Thoughts on a Spoiler Subpage

I suspect that the functionality is already there so if I went ahead and tried it everything should work. However I don't want to bring Wrath of Mod down upon myself for being so presumptuous as to create a subpage namespace all by myself. So here is a request for general consensus / is this allowed? / is this a good idea?

I was thinking of adding a trope to a work page but realized I couldn't think of a way to phrase it without it being a spoiler. The fact that it only takes effect in the last few chapters and is a notable plot point means that even associating the trope with the work is arguably a spoiler.

The thought crossed my mind that a good way to work around that would be to allow for a spoiler subpage for works. Then we could list all the plot twist tropes, the death tropes, the all whited out tropes, the self fulfilling spoilers, and everything on spoilered rotten there without accidentally ruining someone's experience with unexpected spoilers. That way if you go to the spoiler page it is on you for wanting to read spoilers.

The downside that I would be worried about is that I wouldn't want it to divert every single spoiler away from the main page, I was really only thinking of a place for major story changing spoilers to exist with the work. Minor spoilers should stay where they already are.

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The idea of having a folder on the work page dedicated for spoilers was discussed a few years ago and shot down; I doubt having a dedicated Spoilers subpage is going to fare much better.

The problem with a spoiler subpage is that people won't realize that tropes are on it instead of the main article, and will try to add them. Anyway, who decides what's a spoiler?

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The same people who decide now, the tropers.

If you were following Self Fulfilling Spoiler and Spoilered Rotten you might decide that a trope shouldn't be on the main page, and this would give a secondary location that was safer to list them. As a subpage it wouldn't matter a whole lot if a work has one or not (most works don't have every available subpage). But it doesn't sound like there is much interest either way so I will just write it off as a random thought.

edited 12th Nov '17 7:55:46 PM by Daefaroth

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I also think this is a bad idea. However, I'd like to add something concerning who these pages are for.

While work pages are created, maintained, and for fans of that work, work pages are not merely for fans. They are also for people who enjoy tropes.

• This is one reason why examples require context, even though most fans may already know the necessary context for a given example.
• Moreover, readers learning about a trope may go through the examples list and decide that Work X looks interesting and they may click through the wick to read our article on that work. Whether or not the reader cares about being spoiled for, say Kingdom Hearts coded or The Gods Must Be Crazy would depend on the reader's own — unpredictable — preferences.
• Plus, there are plenty of people who keep "Show Spoilers" on at all times unless they don't want to be spoiled.

I just don't see a useful point in having a separate page for spoilers. I think we already do enough to protect readers from spoilers. I mean, we more often than not go overboard with the spoiler markup...

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

There are spoiler tropes just like YMMV trope, examples would be Death Tropes or Ending Tropes. Every trope that gets the spoiler tag would go in the spoiler tab as well as those tropes could get a warning up top that the examples are spoilers and should be treated as such.

As of right now we have entire sections of pages and character pages that are literally blanket spoilers from top to bottom.

Thank you, that is what I was trying to get at. I'm not suggesting that every trope that has a spoiler should be put on a spoiler tab. Rather any trope that is so self-fulfilling as a spoiler that you wouldn't even put it on the main page could be vented to a spoiler tab.

As an example, let's pretend we still were worried about spoilers on The Empire Strikes Back.

The following tropes would most likely need to be taken off the main page: The Bad Guy Wins, Downer Ending, and obviously Luke, I Am Your Father.

Now think about other spoiler heavy works; horror movies, detective novels, many M. Night Shyamalan or Christopher Nolan works. I'm not saying this is the greatest idea since sliced bread. Frankly I'm not even convinced it is an okay idea. As I mentioned above, and has shown to be true in this thread, I am concerned that people will come to the incorrect conclusion that anything that has a spoiler on it should be removed from the main page when I was only thinking of whole plot level spoilers when I suggested it.

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Yeah.

Basically tropes filed under various indexes that are spoilers, akin to YMMV tropes. Ending Tropes, Death Tropes, Twist Tropes, and so on.

It would be decided on a case-by-case basis. A certain trope could be a complete spoiler on one work and not a spoiler at all in another.

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I like the idea, especially for those cases where the trope itself is an inherent spoiler. There is of course the problem of it being put back on the main page by someone who didn't check though, not sure how that could be avoided. Does anyone know why the subfolder idea was shot down?

I missed the part where that's my problem.

Help me, what are the most popular scenarios of someone browsing through a trope list of a work they haven't consumed? I don't remember this ever happen to me.

They've started consuming the work but haven't finished it yet.

Mind you, getting spoilers isn't 100 percent a bad thing, given what Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt have said on the matter. There's also this other article on Psychology Today and a link to the study itself in case you're curious.

My point being that there's not a huge concern — or at least a valid concern — about spoiling people. We shouldn't go to extremes to "protect" people from spoilers.

edited 8th Feb '18 8:16:19 AM by WaterBlap

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

Fair enough. There's one question I still have: Why the policy to not spoiler tag trope names in example lists? That would avoid discussions like these.

