Regarding Spoiler-tagged images

Quite a few times now, I've been browsing danbooru and have found images that are tagged "spoilers".

This is all well and good, but by the time one gets down that far in the tag list, they will probably have already seen the picture and the character/general tags, any of which could be a major spoiler for something they haven't seen/finished yet.

For example, this image (major spoilers for the "Umineko no Naku Koro ni" sound novels!):
post #1576118

There are two (or as many as five, depending on your point of view) spoiler characters in this image - and they are tagged by names that are themselves spoilers.

So what should be done? I think that images bearing the "spoilers" tag should be hidden, along with their character/general tags (but not the copyright/artist tags - these would be useful so that the user would know what story/franchise was being spoiled by the image) until the user clicks some kind of button to reveal it, having been suitably warned.

Not everyone is going to specifically ask the search to exclude spoiler-tagged images, after all.

You can always put the series in your blacklist. That'll block out any and all tags related to the series until you watch/play it.

Benit149 said:

You can always put the series in your blacklist. That'll block out any and all tags related to the series until you watch/play it.

True, but it is a cumbersome thing to blacklist every series/franchise you haven't seen and potentially might - nor does this work for those without user accounts.

Benit149 said:

You can always put the series in your blacklist. That'll block out any and all tags related to the series until you watch/play it.

You can do that if you know you'll be seeing spoilers from a given series. I could probably list a few series where (often heavy) spoilers come up with no warning, and you might spoil yourself by browsing images from it without knowing that. And that much knowledge is a spoiler itself.

Danbooru isn't perfect. You either have to watch/play the series first before coming (thereby deliberately avoiding Danbooru for a bit), rely on the spoilers tag for the major revelations, or blacklist the series entirely to be absolutely safe while on Danbooru. There are some instances where accidental spoilers can happen here, such as when you're editing a wiki for a series-specific tag that inherently spoils something. If someone browses the wikis and happens to just see the tag in the list, well there you go. Another problem is users who aren't familiar with spoiler policies writing revealing comments without blacking them out. I actually had to downvote a comment to hide it from view because it was an unblocked spoiler.

You can do that if you know you'll be seeing spoilers from a given series. I could probably list a few series where (often heavy) spoilers come up with no warning, and you might spoil yourself by browsing images from it without knowing that. And that much knowledge is a spoiler itself.

I think this site is a major case of late-arrival spoilers where you're just minding your business and browsing images for series you're not familiar with, and you happen upon a spoiler you're not familiar with. You don't know what the context is, but just seeing the spoilers tag is a bad sign. Again, this site isn't perfect. I think a lot of it relies on users being savvy about avoiding spoilers, and this site is doing its best to help prevent angry nerd raging. As far as I know, the three options I mentioned above are what I would do.

Benit149 said:

Danbooru isn't perfect. You either have to watch/play the series first before coming (thereby deliberately avoiding Danbooru for a bit), rely on the spoilers tag for the major revelations, or blacklist the series entirely to be absolutely safe while on Danbooru. There are some instances where accidental spoilers can happen here, such as when you're editing a wiki for a series-specific tag that inherently spoils something. If someone browses the wikis and happens to just see the tag in the list, well there you go. Another problem is users who aren't familiar with spoiler policies writing revealing comments without blacking them out. I actually had to downvote a comment to hide it from view because it was an unblocked spoiler.

I think this site is a major case of late-arrival spoilers where you're just minding your business and browsing images for series you're not familiar with, and you happen upon a spoiler you're not familiar with. You don't know what the context is, but just seeing the spoilers tag is a bad sign. Again, this site isn't perfect. I think a lot of it relies on users being savvy about avoiding spoilers, and this site is doing its best to help prevent angry nerd raging. As far as I know, the three options I mentioned above are what I would do.

Comments on a spoiler-tagged post should probably be blanket-treated as spoilers themselves (and thus hidden by this suggested feature), to be honest.

Also, relying on the spoilers tag is, as I mentioned in the OP, not a particularly good option when there are tags that can be, by themselves, spoilers (tags that you would quite likely get to before realising that the picture is even tagged with the spoilers tag).

Benit149 said:

Danbooru isn't perfect.

That's why we have user feedback, no? :)

I can agree to some extent with the Late Arrival Spoiler point, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere. Consciously avoiding most things that can spoil you while you're watching/reading/playing is one thing, but it's something else when you're spoiled before even starting (like, say, a spoiler CG attached to a piece of music from a game on YT). And while you can't really avoid spoilers on the internet, we're all striving for best practices and mechanisms to prevent us from seeing them when we don't want to.

I posted the custom CSS to dim the spoiler thumbnails just a few days ago: forum #93712. This way, when you see a pale thumbnail with black border, it's time to carefully check the series name in the tags before opening the image and/or reading the comments. You can expand it further by hiding general and character tags until hover:

Shoujo_Q said:

True, but it is a cumbersome thing to blacklist every series/franchise you haven't seen and potentially might

You can just blacklist the "spoilers" tag itself. Then all spoilers from all series will be blacklisted.

Shoujo_Q said:

nor does this work for those without user accounts.

Hmm, how about this idea: All anonymous users will be given the default blacklist "spoilers". That way they won't accidentally see spoiler posts.

They'd still need to make an account to actually manually change their blacklist from the default.

