Me... Metafilter has spoiler tags now?
December 22, 2019 11:57 PM - Subscribe

What sorcery is this?

...actually, having researched this a bit on my own, it looks like it's just the standard details and summary tags, which somehow I had not been aware of after a 20 year career in web development. Still, it's pretty neat! Doesn't seem to support IE/Edge though.
posted by whir (5 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I remember there being a metatalk about it sometime in the last year or so. (I never tried it myself - I haven't gotten the hang of mouseover text either though. Unless/until it gets added to the little bold/italics/link html shortcuts button, it's beyond me.)
posted by oh yeah! at 6:37 AM on December 23, 2019


It was noted in this MeTa, and is occasionally used in cross-FanFare discussion, but as noted, it doesn't work for everyone. V fgvyy cersre EBG13 pbqvat.
posted by Etrigan at 7:06 AM on December 23, 2019


We're at a weird point in our relationship with spoilers here. There are apologies being made for mentioning plot points inside of FF discussion posts about the related property. There are people switching to rot13 within a thread to avoid giving away the plot to other people who've seen/read the exact thing that FF thread is discussing. There are "books included" spoiler tags being used to help people discussing a sequel avoid hearing about the original. And there are comments about associated shows being deleted even when they don't even contain mention of plot points or character names (presumably because people flagged them, so complaint against the mods on that, but still... wow).

Maybe this reads like the prelude to some kind of slippery slope complaint about spoiler tags, has everything gone mad, etc. But it's not. No one wants to make people miserable with spoilers. So if this is a tool that can help discuss topics without making nice people unhappy, very cool. Hopefully, it will work on more browsers soon so that it can be practical.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:20 PM on December 29, 2019


That should have said "so no complaint" above.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:30 AM on December 30, 2019


Just to follow up on this, two points to note for posterity-

First the details/spoiler tag isn't something of Mefi's, it's a general web thing - but not all browsers support it. In those cases your spoilers will just appear for the person as regular text... so they'll get spoiled. So don't count on it for mission critical non-spoiling.

Second, I love ROT-13 as much as the next gal but we generally ask people not to use it for big chunks. A line here or there, ok, but more than that and it gets to be a problem for people reading the thread who aren't translating it. Also I've been told it's a headache for people using screen-readers, since the program will just read off the entire garbage text and the person has no way to jump through it.

In conclusion spoiler technology is a land of contrasts.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:49 PM on January 9, 2020 [2 favorites]


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