To spoiler or not to spoiler, June 2014 edition

Question

Question #59239 (spoilers for Deathly Hallows) has been the subject of back-and-forth edits over whether spoiler information (specifically, the death of a particular character) should be included in the question title, and to what extent the question body should contain spoilers.

There have been links to posts about spoilers elsewhere on Meta in the comments on the question, but the back-and-forth editing suggests that not everybody agrees (at least not for this particular question).

I know Meta questions are supposed to tackle general site policy rather than specific cases, but I feel like this one is getting out of hand.

Should the title of this question contain spoilers, or not?

Answer 1

Personally, I'm pretty anti-spoiler. I avoid a-song-of-ice-and-fire questions on this site, since I'm watching the TV series Game of Thrones, and not reading the books. So many questions on the franchise are filled with things that are either spoilers for the TV show, or are details that weren't included in the TV series. I'm not interested in having future twists spoiled, or getting exposed to details that could spoil future events. If The Walking Dead was more prolific on this site, I'd probably avoid those questions too, since that show has a similar situation where the original source material is further along than the TV series.

Having said that, I don't think it's much of a sacrifice to make the question title less clear, so as to not spoil people who browse our site's content via:

• The Hot Network Questions list
• The /questions page on this site
• The site's RSS feed or Newsletter
• Links to this site via search engines
• The site's main chat room, which has a feed of the questions posted to it.

Having no spoilers in question titles ensure all of the above are spoiler-free. I recall how in recent months, there were many agents-of-shield questions that were posted that contained spoilers in the question title and body without any spoiler tags. The community cleaned each of those up quickly, I am amazed that it's such an issue with this question in particular.

In addition, our policy on spoilers is pretty clear on the subject:

Avoid spoilers completely in the title. This doesn't mean using [REDACTED] or silly things like that, it means coming up with another way to summarise the question.

We have spoiler tags for question and answer bodies, but we have no mechanism for question titles. Just make a vaguer question title, and leave it at that. Search engines index question bodies too, so people who seek the answer will still find it just fine.

Answer 2

I agree with both sides of the argument in that post. That is, I agree that:

1) On a site where most questions will be directly about or directly dependent on plot elements, the user should beware and expect to encounter spoilers. Sometimes, it's just not avoidable. That said,

2) The person complaining in this particular question was especially upset that they encountered the spoiler in the hot questions sidebar on another Stack Exchange site. I agree with this user that one should not go to a programming site expecting to find spoilers about popular media.

And so as far as this particular site is concerned, I feel that questions should be allowed descriptive titles that don't awkwardly mask spoilers. But at the network level, this needs to be fixed. By the time you learn that you can encounter spoilers in a Stack Overflow sidebar, it's already too late. Old media or not, we should strive where possible and reasonable to allow folks to encounter these things fresh.

Answer 3

The conflict that arises here came from the Hot Network Questions (HNQ) list. Personally I think the HNQ list is a useful feature, and that we want our questions to appear there.

I’m fairly sure it was introduced earlier this year (2014), after several of the major discussions about out spoiler policy, including those cited in David Mulder’s answer. So the HNQ list wasn’t considered as part of our policy.

Most users of this site (IMO) are aware that spoilers exist, and try to exercise due care when clicking links, reading questions, etc. In the case of older material (such as the Harry Potter books), we’re aware that we might see spoilers in question titles (although spoilers for new media are frowned upon).

But now users who don’t know (or care) about our policy are getting spoilers shown when they read other sites, which is a bad thing.

I think this particular question is better on this site with the spoiler in-title, but better in the HNQ list without. We can’t have two different titles, but I would propose the following:

Our existing policy stands for questions that don't show up anywhere except this site. If a question hits the HNQ list, then we should (temporarily) remove the spoiler from the title to be a good Stack citizen as part of the wider network.

I don’t know of a way to detect a question hitting the HNQ list with our existing tools without just seeing it there (can moderators see this?). But we already get “Most viewed”, “Most commented”, “Most edited” and so on, so perhaps we could add a way to see which of our questions are on the HNQ list, and react appropriately?

I don’t think this would be a huge change to our existing policy, but it’s something we can achieve on-site, without asking our SE overlords to add new features for us.

And as for what constitutes enough of a spoiler to trigger my suggested policy, I don’t know. “I’ll know it when I see it”? But enough people showed up to complain about it this time that I think it would have tripped this policy.

Answer 4

Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but to me, it's really a matter of common sense that being on a detailed Q and A site like SE is rather ASKING to be accidentally spoiled at one turn or another - especially when SE has sites for subject matters like... books, movies, and television shows.

Unless SE completely and explicitly forbids discussions on spoiler-applicable topics (like movies, books, etc) for eternity, there just ARE going to be some spoilers in question titles if only because many of these questions are related to various points of intrigue as applicable to the stories they originate from. Additionally, there will ALWAYS be SOMEONE out here on SE who has NOT read or watched or whatevered the latest whosit and whatsit and as such, even for an old book series like The Lord of the Rings, someone is BOUND to be spoiled 1, 10, even 20+ years later.

In other words, being spoiled here and there is an occupational hazard and that is how I treat the situation myself. I don't enjoy being spoiled, BUT I am NOT going to be up in arms if spoiler-happy questions pop up, either, and I personally don't support the policing of spoilers within question titles - even in the HQN.

