There's been a lot of discussion about how to strike the balance between promoting discussion in The Living Room whilst simultaneously protecting people from having their favourite shows spoiled. After crowd-sourcing some opinions I have come up with a (hopefully) comprehensive spoiler policy for these sub-forums. Just remember this acronym: DBAD (Don't Be A Dick). Think of that acronym when you're about to discuss some potentially sensitive information. For a more complete elaboration on the do's and don't's of spoiling in The Living Room, read on: TV SHOWSNetwork shows: - If the episode has aired on TV, it's fair game. Talk about it out in the open in the show's discussion thread. EXCEPTION: ALWAYS use [ invisible ] tags for "next week on..." clips. Online/Netflix series: (i.e. House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black) - Use invisible tags at all times because we all watch those shows at different paces. Shows based on books/comics/other previous works: (i.e. Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead) - DO NOT discuss potential future developments out in the open. No "I can't wait for this" or "I wonder if they'll cover this" or "I wish they had done this" posts. Start a new thread for the book if that's what you want to talk about. MOVIES- In threads about specific movies, free discussion is allowed as soon as the movie is released, as long as the thread has a SPOILER ALERT message in the title. The onus is on the visitor not to click a thread labeled SPOILER ALERT. EXCEPTION: ALWAYS use [ invisible ] tags when discussing script leaks. - In general threads (i.e. What Movie Did You Recently Watch?), use [ invisible ] tags at all times if discussing plot points. I'm open to altering some of these rules if you make a good enough argument, but this is how we're going to handle things from here on out. If you are caught spoiling, you could get banned from these sub-forums altogether, in addition to receiving infractions. So DBAD. Update: Policy review is now over.
Due to DVRs, I'd recommend the edit for Network shoes to be spoiler tags/invisible tags/whatever for 24-48 hours after the initial airdate of the episode. After that, it's free reign.
lmao if you go into a thread for a movie like 2 days after it's released to say "can't wait to see this" and read a wall of spoilers, then you had it coming.
Wouldn't it be easier if the person watching the show doesn't check the thread until after they've seen the latest episode, eliminating the need for the invisitags?
Precisely. It's difficult enough to get people to use invisitags, and making them jump through hoops hampers discussion. Want to join the discussion? Watch the episode and then discuss.
Wait, so we can't discuss the The Walking Dead comics, not even with invisitags, in the existing thread?
The thing about this is, what if you create a thread for adaptions and want to theorize, discuss future plot points that may or not happen in the TV Show? According to these rules it's impossible to that in any thread whatsoever. Even with the use of tags. For example, in The Walking Dead thread there is to be no comic talk, right? Because some people would be spoiled. But in the Walking Dead Comic Thread there would be no TV talk, right? Because some people would be spoiled. We'd need a third thread to discuss both TV Show and Comic events, and a third thread is pretty excessive, right? I suggest some labels similarly to the ones in the Your Projects thread. The prefix labels being TV+Comic Spoilers TV+Book Spoilers TV Spoilers Spoilers all etc. I also suggest these prefixes for individual posts that can be placed in the title so that each poster can describe what his/her post will contain so that other posters know to skip that post and go on to the next. This way, anyone who goes into a thread knows exactly what they're getting into. Anyway, that's my only real issue about these policies, I agree with everything else. I just think we should have a place to discuss book and TV spoilers alike. An Example
In other forums that I frequent, they keep one thread for ONLY tv show discussion and another separate one for exclusive book discussion (ranging from the first book till the last.... anything goes here... even the TV adaptation spoilers because if you've read the book they aren't spoilers anymore). Also as I have seen, most people, for good measures, tend to use spoiler/invisible tags while discussing recent episodes. Although I do agree that one should not enter a spoiler filled thread without being up to date with the plot.
I have never, anywhere on the entire internet seen a thread where people used tags for just aired episodes. Learn something new everyday.
Yet the new spoiler policy states that anything that has aired on TV is fair game for open discussion in that respective thread. This policy is meant to un-complicate things and you guys are creating pretty far-out hypotheticals. Of course it's going to be difficult to make a policy that is completely comprehensive but we had to try. And honestly, how many Walking Dead comic fans aren't following along with the TV show? The relationship between the comics and the TV show is a one way street: the source material may inform the TV material but not vice-versa. The simple fact of the matter is that we could allow spoiler tags for books in the TV show threads, and vice-versa, but we tried that and some of you guys have proven incapable or simply unwilling or too belligerent to abide by those rules. So it's an all-or-nothing proposition, for the good of everyone.