Purpose

This guide is meant to lay out how spoilers are expected to be handled within the community here. I personally am not that fussed about spoilers, but many are. So, with the hope that this can be an inclusive community, I want everybody to remain cognizant of spoilers when discussing content in this community. However, that presents some challenges.

Lemmy, being a service on the fediverse, is not the only platform that can access content within this community. Also, there are a wide range of third party apps that are designed to browse content on the fediverse, each with their own quirks when it comes to displaying content. For instance, it was recently brought to my attention that there is no spoiler syntax on the kbin.social platform (thanks @e0qdk@kbin.social). So, it is impossible to use a unified spoiler tagging system that works for everybody. So, I decided to draw up some rough guidelines to follow when discussing spoilery content within the community that all platforms should be able to follow.

Basic Rules

1. Spoilers should be separated from the rest of the text

This basically means that if you are writing spoilery content, make sure it is in its own paragraph at least. No in-line spoilers will be allowed. Optionally, you can visually separate spoilers even more through the use of a horizontal line --- in markdown. Personally, I hate that in-line spoilers are not supported as it is burdensome to always separate spoilers in this way, but it is a limitation that is inherent to the platform.

2. Before you actually spoil things, provide context.

This means that you must first indicate the media or content you are about to spoil. For example, let’s say you are trying to answer a question with the content below:

Megumin likes explosions.

Then, to follow this rule, it would be best practice to write it like this:

[Konosuba] Megumin likes explosions.

3. When available, use proper spoiler syntax

As mentioned above, this is not always possible due to the array of fediverse platforms and apps. However, if you are on lemmy via the web interface, then proper spoiler syntax is available to you. To put the content above behind a proper spoiler tag, then it looks like this written out:

::: spoiler Konosuba
Megumin likes explosions.
:::

This markdown renders as:

Note that, as mentioned above, not all platforms will actually render this as a spoiler, thus the motivation for rules 1 and 2.

Conclusion

I am not intending to be overly harsh on spoilers in this community due to all of the complications discussed above. However, it will be up to the mod team’s discretion when a comment or post crosses the line. I have tried to lay out some guidelines here that I think should be followable on all the platforms that can access content here.

This is intended to be a living document and I will include a link to this post on the sidebar of the community and will pin it locally for a little while. If people have suggestions or additional things I should consider about this, please feel free to comment or message me.