Why?

1. People complain all over SE metas about the lack of quality of the questions.

Forcing people to ask vague-er questions (or editing questions in the HQN to be more vague/less spoiler-happy) to help solve the spoiler problem isn't a positive step in addressing the 'low quality' questions issue. Additionally, encouraging vague question titles/editing question titles in the HQN to be more vague or whatever doesn't set and won't set a good example for new users and even goes against the guidelines of SE.

My own question regarding being reconnected with a book ended up being edited for specifics which I am perfectly fine with because... yeah. I was being too vague in my question title. But from that perspective, to see questions being edited to become more vague really seems to go against the spirit of SE and the community-wide 'be more specific and give lots of details and support your questions and answers' attitude.

1. SE supports and emphasizes QUALITY of both questions and answers and this includes the inclusion of SPECIFICS.

Engaging in a Q and A session re: a very surprising plot twist in XYZ book or movie that needs some additional puzzling out, research, and/or brainstorming ought to be right up SE's alley in terms of 'quality'. Thing is, how in the world is someone to address this question in a high-quality way without touching on spoilers?

Most of the time, just by saying something like, "How, exactly, did this character die?" or, "How, exactly, does this late reveal of a character's backstory affect ABC?" is enough on its own to be a spoiler.

They're perfectly valid questions to ask and they deal with points of intrigue and mystery that - surprise surprise - could use a little clarification, depending on a person's understanding of the canon of the story world in question.

No spoilers in questions is just silly for that reason.

That is, unless SE wants to ban any and all spoilers AND make it an exception of a sort that question titles here (and in other sites where spoilers might become an issue) are to be vague (and poor in quality according to the rest of SE's standards) if they contain spoilers.

Answer 5

tl;dr: There is a current problem with the Hot Network Questions showing titles to users who would otherwise wish not to use this site. This problem however is unrelated to the way this site should present it's titles. The current consensus regarding spoilers in titles is that they should be used for works that are not extremely new.

--

Regarding the question of spoilers in the title I will quote the current scifi.SE consensus:

Normally we operate on the assumption that certain things are too popular and old to be mass spoil-able. However, if you feel this isn't popular/old enough. Feel free to edit it yourself.

There are just some things that it is hard to ask about effectively without some small spoilage. We are, after all, a site dedicated to answering questions about plots, and the very nature of this is spoilerific.

Additionally, spoiling may not be the bad thing we've always thought it was.

(Source: DampeS8N on Is it okay to have spoilers in question titles?)

Then we have Is there a moratorium on some spoilers? asking whether spoilers get out of date at a certain point, where the highest voted answer states

It's up to the person asking/answering the question to decide.

And additionally quotes Jeff sharing his personal guideline which seems valuable to consider:

I also take the age of the work into account. [...] With TV shows, I try to spoiler big plot points from the current season, if practical.

Both movies and television are relatively easy [...] Books are a different story, in my opinion. Books don't generate nearly as much buzz upon release, so I tend to spoiler important plot points [...] for quite a while afterwards.

(Source: Tony Meyer on Is there a moratorium on some spoilers?)

Now, disregarding meta.scifi.SE discussions up till now presenting the rationale in favour and against spoilers:

Against

• Currently popular question titles are broadcasted all over the network, thus forcing it upon people who would otherwise not use this site.

In favour

• Questions should be searchable.
  • Even on scifi.SE itself when asking a slight paraphrase of this question it did not appear in the suggested question list (all other questions except one contained the word "Dobby" literally in their title and thus ranked higher).
  • Titles are predominantly shown on Google. The idea of SE is different to a forum or traditional Q&A in that it's meant to answer everyone's question, not only the person who first asks it. If questions can't be found or will be badly indexed this point will be lost.
• A title in general should be representative for a question (that's the point of a title). Exceptions can be made in cases where a work is currently really popular (e.g. current season or e.g. 3 years or so for books). People who hate spoilers that much should not go to a Q&A site as this inherit to the nature of such a site.

Regarding the against rationale I would simply argue the following: This should not affect question titles and instead people who take issue with this should add a feature request regarding the filtering and/or hiding of HNQ on meta.SE and upvote it. This seems like a very valuable addition to the SE network that goes far beyond the issue of spoiler only.

Answer 6

I agree with avoiding nasty spoilers in question titles ("nasty" being subjective, unfortunately). However, I find some spoiler-free ways of writing titles incredibly annoying and useless.

Some made up examples, though I'm sure you can remember actual examples:

"Why does this happen to this character from Harry Potter?"

"Why do these entities from The Matrix want to extract this thing from these mammals, and does this violate a certain rule of physics?"

I call these the "This Character" kind of questions, and I think they are incredibly useless. They aren't searchable, and it's a kind of pointless Taboo game (say something without mentioning forbidden keywords). The reason is that in a Q&A website, not being able to ask questions clearly runs counter to the format of the site.

So I always favor asking "Dumbledore's fate in Harry Potter and The Magic Broom" instead of "Why does this character die in Harry Potter and The Magic Broom". The first is relatively spoiler-free while mentioning enough keywords to be searchable and meaningful. The latter is pointless.

If you really cannot figure how to ask the question without running into This Character, then maybe the question shouldn't be asked at all; it's so specific that it cannot be asked without spoiling something.