Don't mention major spoilers in this thread please.
This thread is for any question, idea, complaint, etc. you have about spoilers. Spoilers are a perennial topic here and a problem without a perfect solution.
Don't mention major spoilers in this thread please.
This thread is for any question, idea, complaint, etc. you have about spoilers. Spoilers are a perennial topic here and a problem without a perfect solution.
I have always, always been against specific spoiler warnings and have removed quite a few which I thought were surplus over the years. In fact, I raised the topic some long time ago for the very reason that the proliferation of spoiler warnings when I first started using this Wiki was a nuisance. There is a difference though between spoiler-free and spoiler friendly. There is no need to put major spoilers in the intro section of a character. The important thing is that readers are able to find all the information they are looking for and presenting it in a book by book lay-out makes the Wiki spoiler-friendly (NOT spoiler-free) as well as providing the researcher with the timeline of the characters emergence in the books which in itself is information which is of interest to many readers. If it was up to me, all spoiler warnings would go and instead a careful approach with a 'do not reveal spoilers ahead of time' would be implemented. But, I can live with the odd ones as long as they only get used for very major, major stuff, like the death of WJ and Rake - not for example, as on the Scillara page, to announce 'and they lived happily ever after' *arghhhhh...*
There should not be a need for complicated technical solutions as long as some simple guidelines are adhered to. If we do our bit and present the information in book sequence with any history section at the bottom rather than at the top of the page, then it is the readers responsibility not to stroll beyond a book heading they have not yet read as far as I am concerned. Those who do will likely also peak behind any show/hide curtain in any case!
Any product, to be successful, needs to answers the expectations of the potential consumer. Having identified that there are two different groups of users, new readers who might avoid the Wiki if they find spoilers and re-readers who want everything in a nutshell, if we can provide a good service to both, the Wiki will be that much more successful. Currently, anytime a new reader asks questions on reddit, someone will post a warning about using this Wiki saying they will inadvertently come across major spoilers. The tide is slowly changing with others saying that they found it helpful and that they did not get any major spoilers as they were careful not to go beyond the books they had read. I have never yet seen anyone complain that they did not get told about a characters history in the first paragraph. That in itself is pretty indicative that spoiler-friendly lay-out is the more pressing need.
However, as a re-reader myself, in some cases, I would find a bullet point short page alternative useful (not imperative, but useful) to have. Bullet point character pages would just be another tool in the tool box. Similar to the DP/EDP. The Wiki would not change character by having them. There are in any case only a few characters whose timeline/life story is so convoluted that a second, condensed version sorted in time rather than book sequence would make sense. For those few, however, they would be a useful tool to have. And if that type of page does not exist on other Wikis... I, personally, would not compare ASOIF with the Malazan books (the latter being ten times more complex imho) and Wookieepedia is a different subject matter altogether.
Well, that ended up rather longer then intended. I could have said in a nutshell: I dislike spoiler warnings, I like spoiler-friendly lay-out, I believe you can never have too many tools as long as they are correctly grouped, labelled and easy to find.
Egwene
PS: the dying bit... no strong feelings either way. Have to admit to being a Philistine who never uses those info boxes to look up information. They make a page look good though :)
PPS: just looked at the Whirlwind Goddess page... I like the idea very much if there was an option that one could choose to turn it off site wide. If that was a possibility - wow - it would be a pretty elegant solution :)
To clarify, I am using an iPad and viewing the full site just as if I were on a PC. You can highlight text, but it just puts a shade of blue on top of the blocked out spoiler text. It works the same way on every site/forum where I've seen the spoiler font technique used.
Yeah, I got your meaning. As I understand it at this point Safari is on the verge of becoming the worst browser (even behind IE). I tested on Opera and Firefox (which is what I have installed on my phone) and it works for both of them (although Opera's behaviour is not ideal).
Sorry, but if only Safari has this problem then the fault is Safari's.
I was about to write something but Egwene said what I had in mind in her first 2 paragraphs. A spoiler-free site would be close to useless, but the more spoiler-friendly we become, the more people will rely on us for info. It's important to consider what people respond to. On Reddit, there have been frequent comments like, "Avoid the Wiki. There are spoilers everywhere." Egwene's announcement of the New readers zone was very popular, as was a comment she had made earlier about working toward a spoiler-friendly site. Andorion's announcement on the Spoiler-friendly fan art gallery has been stickied ever since he posted it, 3 months ago.
re. Dropdowns: They are wonderful. Two points:
re. Info boxes: I definitely support removing death info (some include how as well as when). Since Info boxes appear beside the Intro section, they seem safe to the new reader. In my first read, I forced myself to stop looking at them because of death info. An example: Murillio (Fortunately there's no death info in Murillio's Info box—just using him as an example) Even though he's not a major character, it would still be really disappointing for someone reading GotM to see a death entry in his Info box.
Edit: Experimentally added "Spoiler protection" to the show/hide link on Whirlwind Goddess. Remove it if you don't like it. :)
Regarding this spoiler argument, I think things are better than what we may think.
As I saw and as has been pointed out, a lot of very very popular wikis - Game of Thrones, Star Wars don't really have coherent spoiler policies. We do.
Our current policy of book by book divisions with Spoiler heading above major stuff is easy to implement and quite effective. Where we lag behind is implementation and that is being overcome every day.
I think the idea about removing death info from the infobox is great and needs to implemented ASAP. No point in spoiler warnings if we have that.
So this brings us to the dropdown box issue. Technically speaking how complex is the code? If its not too difficult and if it doesn't have Apple issues we could make that our new policy. But if the code is too complex I don't think all editors would be able to use it
Just to be clear, we are talking about adding the dropdowns as a replacement for the Spoiler Alert banners, aren't we? It's not something that would be added to every section of every page, is it? o_O
Whether spoiler alert or show/hide... I hope we can all agree that ideally pages are laid out in such a way that extra alerts will only be needed in extreme cases.
For the drop-down version on the Whirlwind Goddess page, I have altered the 'show/hide' bit to 'show or hide' and 'show / hide' respectively. On my screen the two words were pretty meshed together when using normal font size and slash with no spacing. See what you think.
I had a play with the collapser on the Bellurdan page. It seems to me that there is no reason that we can't use it for individual sentences rather than the whole paragraph. Looking at the formula... is there any reason that the book has to be referenced in the template? It does not seem to make any difference here or there what abbreviation is used in the template (or I did not spot it). Also - would it be possible to create a shortcut template a la ref brackets behind which the long code could hide? That would make using it easy. I have also played with the wording of the 'click here' part. See what you think of the different versions.
I removed red spoiler overlays from Anomander. They didn't seem to work very well.
The collapsible windows work much better. We are trying to get all spoilers out of the Intro sections & the windows will work well for the other sections.
re. Spoiler collapser buttons in oasis. The buttons are really hard to read because there's hardly any contrast in the brightness of the text color vs button background color. I tried making the text white, but it made the monobook toggle text white :p Is there a way to make the monobook & oasis text colors settings independent of each other?