Nutty, they aren't more important they are simply more fragile.

You can't make that judgment. You're unwilling to either learn who is on a show you watch, or evade your eyes 'til the show starts, in a thread where the conversation is trickling on good days, and then, half the time it's not about the show. There are people that want to talk about the show, not spoilers, just who is in the regular cast and wonder aloud what will happen, and they have no place to do this without being spoiled.

Cindy, talking a little below your knowledge does not ruin your enjoyment of the show.

Talking above your knowledge (and thereby increasing it) does.

At the same time, the Buffy thread was being much more strict about the casting news for Dawn and Riley.

What does the proposal actually say about new characters? I was under the impression it only applied to characters who had been around as of the end of the season before.

If it doesn't apply to new characters, Dawn would still have been a spoiler. (And if it does apply to new characters, the fact she's Buffy's sister, the key, etc., would have all been spoilers as plot points, so about all we would have been able to do is to confirm that a teenaged female actress was joining the cast. She could've been Giles' illegitimate daughter or the vampire successor to the anointed one.)

Riley leaving the show would also still have been a spoiler, because he left in midseason and the consensus seems to be that if a change like that is announced during the summer, it's still a spoiler.

Trudy, but do you see my point? Where your (or any individual's, or small group of people's) dictating a new strictness of policy for all, feels unfair to others? Makes others (me, e.g.) feel left out, frustrated, and unable to be a part of the whole group's decision-making?

I mean, we're trying to balance feelings of the two camps. I keep feeling like the spoilerfree camp is making a claim to greater rights in decision-making, because it is spoilerfree. Whereas, I don't see clear to any one Buffista having greater rights than any other.

Cindy, talking a little below your knowledge does not ruin your enjoyment of the show.

It ruins the enjoyment of the conversation. There's nothing to talk about. This is a message board. It isn't even a necessary tool to watch the show. A message board is a necessary tool to post messages about a show.

And, you can't make value judgments about how other people feel Trudy. Spoiler people were reminded that constantly over the last few days. There's no reciprocity?

Cindy, you won't enjoy the show if you can't thoroughly discuss on main thread (as opposed to back channel or a new thread created for the purpose)?

I didn't realize I was making a rash assumption.

And what DO you consider granfatherable if not a policy which predates all of us?

And what DO you consider granfatherable if not a policy which predates all of us?

Lots of things are grandfatherable. Things that make this many of us yell this much for this long, NSM. Right now, we need to vote for the sole purpose of making people feel like they are contributing to their own community, and not left out.

I think that right there is a good enough reason to suspend any grandfathering legislation, whether it applies or not.

The policy wrt to summertime casting announcements, so far seems nil. Buffy and Giles were allowed. Nothing was mentioned in slug or FAQ.

Spoilers lite was possibly created as a solution to the Spike Soul/Vampire question, not a summertime casting news issue.

And just to prove that no Buffista discussion ever ends...

David S. - 10:17 am PST - Jun 22, 2000 - #6368 of 10021

Hmmm, maybe we need to making a list ruling on what constitutes spoiler info during the off-season...

Oooh, dig my prescience.

And what DO you consider granfatherable if not a policy which predates all of us?

Not Cindy, but: something we -- the people here, the people who built the Phoenix -- discussed seriously. The war thread, for example, or our methods of dealing with unruly posters. Not something we probably inherited from Mary Beth Williams or the X-Files thread and have routinely failed to take literally in the past.

It sounds as though if you go even further back, to summer 1998, we *were* talking about similar casting news (Angel's return) pretty freely, so we could argue that the true intent of the Buffista forefistas was always to openly discuss summertime casting news.