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I strongly believe that such a move would stop people from reading and posting to the board. I the majority are told that they'll actively have to go out of their way to avoid spoilers, purely because a couple of people are incapable of holding it in for seven days, I don't think many of them would bother any more. I'm not sure I would, anyway, and I certainly wouldn't want to be a moderator in a forum that treated spoiler-filled threads as the norm.
And when you get right down to it, is it really that much of an issue? I can't help feeling that this is all a bit ridiculous - there are the Lost threads, there are the Doctor Who threads, but where else has this been such a problem that we should now be seriously talking about turning one of the basic principles of netiquette on its head?
Except, in the case of the original 'New Doctor Who' thread - my original thread was clearly marked from the get-go as cointaining spoilers from the very beginning. The thread was then high-jacked by non-spoiler people once the broadcasts began.
Well, Haus already covered this to an extent when he said that your opening post made the thread sound more like the spoilers it contained were only going to be concerning the very first episode. "So you've seen the first episode before it's screened and you want to talk about it," or something like that. I think it's also true to say that it was then some weeks before pre-broadcast spoilers for subsequent episodes began to be posted, which is why most people had come to treat it as a non-spoilers thread - really, if it was intended to be a spoilers thread througout the series that should have been made clear and there should have been more of an effort on the part of those interested in seeing it proceed in that manner to make that happen, rather than just abandoning it for weeks before suddenly reappearing with unanounced and entirely unexpected excitement-ruining material.
In an effort to try and clear this up once and for all, this is how I saw things pan out (adapted from a PM I sent to one of the relevant parties at the time):
The word 'spoilers' was removed from the original thread through a mod action initiated by me, just after I posted the request that spoilers be marked as such. Up until that point they hadn't and that was what was causing the problems, as far as I could tell - the word being present in the title seemed to be the reason why some weren't warning about the contents of their posts, which was why others were getting riled. I figured that altering the title would help to ensure that some form of warning was given in those posts that were spoiler-heavy.
I didn't actually have any idea that Haus had been trying to get the abstract altered - I must not have been around while those actions were being put forwards.
The Who thread has been a massive frustration for me, because it's something that's never happened here in the past. We've never had to deal with the issue of members of the board who are associated with the press posting specific details about plots from episodes that they've seen on preview tapes before.
As I read it, the original purpose of the thread was to discuss the first episode, and the first episode only, spoiler-fashion. I'm fairly sure that's how virtually everybody else saw it, too, which is why the number of people posting to it suddenly increased once it had officially aired. Up until recently, Cube's 'spoilers' weren't *actually* spoilers - they were more hints than anything else. As such, they weren't that big of a deal. That changed slightly when he started making direct references to the actions of characters who were at least two episodes away from even being introduced, which is what caused the relative flood of complaints - I haven't bothered counting it up, but a significant proportion of the people taking part in the thread voiced their anger at that. And I agree with them - I think that this was a little out of order. There was no way that anyone other than the two or three people who'd got to see the shows weeks in advance could even get involved in theorising about future plotlines with him.
So that was why I put the topic title up for moderation, figuring that as long as spoiler warnings were given in the posts, everything should be fine. Then Six’s post popped up, the one that I set up the new spoilers-only thread with. That post doesn’t appear to be speculation at all, as he claims, but instead bears all the hallmarks of a complete plot synopsis. The trailer for next week’s episode only serves to reinforce this suspicion. That’s taking spoilers to a ridiculous extreme, in my opinion, and it really wasn’t fair on the non-spoiler crowd that a post *that* detailed should be there to be tripped over by accident. And when it comes right down to it, he could – and probably should – have simply linked to the original source, rather than posting the entire thing verbatim.
So the removal of 'spoilers' from the original thread's title and the starting of a new spoilers thread were individual events, and the first of them was never intended to be a doorway to the second.
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