3

I understand that titles should be meaningful, and I admit that this just becomes a problem if something draws as much attention as its the case with GoT.

But still... I can't be quite sure as I haven't watched the season final yet, but I feel like the HNQ here just spoiled me with a compact summary of that episode.

enter image description here

I came up with this a few times already, I know. And I'm aware of the options to just exclude the HNQs.

But still, not everyone is willing to dive into meta for solving his problem, and getting a HNQ-list as I just did, just hopping over the topics and its already too late to lookup any solution.

My idea to solve this problem1 in case this is technically doable, using a tag like and making that tag be negatively considered in the HNQ scoring so that each site could provide at most 1 post with that tag to the HNQ at a time, if not even banning it or giving its title a spoiler protection in the HNQ.

EDIT: Note that this post actually mentioned from the very first beginning that hiding the HNQ is not considered a solution. Now just hopping back in here to see it was voted to be a duplicate of how to turn off the HNQ's feels a bit cheeky. Sorry for having to explicitly state this in an edit block. But having stated it in the text itself apparently got ignored.

1And it is a problem. Yeah each of the titles for them self isn't that spoily2, but HNQ as demonstrated makes that moot

2Well in my honest opinion, 3 of them are spoilers on their own

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    Argh. Titles which aren't spoilery in themselves but their combination is spoilery ... that's a tricky one, and well-nigh impossible to be sure of avoiding.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 12:46
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    Every question has every right to be in the HNQ, you're denying the right of a question to get the attention it deserves. The only reason this is a perceived issue is because people are 1: Unable to be mature about spoilers. If you're on the internet expect to be spoiled. Our community serves the thousands, we can't make every individual happy. 2: Because our site has what I call "Spoilerbility", content with the ability to spoil. Seeing something on a programming site beyond my knowledge is "cool". Seeing something on an SFF site beyond my knowledge is a "spoiler".
    – Edlothiad
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 13:02
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    We have rules to hiding spoilers, and we try to make it as possible for everyone to be safe from them. In the case of some of these, titles are often overlooked as most of them are edited by users who have seen the episode, but we can't make it so that a random selection of HNQ questions in your sidebar doesn't spoil an episode for you.
    – Edlothiad
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 13:03
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    i.sstatic.net/rAQdc.jpg
    – Valorum
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 13:15
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    @Valorum I'd say it's not a duplicate, since this is a proposal to exclude certain tags from the HNQs. Although I'm sure there's something on meta meta about that.
    – SQB
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 13:18
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    Oh dear, a spoiling title and a non-spoiling title, together, have spoiled your experience? This is already covered; the spoiling title, Starks figuring Littlefinger out, is already against current standards.
    – user40790
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 15:37
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    @Möoz: Why it is a duplicate? I clearly am supposing here a way to improve the handling, and not asking for assistance.
    – Zaibis
    Commented Aug 31, 2017 at 9:26
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    similar one from sister site, answer might help here too
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented Aug 31, 2017 at 13:44
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    @AegonTargaryen: I feel like no one even reads the part after the picture. I even state there that its not a option for me to disable the HNQ and therefor would like to propose a feature, while this is also taged as feature request. and isntead people mark this as dup of my own posts or hint me that answers to posts I did may apply.
    – Zaibis
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 7:11
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    Because "recent-release" tag suggestion seems to do more damage then any help.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 8:19
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    @AegonTargaryen: Then please put the why into an answer instead of assuming something that clearly isn't stated. As I don't see why that would be damaging.
    – Zaibis
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 8:44
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    @Zaibis post like this appear all the time with same spoiler complains , can't answer each of them every time.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 9:34
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    @Zaibis and who is going to add "recent-release" tag to every new question and then removing them after certain time? And how new is new?
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 9:37
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    @Zaibis, we have a time frame for "so and so" it's never. Nothing is ever old enough to be a spoiler. Some things just enter common knowledge. I.e, "Luke I am your father", technically a spoiler, but not hidden because of how well it's known. Back to your point about disagreeing with the tags. Us as regulars of our Stack want our content (or sometimes not) on the HNQ because it draws attention to the stack, provides us with new users and provides rep (I guess). You denying our site space on the HNQ because we have content that is spoilery might be ok to you, but not to us.
    – Edlothiad
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 14:36
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    By the way, why is this actually a duplicate? OP clearly mentions that turning HNQ off is not an acceptable goal. So why this is a duplicate of "Is there a way to turn off HNQ?" A bit rediciouless I must say...
    – Zaibis
    Commented Jan 18, 2019 at 12:29

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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What you're proposing is a bad idea on multiple levels and extensively open to abuse.

1) This requires users to decide, presumably for themselves, what constitutes a "new release". You might wish to note that we've had complaints in the past about questions about books that were released decades ago spoiling TV shows and films including Lord of the Rings (1954) and 1984 (1948).

2) Even if we decide that it's a good idea, it still requires a technical solution from SE that they've been reluctant to perform. Blocking HNQ by tag has been discussed previously on Meta:SE with the upshot being that while SE are happy to exclude entire sites, they're not happy to exclude single tags due to the costs involved and the network overhead.

3) Finally, and to my mind most critically, this gives users a brand new ability to knock any question they don't like off of the HNQ simply by adding a special tag. While we're usually pretty quick about noticing mis-tagging, it could theoretically be hours before that question gets edited back to normalcy during which time its 'hotness' may have declined.

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    It does absolutely nothing but replace one manual, subjective, user-driven task (editing spoilers out of titles) with another manual, subjective, user-driven task (adding a specific tag). Only that the proposed idea also doesn't help the site itself on top of that.
    – TARS
    Commented Jan 19, 2019 at 15:40
  • @TARS "It does absolutely nothing" That's nonsense. If you had read the OP, you would see that in that case it would make a major difference. But I accepted this answer for the 3rd point. As I had not considered that one back then. And I agree, that this would make in fact things difficult, even if there was a technical solution for it.
    – Zaibis
    Commented Jan 21, 2019 at 5:10

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