Violations of the Spoiler Policy

Kara no Shoujo have a serious case of Spoiler Policy violation, especially for the second game — almost every single text there (save for the Trope names) are spoiler tagged.

Would it help if the second game was split onto its own page?

I'm actually not sure which of those entries actually qualify as "spoilers", since I haven't played the second game and it's been years since I played the first.

Personally, I'd rather just strip the whole spoiler tags there, but that's just me being a Spoiler Hound, and others might not agree.

The second novel is (at least) a year old, so everything being a spoiler doesn't make the least bit of sense to me. I say, since it's rather obscure and I doubt someone with knowledge of it would just come around (unless asking in ATT is a viable option?), that it should get the "'here there be unmarked spoilers for the second novel' tag and spoiler-stripping" treatment.

Well, for the moment, I've "hidden" the trope entries in separate folders and removed most of the spoiler tags. I've also commented out some ZCE and poorly-worded entries, but that's an entirely different matter.

Regarding an entry on Awesome.How It Should Have Ended describing the time HISHE Superman and Batman appeared at end of one of The Nostalgia Critic's reviews, how necessary does it seem to obscure the name of the specific review?

IMHO it kills any context the example has.

I thought it seemed even worse originally-The person who first added it there also hid the name of the show!

And in any case, spoiler tagging the name of a work is not allowed, and that carries over to individual episode names if it's solely the episode name that's spoilered. For example, "Dumbledore's death in Half-Blood Prince" is not allowed. (Apologies to those of you who haven't finished Harry Potter yet, but it's been almost a decade.)

There is no rule against spoiler tagging the names of works. I know what you are referring to, but the actual rule is more specific than that. From Handling Spoilers:

To paraphrase, the rule is "do not tag the name of the work in a trope's example's list," not "do not tag work names, period."

edited 5th Feb '15 7:22:10 AM by MyTimingIsOff

Whatever the rule is, that's a so terribly formatted example to the point where it doesn't work to illustrate the point.

Not sure if this is a violation or not, which is why I take it here.

Recently, I removed the spoiler tags from a set of examples for some My Little Pony fanfic on Superpowered Evil Side, because they whited out entire paragraphs. I wrote an edit reason to the same effect ("Never put an entire paragraph in spoiler font") and recommended to either rewrite or delete the examples if they revealed too much.

My edit was reverted by the same troper who had put the spoiler tags there previously, edit reason: "All of these examples are massive spoilers for the series and should be treated as such. However, since they ARE examples, they should not be deleted." They also sent me a pm that says "Actually, I just read the Spoiler Rules. I did not break any of them."

I checked Handling Spoilers and found, to my surprise and also dismay, that there is indeed no rule against putting entire paragraphs in spoiler font. It appears that, as this

• Show: Example

is permitted, this is permitted too:

• Show:
  • Example 1
  • Example 2

Looks atrocious, but does not violate any rules. Is that correct?

edited 1st Mar '15 7:24:18 AM by LordGro

To me, this does in fact break the spoiler rules - the ones regarding readability and looking good. Eddie was a fan of deriving case-by-case judgments from very general guidelines.

I would love to agree with you, but here our policy page comes in. It has this to say about our hard-and-fast rules:

Then comes a horizontal line the purpose of which I do not actually understand, and then this:

If the rules above are the "the policy part" (and that's definitely being said here), then what follows is not policy. Not policy, not rules. It's just "something that bugs tropers who have an interest in making things look good".

What the page signals is: The three numbered rules are binding; the rest—everything below the first horizonal line—is just recommendations. "More what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." You can follow them if you like; but you don't have to. Some tropers—those "who have an interest in making things look good"—may have an issue with it, but if you aren't one of those people, then it's not your problem. As long as you stick to the three rules of the policy, it's fine.

Our policy page actually does permit Swiss cheese entries and paragraphs whited-out entirely (the latter are not actually mentioned, by the way). It says they are ugly—so you might want to consider not making them—but they are permissible. And if I, as a wiki cleaner, want them gone, I will have to fix them myself (which I probably won't, because that would ultimately require me to read My Little Pony fanfics). Because the other troper is actually right: they did not break any of the rules.

edited 1st Mar '15 10:35:30 AM by LordGro

The "three rules" are bright line rules. The rest of the article covers "good style". Good style is not a bright line policy but it's not an optional extra.