To quote from Handling Spoilers, possibly the same reason why potholes and wicks are discouraged from being hidden behind spoiler tags:

There's also the point that hiding a spoiler name gives absolutely no context to the reader, so they can only guess what's being hidden behind spoiler tags.

I have viewed pages to see if its the type of show I would want to watch or game I would like to play then the pages are filled with spoiler trope names then blanket spoilered. Entries like Dead All Along, Bittersweet Ending, The Hero Dies, Luke, I Am Your Father, Inverted Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending just sitting there on the page and even putting those on the page are MASSIVE spoilers. (Can you guess the game?)

edited 8th Feb '18 8:32:15 PM by Memers

^^ That's it? Looks like technical problems at the time and should be reviewed.

^ Why would you consult a work page to see if it's any good for you? I prefer rating systems like on IM Db to do the job.

edited 9th Feb '18 2:33:19 AM by eroock

Some people naturally prefer knowing what kind of tropes are in a work (or not in) than what some unknown people think about the overall quality. Personally I think rating systems are crap. Reviews usually work better, but are crapshoot whether they contain spoilers.

Sometimes you just happen to get to a page for edit reasons rather than any specific interest, which may lead to such interest or away quell any potential interest from appearing at all because of spoilers.

I don't think anyone should have to justify reading a work or trope page without full knowledge of the work.

A research study like that is about an average effect of spoilers. Calling it invalid to be concerned about spoilers is misunderstanding the entire study, and it dismisses a lot of people's actual opinions. It's like seeing a rating of 3/5 and assuming everyone will think it's mediocre.

I don't think we should go to extremes to protect people from spoilers, but I also don't think we should be careless about them. That's just inconsiderate and rude.

Personally I'd prefer some kind of organisation for tropes (plot tropes, setting tropes, game mechanic tropes, etc., and we already have character tropes on a separate page), which would probably include spoiler tropes.

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Being good or bad isn’t what you should be looking for at tv tropes. It’s best used for objective elements in a series of a game imo and there are some tropes that are just no sells or must buys for me, especially video game gameplay tropes and reviews don’t do shit most of the time. Also Wiki Walking.

So skimming through the pages helps but not when an unspoilered The Hero Dies is directly on the trope list with everything else.

Hell I bought MS Saga A New Dawn based on our tv tropes page, people might hate the game but I ended up loving it.

edited 9th Feb '18 4:19:06 AM by Memers

I'm obviously not calling the concern itself to be invalid, but the idea that all spoilers need to be put on a separate page because it's "just that important." It isn't that important and it isn't that damaging.

If I was saying "being concerned about spoilers" is invalid, don't you think I would have argued to do away with spoiler markup?

I'm still in favor of a spoiler-trope folder on the main work page. But apparently that was shut down a while back.

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

I'd be in favor of a spoiler subpage(to go with the YMMV page). Actually, I vaguely remember suggesting one a few years ago, only to have the idea shot down.

I think one of the arguments against was that people wouldn't know which spoilers would go on the spoiler page. There was also a question of (for long-running series), what part of the story the spoilers would be for. Perhaps something is a big twist early on, but over time it becomes It Was His Sled.

If there were a spoiler subpage, I'd save it for the biggest twists, and those tropes whose very presence on the page count as spoilers regardless of the context. Some tropes could be kept on the main page under spoiler tags.

The spoiler subpage would also help to solve the issue of pages so full of twists that they need to forego spoiler tags altogether - the worst offending spoiler tropes could then be shunted to the spoiler page.

edited 10th Feb '18 1:21:35 AM by Wyvernil

The spoiler subpage would for

• spoiler tropes indexed under Spoilered Rotten
• Ending Tropes,
• Plot Twist tropes and it’s subindexes Betrayal Tropes, Family Twists Index, Index All Along, Movie Twist List, Twist Ending
• Death Tropes

imo. All already neatly organized in indexes.

edited 10th Feb '18 4:48:28 AM by Memers

Spoiler subpages are overkill. Either allow trope names to be spoiler tagged (and fix the hoovering issues) or leave as is.

We don't need to separate spoilers. It fucks with organization (what do you do with YMMV and Character pages if we go the subpage route?) and people should know better, especially since tons of pages are already plastered with spoiler warnings.

edited 10th Feb '18 5:11:23 PM by Karxrida

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

Honestly, I've never seen the issue about hovering over the spoiler text. Why are you doing that if you don't want to read it in the first place? And it's such a small area of the screen that you don't really do it accidentally. Now, if it's visible through some colour settings (which I believe is an issue on some subpages) then that's just bad page design which should be fixed regardless.

"People should know better" is a bad argument. It's dismissive of mistakes and ignores that some people just don't think like you do. What they should know is irrelevant. What they actually know is relevant.

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We do not spoiler trope names on pages.

• The Hero Dies : text

Is how it goes.

None of the spoiler tropes are YMMV I think but if there are they would go on the YMMV page in the same way character tropes like The Scrappy go on the YMMV pages.