The upfront presentations are usually around mid-May. The 15th is a good estimate. [That's when FBC's was this year.]

Cindy, as I recall, renewals for shows are usually announced in the spring, usually through March and April. I'm pretty sure, however, that Fox announced the several-season renewal of The Simpsons as early as January.

Casting announcements don't always come with renewal notices, though. A lot of that comes out of the network up-fronts, which are done in late May.

Of course, further cast changes can be made later in the off-season, after the up-fronts. As an example, key members of The Practice appeared at the ABC up-front only to find a week or so later they were losing their jobs.

Would somebody in the industry please correct me if I'm wrong?

The most certain renewals happen the earliest. But everything is announced by the end of May. Even then, sometimes shows can still wind up getting dropped after that (see: The GG spinoff that was picked up, and then it wasn't).

Casts on most shows actually don't necessarily happen all that often, but when they do, they actually get announced as neccesary.

Didn't need to be said twice.

Brenda has tracked down some of the original discussion about spoiler policy. I don't want to rehash the entire argument since the days of yore, but a link might be useful as a reference. I don't know if it's any more conclusive than our current discussion. As I recall, we left some things "to be determined" which is what this vote will do.

But maybe Brenda could throw us a link.

DX made this post in Satre, I think it is helpful in regards to past dealing with summer spoilers:

DXMachina "Bureaucracy 2: Like Sartre, Only Longer" Jul 27, 2003 1:34:52 pm PDT

We've sung this song before it seems.

(It also analyses the whole FAQ thing, but can we ignore that for now?)

I don't know why we can't refashion the Angel Spoiler Lite (much like the way we refashioned the Firefly Spoilers) so that the main discussion/speculations with the knowledge of casting spoilers can occur there. We can decide to do so freely without whitefonting the said main casting spoilers (or anti-spoilers), with a request for the spoiled not to unleash any plot-related stuff or other, more minor casting spoiler information for the duration of the summer.

Yes. This.

Some prior discussion can be found in the first Bureaucracy thread from our early days at WX - [link]

and in Roll Your Own Two, when we were preparing for the move - [link]

The second link is to the final (of what I can find) wording of the spoiler rule, in a post from Jon B.

The first link is an earlier discussion of how spoilers ought to be treated. It does touch on some of the issues before us right now, though to unclear resolution. The last post in the conversation basically restates the broadcast rule but mentions exceptions being made in special cases. Helpful? Maybe, maybe not. [OK, especially not since these are at WX and now I'm having trouble getting to the pages. I have some of the discussion copied, and I can post if people can't get there but want to see it.]

brenda - I'm getting only error messages.

In either of those (and despite the gfc's challenge wording, I think we're looking for most recent spoiler policy discussions that led to the policy in place today, if anyone wants to claim the gfc at this point, I don't know...) are summertime casting news items addressed?

I ask, because I think that's the point here. People who don't want to know casting news items during the TV season, do seek them out in the off-season. So if gfc is going to be invoked, there needs to be a conversation that led to them being covered under the spoiler policy. Casting news is mentioned in the FAQ as written, but not specifically this kind (season regulars announced off-season). That's all that's at dispute. While nobody wanted to try to get character X's appearance mid-season exempt from spoiler rules (which we all agree apply), it seems historically there it was accepted that summertime casting news was okay (at least some times).

They're mentioned, but not really to any resolution (except in the negative sense, that they didn't end up in the definition. And there's reference to another discussion that I haven't been able to track down since I can no longer get into those threads.

What might also be helpful (and I haven't come across yet) is whatever discussion resulted in the establishment of the Spoilers Lite threads.

What is clear is that outside of the stated spoiler policy where the broadcast only rule appears, we have precedent for dealing with this stuff in two ways. One is making an exception to the rule (Buffy's return, ASH's limited schedule), the other is designating an alternate place for discussion (Spoiled on Spike, Torez spoiler). I heartily wish we'd moved on one or the other of these options at the beginning of the summer - but I think most of us on both sides didn't think of them as options for some reason.

Note that I'm searching for these from an informational standpoint, not trying to shut anything down.