Major spoiler tropes and works pages

The problem I have with "white out as little as possible" is that it ignores that spoilers are supposed to be crafted so that the remaining sentence would still make sense even if the spoilered text was removed completely.

(Admittedly, a lot of the spoilers on the non-character pages for TWD need work in that regard, but that's a project for another day. )

edited 4th Dec '13 7:46:39 PM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

I see nothing on the Spoiler Policy page saying that, and it doesn't make sense anyway. If you insist on pretending whited out text doesn't exist, then you get weird situations that look inane. For example, whiting out just a name of a character (and leaving the rest of the line untouched) is a good minimalist approach to handling spoilers. If spoiler text doesn't exist, then you've got just got a bunch of randomly blank spots in the sentence.

So what are you even saying here? Seriously, I just don't get it. Give me some examples.

If it's obvious by the context what the text is but not its specifics it's fine. Reading it as, "In episode 11 [name removed] dies," works well.

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Okay, sorry I got a little snippy there, I just thought he was saying that didn't, when it's pretty much the textbook example of what we're supposed to do.

I could have sworn it was said somewhere that spoilers should be written so the sentence makes sense without the hidden text, but the closest I can find to that (searching ATT and on the spoiler policy page) is from the fourth bullet point on Handling Spoilers:

Which isn't the same thing, I know.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

I was saying that, earlier in this thread. Leaving a bunch of holes in a sentence doesn't make any sense to me.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I think the intent is more that if at all possible, the example should work as an example even with the spoiler text hidden. Take this example from the page for Goldeneye:

• Disproportionate Retribution: "A worldwide financial meltdown, and all so mad little Alec can settle a grudge with the British Government fifty years old."

For those of you not familiar with the film, the real identity of the Big Bad is kept a secret for almost half the movie—that's what's being hidden here. (More than just his name is hidden, since hiding just the name is an indirect spoiler via spoiler length.) Nevertheless, the example is entirely functional: the spoiler-text section is clearly hiding a character name, which allows the sentence to be parsed; the severity of the retribution is made explicit; and enough detail is given to show just how much overkill this is.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Is anything lost doing it without the spoiling information?

• "A worldwide financial meltdown, and all so the Big Bad can settle a grudge with the British Government fifty years old."

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Now am I in the right place? Or do I need to go back to the namespace thread? (The following talks of both spoilered-out trope names and namespaces.) Anyway...

As far as I could tell from a certain discussion on ATT, it is forbidden to spoiler out trope names. However, there's still a bunch of pages with spoilered-out trope names even so. Considering that there are some films or TV shows where spoilers will be unavoidable, especially when there are those of the bipedal type, may I propose a Spoilers namespace for anything with an excessive amount of spoilers?

edited 8th Dec '13 1:49:17 AM by ryanasaurus0077

That seems to be the same thing as adding a folder to hide the spoilers (which is rejected by the mods and admin).

In this case, one could rewrite it to just say "the Big Bad" or "Janus" (the identity the character is known as in the first half of the movie), but you'd have to rewrite the example since that's a direct quote from the movie.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Ah, no character was cited, so it wasn't clear that it was a quotation.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I wish to propose a solution to the major spoiler trope issue that to my mind would be simple to use and consistent with extant Wiki syntax and semantics, and wouldn't force users to shift between more namespaces than they already do.

It would work as follows: after a [[spoilercontrol]] tag (which would produce a tab similar to the folder control tab that would toggle between "hide major spoilers" or "show major spoilers"), bullet points marked with the [[majorspoiler]] tag would be automatically shown or hidden (probably easy to implement in JavaScript) depending on the spoiler control. The default would be to keep major spoilers hidden, but could be changed to show major spoilers in the user's settings.

Hmm ... how does that work with respect to non-logged in readers? I don't see it.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

"Hmm ... how does that work with respect to non-logged in readers?"

They would just have to click on the "show major spoilers" tab, like logged-in readers who didn't have that as their default setting.

The trouble is that the folder still glitches on occasion. That isn't immediately obvious if the hidden tropes are further down the page.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

"may I propose a Spoilers namespace"

This is not a good idea. TV Tropes exists to list and catalogue tropes, not to hide them. It would involve extra coding and make the website harder to use for logged-in users and non-logged in users alike.

BTW, I did a little experiment the other day—accessed the wiki on my iphone, which was not logged in to TV Tropes, and attempted to view spoilered info. I could not do it. The Apple touch way of highlighting things—hold your finger to the screen to get a highlight window, then drag it to highlight the whole area you want—did not reveal the spoilered information. The more spoiler tags you use, the less well the wiki works.

For the record, that's an iPhone issue. Works fine on Android.

Well, I never use my iphone for this wiki anyway, which was why I wasn't logged in. Still, the thing to remember is that use of spoiler tropes is going to make the wiki less readable and less useful for a non-zero amount of users. We should work towards using fewer spoiler tags, not more, and we definitely should not be creating new namespaces.

Not for Droid Motorola MAXX, with the most recent updates. I have spoilers off, so only YKTTW is affected, and I can highlight just fine on computers, so I ignore the bug.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

It's been over a year, and I still think the spoiler-hiding mechanism I suggested in 238 is a good idea, though the markup syntax might be done differently with the new wiki code to come—which will hopefully get rid of the lame objection that our existing folder markup doesn't work anyway.

At this point, it would be redundant, because we have the spoiler toggle off to the left. It's basically the same thing, but easier on everyone.