Template talk:Spoilers

It came up on Talk:Merlin (BBC)/Characters that it might be nice to have a field in this to be able to be more specific which part is being spoiled (e.g. recent episodes, rumors of upcoming episodes etc).--RatCreature 04:24, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

ETA:Additionally it might be nifty if we also had one of these hiding-unless-highlighted spoiler templates, as alternative, when it is just a sentence somewhere that spoils something recent that many might not want to read, but the rest of the page is fine. I find that method annoying and cumbersome if it is whole paragraphs you have to highlight (like it is sometimes on the TV tropes wiki), so if it was for example a section recapping a kerfuffle over a recent character death, then I'd rather like a spoiler banner on the page or the section. But if it is just a sentence like "When X died last week, the first denialfic was posted two hours after the episode." in a paragraph where the rest is about other fanfic about X, then the highlighting option might be useful.--RatCreature 06:59, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

When is a Spoiler not a Spoiler anymore?

I've added categorization to this template, so we can see where it is being used - Category:Pages with Spoiler Flag

It's being used on >200 pages, and most of these spoiler warnings are very old. I think there should be a point after which it is reasonable to include spoilers, without needing a spoiler flag. If you are reading a fandom page and you're not all caught up on the source material, you should expect spoilers for older developments in fandom, and I think we should only use the spoiler flag for recent events. With that in mind, I'm wondering if we need to provide more guidance on how this flag is used. --Auntags (talk) 10:18, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for opening a conversation about this! I agree that more guidelines might be helpful -- certainly we should discuss it to see if there's enough agreement among editors to provide the basis for guidelines.

Personally, I'd prefer to err on the side of leaving spoiler warnings, even for really old fandoms. I'm often pretty late on getting into fandoms, and even though that means I'm frequently spoiled on twists and reveals, I like when discussion places give me a heads up -- it's a nice cue to make a decision whether I want to be spoiled, instead of having spoilers unexpectedly dropped on me. Perhaps we could make two levels of spoiler warnings, one for more recent developments? -- Quaelegit (talk) 01:29, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

EDIT: also thank you for the categorization, it's helpful! -- Quaelegit (talk) 01:30, 10 April 2023 (UTC)