When even separating a forum is not enough.

[Aspiring Writer]

Okay, I refuse to see spoilers, and the RoW thread and previews are included in that, so I am fairly grateful to how Chaos and the staff handle it, and yet, there are still a few slip-ups that happen that are really annoying. The one currently on my mind is when you hover over a person's name, you see what topic they're looking at, but you don't know what forum that's in, so when you see an interesting title, you may click on it and not realize that it's on the spoiler thread and you read the post until you bother to look up and see you're in the forbidden forum. Which is always a little sad when you have successfully avoided spoilers for over two months. So what similar problems have come up with avoiding spoilers, and what solutions are there to these problems? My solution to mine would be to highlight the topic name in another color to warn it's in a spoiler thread and you shouldn't click on it.

Edited November 9, 2020 by Aspiring Writer

[Honorless he/him]

That's true. Someone else got spoiled because they visited my profile and  my comments in the spoiler forums are visible in my profile. This one I'm not sure if anything can be done about.

[Ghanderflaffle she/her]

I did get spoiled for Dawnshard, but it was my own fault because I’m too used to clicking spoiler boxes. I finished the book an hour later anyways. But I do get where you are coming from.

[Kings_way he/they]

One person I follow has been posting in Dawnshard forums, so I had to unfollow them before they posted in a topic with a really spoilery title. 

[Voidspawn he/him]

@Kings_way do you have Dawnshard so you can read it for yourself yet?

[Kings_way he/they]

1 hour ago, Voidspawn said:

@Kings_way do you have Dawnshard so you can read it for yourself yet?

no, but I plan to get it soon

[Aspiring Writer]

I did not expect people to actually post in this thread. 

5 hours ago, Honorless said:

That's true. Someone else got spoiled because they visited my profile and  my comments in the spoiler forums are visible in my profile. This one I'm not sure if anything can be done about.

Maybe there can be an option for people that any threads in the spoiler forum to be blacked out? So you can't actually read the text? Maybe?

[Chaos he/him]

There are currently not programmatic ways to do these. We try to do our best, but this is as good as we can do, unfortunately. This is not a typical forum use case to have such strong spoiler policies. 

I would strongly recommend active users of the forum to read new books. The internet is a spoiler machine  We do the best we can though.

[Aspiring Writer]

In my defense, RoW wasn't even out when I read the spoiler, sooo...

And yeah, I'm aware of restrictions that would prevent these solutions, I just thought we could pitch them cause I did get spoiled and thought maybe there could be a way to prevent it, and I'm sure there idiots like me who have similar stories. Thanks for responding.

[Ba-Ado-Fisherman]

Just read the book before coming on to any forums.  Slip ups happen, and most times it's completely accidental.  You're taking a risk by reading anything on forums dedicated to Cosmere books if you haven't read everything.

[Aspiring Writer]

15 hours ago, ShalladinForever said:

Just read the book before coming on to any forums.  Slip ups happen, and most times it's completely accidental.  You're taking a risk by reading anything on forums dedicated to Cosmere books if you haven't read everything.

Bit unfair considering the book hasn't been out for a month and I use the Shard for other purposes. I avoid going anywhere that has spoilers, but clicking someone's profile and seeing the top post that has to do with RoW and/or reading a very suggestive topic name is hard to avoid.

Edited November 30, 2020 by Aspiring Writer

[Guest Somebody from Scadrial]

15 hours ago, ShalladinForever said:

Just read the book before coming on to any forums.  Slip ups happen, and most times it's completely accidental.  You're taking a risk by reading anything on forums dedicated to Cosmere books if you haven't read everything.

Like Aspire said, it hasn't been out for a month and Christmas is soon, that's two reasons to not have the book yet.

[Orlion Blight he/him]

I remember looking up a Coppermind article to refresh my memory and lo and behold, the first sentence was a major RoW spoiler. 

The warnings on top of the article don't help if the spoiler is still instantly visible, guys! 

Of course, I "don't believe in spoilers" so it didn't ruin my enjoyment, but it would certainly bum out others doing what I was doing (refreshing my mind).

Going forward, I think the Coppermind should not change its articles with new content until the spoiler period ends on the 17th Shard. 

[Chaos he/him]

7 hours ago, Ooklara said:

I remember looking up a Coppermind article to refresh my memory and lo and behold, the first sentence was a major RoW spoiler. 

The warnings on top of the article don't help if the spoiler is still instantly visible, guys! 

Of course, I "don't believe in spoilers" so it didn't ruin my enjoyment, but it would certainly bum out others doing what I was doing (refreshing my mind).

Going forward, I think the Coppermind should not change its articles with new content until the spoiler period ends on the 17th Shard. 

The spoiler period of nine months is quite a long time, and that would put the Coppermind very much behind. (It's funny, even just days after release, there were also complaints that things weren't updated.) Release time is the time where people are most excited to edit, and preventing editing for so long would be very difficult to enforce. It is extremely impractical.

Regardless, we do realize that we could do better on Coppermind spoilers rather than our usual policy which we have done in the last decade, especially the one you're referring to. We have done much more with that now. Check out this article where I explain more, which describes more things: 

Edited December 15, 2020 by Chaos

[Knight of Iron she/they]

22 hours ago, Ooklara said:

The warnings on top of the article don't help if the spoiler is still instantly visible, guys! 

Not sure when this was done, but with the addition of the Time Machine and everything I've noticed that when you first visit the Coppermind the entire page will be blurred out and a very serious warning/pop-up will come up informing you of just how spoilery everything is. Proceed at your own risk stuff.