Not really a high priority, but I was wondering how hard it would be to include one of those "spoiler" tag thingies, so that you can include hidden text in your post that only shows if the reader decides to expand it.

Why?

The thought came to me while I was looking at the Watchmen thread in Off-Topic. That's mainly where it'd be useful, for movie/book discussions, which is also why it's not a high priority for the site. Could also sometimes be handy for some RPG discussion, though, e.g., if people are giving examples from modules and such.

I've seen it used most in gaming threads with module descriptions, or if someone is posting a large block of semi-meaningful text that most folks might not want to read (like stats for a character or monster).

It's not a priority, but I'll keep it in mind.

Its useful when discussing movies or tv shows that others might not have seen yet. BTW the site rebuild looks pretty nice, good job.

So-called 'spoilers' have never bothered me in recent years. I figure seeing the visual version on a screen is going to be pretty different than reading about it in a text version.

Plus, in recent years moviemakers and even some TV shows have gotten pretty good at blowing our socks off visually - most text descriptions of such things fail to capture what is happening on the screen , so they aren't much of a spoiler.


Amyway - with WATCHMEN , that thing has been available for browsing and reading for close to 20 years now. Nothing can be 'spoiled' with that.
Haven't read it by now? Where have you been?

Almost the same thing with DARK KNIGHT- anyone who was really "into it" saw it between opening day and today.

This all reminds me if the person who complained that HAMLET was 'ruined' for him because someone told him ahead of time that Hamlet dies at the end.


- Ed C.

All good points, Ed, but with e.g. Watchmen it's one thing to have read it, enjoyed (or not) the plot twists in the context of an actual narrative, and then see the movie, quite another to be told the just key plot twists before viewing a movie version.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised at how well The Crying Game stood up even though I knew about "that". (Plus my wife, who'd never heard anything about the movie, could tell that * was a * from the word "go".)

Spoiler blocks would be more useful than spoiler tags, especially in sig blocks.  It's fairly rampant over at ENWorld, but they have about fifteen banners with their M:tG colour, their geek rating, what kind of hobbit they would be, twenty or thirty lines about 4e, and whole quote blocks in their sigs.  Most here are quite conservative about what goes in their sig, so it would likely not have an immediate impact, and it is already limited to 500 characters or something.

This would only apply to the appearance, of course, it wouldn't really decrease server load, so from a bandwidth perspective, it wouldn't help.  With spoiler blocks, the sig limit could be loosened, unless it is already in place for bandwidth conservation.

Also, they would be useful for large-ish blocks of parenthetical information.  Dropping a whole table or character sheet into a post can be distracting, but the reader could go back, pop open the spoiler, then go back to reading as necessary.