There's two problems with that answer:

• What is "good style"? The thing is, Handling Spoilers should define what we consider "good style" in regards to spoiler tags. Because the tropers who put entire paragraphs in spoiler font already think they practice good style, and if I tell them what they do is ugly, the answers that I am bound to receive are variations on "does not look ugly to me". As I said above, Handling Spoilers only mentions Swiss Cheese entries as a thing "that bugs tropers who have an interest in making things look good". There's nothing said about all-white paragraphs, and they don't violate the three 'bright line' rules.
• You say that "good style is not an optional extra". But Handling Spoilers makes it sound like anything except the three hard rules is optional.

This whole passage is highly unsatisfactory. It says that Swiss-Cheese entries "look like crap", suggesting you might want to avoid them, but it also makes clear that this is "not policy". What does that even mean? Isn't this whole page supposed to be a policy page? If it is "not policy", isn't that saying that it is not binding? What else would it be saying but that?

As for the plea "Think about it", that is ultimately permitting everything. Because it leaves the issue to tropers' personal judgment, and if personal judgment says that Swiss Cheese entries and All White paragraphs are okay, then why should a troper take the trouble to avoid them?

I notice that until a year ago, Handling Spoilers said that "Under no circumstances cause the entire example to be in white font", and that's indeed the rule that, until recently, I believed was in effect. But actually Fast Eddie has changed that passage to "Under no circumstances cause the entire text of the example to be in white font, concealing the trope name." I don't know why he did this, but this expansion makes quite clear that "entire text" is to be read "including the trope". Which makes it equivalent to rule #1 and therefore redundant, but that's what it is saying. It also implies that whiting out everything except the trope name does not violate a rule.

Bottom line: A considerate reading of Handling Spoilers can only lead to the conclusion that all-white paragraphs are allowed, and that Swiss Cheese entries are not popular with everybody but are not really forbidden either. If this is not the intended message, then the page needs fixing.

edited 18th Mar '15 1:41:42 PM by LordGro

Knowing Eddie, I suspect he changed it because he didn't think spelling it out was necessary.

Did you see the page before? It was a mess. Maybe reducing it to the three rules was overkill, but Eddie tends to go crazy with the axe on pages that need weeding.

The point is that it's much more clear now. Things like tagging entire paragraphs is not actual against the rules. Sorry, not much else we can do. Typically, what I do is fix the big blocks, then PM the person who put it there in the first place and show them the difference. "See? Just make a few word choice changes, and all you need to do is conceal one or two names, then the rest can remain uncovered." But since it's not actually against the rules, you can't make them do anything.

Fast Eddie was of the opinion that an all-white was superior to swiss-cheese.

That's not what I mean. I mean that this:

• Big Bad Friend: Bob Darklordington fights beside the heroes for the entire series, quietly laughing as they try to discover his identity, only for them to discover it moments after his plan comes to fruition.

is worse than:

• Big Bad Friend: Bob Darklordington fights beside the heroes for the entire series, quietly laughing as they try to discover his identity, only for them to discover it moments after his plan comes to fruition.

I said that Fast Eddie considers this acceptable practice:

• Big Bad Friend: Bob Darklordington fights beside the heroes for the entire series, quietly laughing as they try to discover his identity, only for them to discover it moments after his plan comes to fruition.

Eddie considered

• Big Bad Friend: Bob Darklordington fights beside the heroes for the entire series, quietly laughing as they try to discover his identity, only for them to discover it moments after his plan comes to fruition.

acceptable , barely, and only in comparison to

• Big Bad Friend: Bob Darklordington fights beside the heroes for the entire series, quietly laughing as they try to discover his identity, only for them to discover it moments after his plan comes to fruition.

That second one is a "swiss cheese" spoiler and is not acceptable. The first one is better, but still not good.

Best practice: rewrite so it's not a spoiler:

• Big Bad Friend: One character fights beside the heroes for the entire series, quietly laughing as they try to discover his identity, only for them to discover it moments after his plan comes to fruition.

edited 18th Mar '15 7:44:24 PM by Madrugada

I have some questions about some entries I recently added to AwesomeMusic.Guardians Of The Galaxy:

• For "O-O-H Child", did I really need to keep the context of the song in spoiler tags?
• For "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", should I hide the title?

Ultron and Ant-Man both violate the rule about not hiding anything above the Examples section in spoiler tags (I admit responsibility for the latter), but I don't know how to fix it without completely removing the information.

It's not necessary to give out the conclusion (or similarly important event) in a list of works. Remove it.