Spoilers

[ColinJ]

Having just had my evening's viewing of today's Worlds Road Race ruined by yet another spoiler thread title, I'd like to suggest an addition to the forum guidelines:

No member shall start a thread discussing a current sporting event and reveal the results of that event in the thread title. Members should obey the 'Spoiler' convention where the name of the event is featured with the word 'Spoiler' included.

I'd suggest a warning for the first offence in case anybody was unaware of the convention. If they do it again, give them a 1 week suspension and back that up with a 3 strikes and you're out policy!

I've lost count of how many times people have tried to defend their actions by saying "Don't visit a cycling site if you don't want to see cycling results". Well there are cycling events on almost year round now, so that would pretty much mean that I couldn't ever visit CycleChat or any other similar site unless I sat down during the day of the event and watched the coverage live which doesn't suit my lifestyle, ta very much.

Yours,

Mightily-peed-off,

Hebden Bridge!

 

[Noodley]

100% agree Colin.

 

[ColinJ]

Oh, and to emphasise that new guideline, perhaps Shaun could add a tagline below Racing saying "You must use the spoiler convention when discussing events", with a link to a detailed description of what the spoiler convention is.

By tagline, I mean like the line "From nipping to the shops to racing a crit. Write about it here." displayed below the Rider's Tales forum title.

I know that the mods can't be everywhere at once, but could they step in and edit a spoiler thread title immediately whenever they spot one, and issue a suitable private warning, and make a note of having done so, in order that deliberate repeat offenders can be punished?

 

[Noodley]

I know that the mods can't be everywhere at once, but could they step in and edit a spoiler thread title immediately

I did that today with the Worlds thread. It does not happen often tbh.

 

[ColinJ]

I did that today with the Worlds thread. It does not happen often tbh.

I was away for the last 2 weeks of the Vuelta and made my mates swear not to discuss it in front of me and I didn't read Cycling Weekly for 3 weeks. Amazingly, I managed to get back and watch those 2 weeks without hearing any of the results in advance. It made it far more exciting to watch than simply 'seeing how it was done'!

I think that made me a bit complacent though. I saw that there was already a thread on the World championships with a spoiler warning in the title, so I let my guard down and paid a quick visit to CycleChat this afternoon despite not having watched today's race. There was the result, staring me in the face ...

 

[ColinJ]

I forgot to block the Racing forum from View New Content which is why I ended up seeing the problem thread title today. I used to have it blocked but I think I forgot to redo the block when the forum software was changed.

For anyone else who wants to avoid seeing spoiler threads in Racing, click on Signed in as (Your forum name), My Settings, Forums and Block Forums then select Racing in the list of forums and click Block/Unblock forums.

Be warned - if you go to the forum home page, you will still be able to see the title of the latest thread in the Racing forum in the list of forums.

If you want to read Racing posts after blocking in View New Content, you will then have to navigate to the Racing forum and read through the posts yourself to track the new ones.

That seems like a good compromise to me, but please still obey the spoiler convention folks!