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I'm currently watching Star Trek TNG. While skimming through the Stack Exchange hot questions list, I saw a question in scifi.SE that spoiled the death of a character. Should I leave a comment telling the OP to change the title so other people who haven't gotten to that part of the show don't have it spoiled?

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    I see this as a huge unsolved problem actually... thinking this is something that the scifi.SE community should work on, eg. having a big button in the header "Spoilers: OFF" would automatically filter all questions with spoilers... or something. And that would be not very fine-tuned actually...
    – n611x007
    Commented Jun 20, 2012 at 21:55
  • I edited the title for you to be less spoil-y. But the body of the question would need to be reformatted if you want to avoid spoilers in the preview text.
    – OghmaOsiris
    Commented Jul 23, 2012 at 17:44
  • For the record, I've edited the question to remain true to the spirit of the question but to avoid the obvious spoiler elements.
    – Valorum
    Commented Mar 17, 2018 at 20:00

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Having a good title (concise, searchable, good representation of the question/problem) is more important than anything else, so if excluding spoilers from your title results in a bad title than you should include said spoilers. However, if you can come up with a good title which excludes titles then that's great, feel free to use it.

Something else to consider is that if a user wishes to avoid seeing spoilers for a certain work they can always use the ignore tag feature.

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    +1 I habitually ignore tags for movies I want to see but didn't yet (usually because it isn't released in the UK yet - why movies persist with coming out days earlier in the USA, making the whole internet rampant with spoilers before the rest of the world gets a chance to legally see a movie is another question. I know the historical reasons, but why it continues in an age of instant communication, I have no idea...)
    – razethestray
    Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 16:26
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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.

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    I see that study as something unaware of it's context. The human brain enjoys something it already knows and can expect and predict, that's why we enjoy songs more once we heard it 3 times (for example). But I would never conclude that spoilering is not a bad thing; it's ripping people from their choice. Before Spoiler Age (read: Nuclear Age), knowing the plot meant re-reading. It was a sign of a work that's worth, a work with depth. Knowing the plot allows you to focus on the events that leads to the spoiler and wonder why didn't you get the big picture by yourself when now it's so obvious.
    – n611x007
    Commented Jun 20, 2012 at 21:50
  • See if you enjoy watching Presumed Innocent when you know who the murderer is.
    – Almo
    Commented Jun 13, 2014 at 20:41

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