History Administrivia / SelfFulfillingSpoiler

A Self-Fulfilling Spoiler is the particularly aggravating practice of using spoiler tags that make it quite clear what they're concealing by their length, their position, or the wording of the surrounding sentence. Because of this, you can easily guess what's behind the tag, which of course defeats the entire point of using them at all. Even if the reader can't tell the specifics, they can tell enough that there's ''something'' spoilery there.

* '''Don't spoiler tag the work's title.''' The name of the work is the most important part of the example. It would be impossible to even ''know'' if the reader can safely read the rest of the example if they don't know where the example is from.

* '''Be careful with {{Gender Reveal}}s.''' Spoiler-tagging a pronoun is almost guaranteed to lead to the reader picking up on the idea that the character's gender is [[SamusIsAGirl not what they originally thought]]. This is a tricky one, because even if you rephrase the example without using spoiler tags at all -- for instance, by using the "singular they" -- readers may pick up on what you're doing. Consider focusing on the event rather than a character -- for instance, changing "the time [[spoiler:her]] arm was injured" to "the arm injury".

* '''Avoid short names.''' In some works, only a few characters have names that short, so it's easy to guess who they are. If you say, "in ''Literature/HarryPotter'', [[spoiler:Ron]] does something that's a really big spoiler", if you're at all familiar with the work, you can probably guess that it's [[spoiler:Ron]] because no other major character has a name short enough to fit in a spoiler box that size. This is even worse when you have a character with a OneLetterName. To make the name harder to guess, try using the character's full name (''e.g.'' [[spoiler:Ron Weasley]]) or adding a brief description of the character's role (''e.g.'' [[spoiler:Harry's friend Ron]]).

* '''Don't even mention ''Theatre/TheMousetrap'' -- it's a special case.''' It's a play that [[DoNotSpoilThisEnding swears its audience to secrecy]] as to the culprit, and throughout the wiki we have obliged and refuse to spoil it. But if you put a reference to it on a page, even if it's under spoiler tags, that might give too much of a hint. If you're really curious, go to Wiki/TheOtherWiki; we won't help you.

Part of this comes from the fact that using spoiler tags is an art, and it takes some practice to know ''which'' words should be spoilered. For example, let's take the trope LukeIAmYourFather and its [[TropeNamer trope-naming example]], which is good for demonstration because the details have [[ItWasHisSled long since been spoiled]].