Spoilers
Ok, so I’m looking for a little input. I’ve never really had to deal with “spoilers” before. No Harry Potter fansite, just yet. But, that has changed with DGH. I now have spoilers to worry about for both the blog and the forums. So, what do I do, if anything? On one hand, I’m thinking “well, if you don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t visit sites with info on the show.” But, is that fair? I chatted with my buddy Jeremy a bit since B5 has a number of blogs that deal with spoilers, such as House is Right.
They don’t really have any set policies, either. So, we talked a bit. Here are some general thoughts put across:
Blog:
- Since the blog is a controlled environment and there are no comments, it’s easy to add a word in front of the actual title and to make the title vague. i.e. “Spoiler: Episode 78″ or “Preview: Episode 64″, etc. Not going to do anything for the blog entry though.
- I could try to get some plugin made for Nucleus that would create a spoiler area that people had to expand to read. But, is that worth it? How would it affect the feeds and search engine results?
Forums:
- I run a House site. What am I gonna say? Don’t post info about HOUSE on my HOUSE forums dedicated to HOUSE? That’s a moderation nightmare.
- Spoiler tags in posts. Ok, that can be OK, but again… getting people to use them. This can be a moderation nightmare, as well.
- Even if we did that, what about subjects? We could create a spoilers forum and make it so that threads automatically have [SPOILER] in their subject (not sure how we’d do that - some hack). But, even then, what if it is “[SPOILER] House dies in Episode 78″? We could make it (again, some hack, no idea how - but this is getting awfully complex) so that threads in that forum don’t show up in ANY searches, except for staff members, I suppose… otherwise, trying to moderate thread titles is kind of a moderation nightmare (I need to stop saying that).
So, if anyone has any input, perhaps something I’m missing, that’d be great. Thanks.
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April 20th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Some people like spoilers (I do) and some people don’t. I think just having a clear policy on them will be good enough. The people who don’t like spoilers will complain loud enough to help catch what staff doesn’t. I do think you should allow spoilers, because if you don’t someone else will and lots of people do love spoilers. I think the spoiler tag for the forums and a clear policy is the best you can do. If you allow comments on blogs then I would suggest a "If you post a spoiler, please SAY SO" so people can avoid them if they want. I also think a spoiler only section in the forums is a good idea too.
Just make it friendly to both sides and then all you can do is your best to keep people using the system you create, whatever that may be.