Community Blog Topic: What is your spoiler policy?

This week’s Community Blog Topic discusses the protocol of spoilers. Usually, I would say 6 months is a good time frame to list something as a *spoiler* when commenting about it in public.

Now that depends on a couple things though. If the subject is so huge/global in scope, people all over will be blurting things out. Take the SuperBowl for example. Many non sports fans will talk about it in passing. So if you might not have watched it and want to go home and watch it on your DVR, I suggest you don’t talk to anyone. Don’t listen to the radio/TV–nothing.

I put this Warchief thing on the same level. No, Warcraft is not near as popular as the SuperBowl but as far as games go, you might get a comment from a casual gamer. As, they might have heard from a friend or read it on a message board.

You cannot realistically expect this to stay under wraps. So to that, the user needs to claim some responsibility. Myself, I try and avoid most lore/story spoilers (which means I miss out on a lot of great articles on WI) until I can tackle the content myself.

With this, I went ahead and spoiled myself. I caught some little d-bag asking “Do you want to know who the new Warchief is?” in general chat on Timeless Isle, so I ignored him and tabbed out to check it out for myself. I’d rather find out about it from WoW Insider and get it done right, than let some troll ruin it for me.

I don’t feel like anything was ruined in the process. In fact, it has heightened my awareness to look for other clues as to what may happen in the coming months.

Quick recap: My general rule is 6 months on run of the mill lore, current movies/books. For something major like who won a major sporting event or say, the next expac in WoW–it’s user beware! We can only shield you from so much.