7
votes
Suggestion: Spoiler Tag on comments that collapses them
I don't know if this would be only an option when you are creating a comment, or added to the list of tags like "Exemplary" and such, but an option to have a "Spoiler" comment tag that collapses the comment but doesn't affect ranking might be a good edition to the "What is your favorite media/What have you consumed recently/Recommendation threads." It's also something that the site already supports, and most importantly, looks atheistically pleasing to me compared to highlightable Spoiler Script.
I do think a spoiler tag will be important (especially once gaming and TV/movie groups get more popular). However simply collapsing the comment won't clearly communicate that it is a spoiler, in my opinion.
Comments can also be collapsed for being tagged (which label exactly I forget - noise?). Old comments can be collapsed when revisiting a thread. I already have a hard time telling the cause of a comment's collapse between these two reasons.
Spoilers I think should be inline, as reddit does them. A specific piece of text which requires hover (or some accessibility-friendly approach) to reveal the text. This allows the commenter to give context (eg. spoiler for Endgame), and means it's never a risky click to expand a comment without examining it first.
I'm not against change just because "change is bad", but I think there's UX issues to the approach suggested above.
Fair. I was thinking maybe there could be a title in the first line of the post, say "Spoiler - Popular TV Show - S01E01" and then you start a new paragraph so that the collapsed post would only show that first. My aversion to inline spoiler text is that there isn't an accepted standard to it, there's a greater cost to getting it wrong, you would have to account for mobile, and on the commenter side, you would run into the highlighter problem of either hitting the entire paragraph, or key sentences, or just the name of someone who is important. And maybe inline support is the best for spoilers, but I thought it seemed novel to use what we had and see if that worked.
Late answer, but the expandable-sections feature seem perfect for that.
To be fair, the expandable sections feature didn't exist when moocow made this suggestion.