Benit149 said:

Another problem is users who aren't familiar with spoiler policies writing revealing comments without blacking them out. I actually had to downvote a comment to hide it from view because it was an unblocked spoiler.

One thing you can do is post in topic #8972 asking a mod or someone to edit the comment to include spoiler tags.

Toks said:

You can just blacklist the "spoilers" tag itself. Then all spoilers from all series will be blacklisted.

This doesn't allow me to selectively view spoiler images (or even see search results for them) for content I *am* familiar with, however (since you can't, as far as I know, whitelist certain tag combinations under a blacklist).

I still think the most elegant solution is to obscure the picture (from both the post and the search results, replaced with some kind of placeholder denoting it as a spoiler) and all of the tags and comments save for the copyright and artist tags. It's the only solution I've seen so far that neither stops people from seeing spoilers of stuff they're OK with seeing spoilers for, nor requires arbitrarily large amounts of work blacklisting stuff they aren't OK with seeing spoilers for.

Hmm, how about this idea: All anonymous users will be given the default blacklist "spoilers". That way they won't accidentally see spoiler posts.

I do agree with this, however. Good call.

Shoujo_Q said:

This doesn't allow me to selectively view spoiler images (or even see search results for them) for content I *am* familiar with, however (since you can't, as far as I know, whitelist certain tag combinations under a blacklist).

Actually, there is a way. If you blacklist "spoilers -whatever", then all spoilers posts will be blacklisted, except for posts that also have the tag "whatever". So you could add more series tags to the whitelist by adding more negated tags to the end of that line. This should be less work than the reverse of blacklisting all series that you haven't yet seen.

Though even I didn't know about this whitelist feature until I checked just now, which is a sign that help:blacklists should be updated to include this information. Edit: Done.

Toks said:

Actually, there is a way. If you blacklist "spoilers -whatever", then all spoilers posts will be blacklisted, except for posts that also have the tag "whatever". So you could add more series tags to the whitelist by adding more negated tags to the end of that line. This should be less work than the reverse of blacklisting all series that you haven't yet seen.

Though even I didn't know about this whitelist feature until I checked just now, which is a sign that help:blacklists should be updated to include this information. Edit: Done.

Hm, that's helpful, but still creates an arbitrarily large amount of work for people who've seen a lot of things.

Shoujo_Q said:

Hm, that's helpful, but still creates an arbitrarily large amount of work for people who've seen a lot of things.

The idea of replacing all spoilers posts with a placeholder image that you mentioned earlier still has the exact same problem as simply blacklisting "spoilers" (namely, that posts from series the user has already finished will still be hidden).

At least with the blacklist+whitelist you can unhide a series once you've finished it. Unless someone can think of a way for the site to automatically detect what series the user has seen (not likely; the site can't read the user's mind), it will have to be manual.

One thing I've been thinking about is how blocking spoiler comments isn't totally foolproof. If your mouse just happens to be on top of the blacked text when the new page loads, and you just happen to catch a split-second glimpse of the text and notice something you're familiar with, that itself can be a spoiler. It'd be a coincidence for this to occur, but there are times when I'm editing wikis and this happens to me.

I wonder if there's a way to make the blocked text only available when you click on it to make it appear, and then click again to make it vanish. Another idea is to click and hold the mouse to read the spoiler, and then it disappears when you unclick.

Benit149 said:

One thing I've been thinking about is how blocking spoiler comments isn't totally foolproof. If your mouse just happens to be on top of the blacked text when the new page loads, and you just happen to catch a split-second glimpse of the text and notice something you're familiar with, that itself can be a spoiler. It'd be a coincidence for this to occur, but there are times when I'm editing wikis and this happens to me.

I wonder if there's a way to make the blocked text only available when you click on it to make it appear, and then click again to make it vanish. Another idea is to click and hold the mouse to read the spoiler, and then it disappears when you unclick.

Put this in your custom css (My Account -> Settings -> Advanced Settings -> last text box):

/* make spoiler text readable only when selected */
.spoiler { color: black }

Now to read a spoiler you either drag your pointer across it or press Ctrl-A to reveal all spoilers on the page. No more accidental peeks.

Hmm, I was thinking of the text staying blank when you roll the mouse over it, but then it'll pop up when you click rather than having to highlight it all the time (or only show up when you hold the mouse button down). And for the record, your method doesn't work if you have a link like this:

Any linked text still pops up, which could reveal a name by mistake.

Benit149 said:

And for the record, your method doesn't work if you have a link like this:

Hello, I'm a spoiler.

Any linked text still pops up, which could reveal a name by mistake.

Try this:

/* make spoiler text readable only when selected */ 
.spoiler { color: black }
.spoiler a { color: black }

Honestly, there's a bit of a catch 22 with the spoiler tag's very existance. I've seen a few new images that werent properly tagged yet but they were spoilers, but I did not know they were spoilers. Caught up to a series and found out that "This one pic on Danbooru" was a spoiler but I didn't know it. Either way, I was still pleasantly surprised so seeing the spoiler pic in the first place actually didn't ruin the surprise since I didn't even know it was a spoiler in the first place.

I just thought the Artist was just having fun giving a character an altered costume.

The only true way to avoid spoilers is right out prevention and avoiding anime/manga sites altogether untill you catch up with a popular series. Your chance of finding spoilers for a not popular series tends to go down even if it is current. Ala Naruto, One Piece and Bleach for example are series that you should make sure you're always caught up on.