 PM on October 30, 2006

At the end of the porno, he ejaculates on her face.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:43 PM on October 30, 2006

I make about half my scratch writing movie reviews, and I pride myself in not explicitly mentioning anything that happens after the first fifteen minutes of a film. It's easy to be vague. Spoilers suck. Hell, today's trailers give away far more than I think they should. Sometimes I close my eyes in the theater ... for real.

That being said, you can't expect to wade through an entire thread on a film and come out the other end okay.
posted by Bookhouse at 10:30 PM on October 30, 2006

Anyway, sorry for mucking up the film for you - I'll defo remember to add a warning next time I'm talking about a film.

That's classy, and much appreciated. Too many people around here hunker down and refuse to admit they might have ever, in any way, done anything that might call for an apology. Note to those people: apologizing does not mean saying "I'm worthless and I don't deserve to live"; it doesn't even mean admitting that you did something terrible. You can just say "Sorry I [hurt you/spoiled it for you]; I'll try not to do that next time." I hope you're all taking notes.

Movies that depend on twists to be entertaining are crap anyway. The good stuff in a movie is the stuff that's good no matter how many times you've seen it.

Yeah, that's the standard excuse for spoiling movies for people, and it doesn't wash. Everything you say is true, and I don't actually consider I've really seen a movie unless I've seen it at least twice—if I love a movie, I can watch it over and over—but I still want to see it the first time as if it were the first time. Just because a good marriage just keeps getting better and better doesn't mean you want to skip right over the first night together, dig?
posted by languagehat at 5:15 AM on October 31, 2006