Spoiler policy

[Ben]

I've received some complaints that people were giving away major plot points to films with little or no warning, and some of the movies weren't even out yet (legally ). We want people to be able to discuss upcoming movies without worrying about ruining the movie for themselves.

So, we've introduced the spoiler tag to the vBCode. This hides spoilers so that they must be highlighted to read, and no one will be inadvertently spoiled. Example:

The boat sinks at the end of "Titanic."

Our spoiler definitions are based on those from TheForce.Net, a leading Star Wars site:

All official site announcements - non-spoiler
cast names - non-spoiler
character names - non-spoiler
official photos - non-spoiler
trailers - non-spoiler
spy photos - spoiler
character descriptions - spoiler
dialogue - spoiler
plot points - spoiler

These are in effect until the film enters wide U.S. release. Even once the movie has been released in the U.S., excercise discretion and courtesy: not everyone can rush out to see something the first day it comes out, and certain countries receive films months after the U.S. release. At this point, we don't expect you to conceal character descriptions or the like, but hiding things like surprise twist endings is expected. There are still some people out there who haven't seen, say, "The Sixth Sense" and could still enjoy it on DVD.

Please follow these guidelines. Block out these items in your post, and don't put spoilers in the title, either, as these cannot be blocked out. I don't anticipate any problems with this, but if for some reason a user continuously ignored this policy, we could revoke his access to the Entertainment Forum. Note that the guidelines for each individual forum are slightly different, so make sure you are familiar with all of them.

If you have any comments or suggestions about spoiler policy for this forum or in general, please feel free to respond to this topic.