15
votes
"Spoiler" tags should also display on comments in tagged posts when viewed from a user page
Right now if a post is tagged with 'spoiler', that tag appears in its own color which is good. However, if you are interacting with a user and click through to their profile, there is no indication that some of their comments may have been in these spoiler threads and thus contain spoilers (just happened to me, thankfully for show I don't watch). It might be nice to somehow indicate these potential spoilers on the user page so that they can be skipped over.
Ahhh, didn't know about that. In your opinion should I delete this post? Not sure what the etiquette is.
If 100 people comment in a "spoiler" thread, and only one of those people write a spoiler, should all 100 comments be marked as "spoiler" in their respective user profiles? That seems like overkill.
Maybe we need a "spoiler" label for individual comments, as well as a "spoiler" tag for topics.
I personally don’t think such a thing would be overkill, especially if it appeared in the header where it currently says “Commented on <topic name>”. Although having some type of spoiler mechanic for comments probably wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway.
It would mean a proliferation of "spoiler" tags to the point where they become meaningless.
Here is the most-commented topic in ~movies with a "spoiler" tag. There are 45 comments in that discussion, and exactly zero of those comments contain spoilers. In this second-most commented topic with a "spoiler" tag, there are 36 comments, and only 3 or 4 comments contain possible spoilers (even if I'm very generous about what constitutes a spoiler). Of the 81 comments across those two topics, only about 5% contain spoilers, which means 95% of those comments do not contain spoilers. If we tagged every one of those 81 comments with "spoiler" in their respective user profiles, that would mean that 95% of comments with "spoiler" tags in user profiles would not contain actual spoilers.
People will quickly learn that a "spoiler" tag on a comment in a user profile doesn't mean there's an actual spoiler present. They'll therefore ignore those "spoiler" tags because they're meaningless. This will have the opposite effect to what you want: it will stop protecting people from spoilers.
If you want to protect people from spoilers, you need to make "spoiler" tags meaningful - and that's not going to happen if you tag lots of non-spoiler comments with "spoiler". You need a more targeted approach to make "spoiler" tags meaningful, and therefore useful.
In my previous comment, I suggested marking the topic title as a spoiler and not the comment itself. This is similar to how NSFW tags on reddit work. The goal is simply that the topic itself is appropriately marked when viewing comments on the user page.
Isn't that the same as tagging individual comments, though? I thought that was the point of your suggestion: to tag individual comments on a user page as "spoiler".
For example: I look at your user page, and you've got a lot of comments in a variety of topics. You want only the comments which were posted in certain topics to be tagged as "spoiler". So, a comment you write in this thread in ~tildes won't be tagged, but a comment you write in a Monday Movie Free Talk topic in ~movies (which has a "spoiler" tag) would be tagged. I would scroll through your user page and I would see the title of that comment marked as "spoiler". But even if the tag is attached to the topic title, it's still effectively tagging that individual comment in your user page.
Or have I got this wrong?
No, you've got it. Tagging the topic title maintains consistency of design regardless of where you access a topic from (user page or your feed). Visually it's not saying "this comment contains a spoiler" but rather "if you click through, this post may contain spoilers". This is already considered relevant information as evidenced by the distinguished nature of spoiler tags as is (this would just be another way in which they are distinguished, so this wouldn't be an argument to include all tags by the topic name on the user page). I don't really think this would devalue spoiler tags elsewhere, just as NSFW tags on reddit are not uniformly ignored. Just my two cents.
I didn't get that from your explanation. I thought you were trying to protect people from spoilers in the user pages themselves. When you wrote "there is no indication that some of their comments may have been in these spoiler threads and thus contain spoilers", I took that to mean that the comments themselves, as displayed in the user's page, would contain spoilers.
Thanks for the clarification.
I think if creating a label for individual comments which contain spoilers, they should mention also what they spoil since otherwise it would fail as a spoiler system.
As @gpl points out, if you're looking at someone's user profile, each comment is under the title of the topic it's commenting on. In many cases, that title will tell you what's being spoiled: if the title above a comment refers to 'Avengers: Endgame', it's a fair bet that the comment is about 'Endgame' and therefore that it is spoiling 'Endgame'.
Of course, that doesn't cover things like the "Movie Monday Free Talk" topics. But even they have "spoiler" tags without specifying which movies may be spoiled (they're "free talk"!). We're already exposed. If you open a "Movie Monday Free Talk" topic, you have no idea what movies may be discussed and possibly spoiled there.
I think the implementation of an idealised spoiler-protection system which individually identifies every single movie, book, and play that is being spoiled in a topic and/or comment might be a bit beyond the scope of an internet forum like Tildes. We'd have to create a database that is effectively IMDB + ISBN + PlayDatabase combined. That's huge. And the benefits just aren't worth the effort.
Wouldn't a custom text output be simply more flexible and easy to implement? Kind of like how we can give a reason for Malice or Examplary and then that would be displayed?
Tagging @Deimos & @cfabbro: Is this an idea to add to the issues list?
I think it makes sense. Labels are basically a way to categorize comments, and I think spoilers fit into that pretty well.
The downside compared to adding spoiler support to markdown is that you'd only be able to mark an entire comment as containing spoilers instead of specific sections of the text, but I don't know how often that's important.
¿porque no los dos?
I think the vast majority of people will just use the comment label, but for portions of comments containing spoilers, some custom markdown could always be used too. E.g.
[#spoiler description]("actual text of spoiler")
Do it just like stack exchange does, they've got a pretty killer method.
TBH, not really. I think it needs a visible spoiler description in the blank area that disappears when the spoiler is revealed. I am also not totally sold on using a single exclamation point to demarcate spoilers. And I absolutely do not agree with using hover to permanently reveal spoilers, since that is way too easy for people to accidentally activate by mistake. IMO, only explicit clicks should reveal hidden spoilers.
Yeah, I like that idea a lot, and using the already established comment label system would certainly make it easier and more intuitive than some custom markdown in the comments themselves. Probably easier to implement too, since all it would require is allowing people to label their own comment
spoiler
and then provide a text input similar toExemplary
, but make that text visible to other users so they can know what the spoiler pertains to.I made a Gitlab issue for it:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/452