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.

OK, as a point of interest, this is some of what was discussed on WX (Bureaucracy, March 2002) - the part I had copied down at the point I could still get in.

Lyra Jane: FWIW, i like the idea that a spoiler has to be 1)a plot point and 2)specific. But I'm the freak who doesn't think actor's contracts are spoilery, so I know I'll be shouted down on this issue yet again.

And no, Buffy being miserable is not a spoiler - it's pretty much the show's premise. If, say, I posted that Buffy's been miserable since she broke up with Anya, that would be a spoiler.

DavidS - It's worth noting where your tolerance is, but I think the lowest threshold rules for Spoilers.

Lyra Jane - Definitely, Hec.

John H -

I'm the freak who doesn't think actor's contracts are spoilery

Their contracts might not be spoilery, but the absence of a contract could be the spoileriest of all...

Lyra Jane -

the absence of a contract could be the spoileriest of all...

I agree that it woud be a spoiler on one level if, say, we learned that NB wasn't signed for next season. But OTOH, it doesn't mean much specific for the plot -- Xander could die, or he could be moving to New York.

John H -

it doesn't mean much specific for the plot

I think the sudden absence of Xander, for whatever reason, is something people would not want to be told about in advance.

Lyra Jane - But what about our discussion of ASH's moving back to England ans plans for his own show last summer? IIRC, that was pretty much seen as non-spoilery, perhaps because it was so widely known.

DavidS -

But what about our discussion of ASH's moving back to England ans plans for his own show last summer? IIRC, that was pretty much seen as non-spoilery, perhaps because it was so widely known.

It's true. Maybe because it happened in the off season - felt different than Seth Green leaving. We knew they were going to write him out of the show. It wasn't inevitable with SG.

Sophia Brooks - Didn't Joss announce it? I know he announced Buffy coming back from the dead, which also would technically have been a spoiler-- but I remember both of thoe things being white-fonted for awhile and then us just sort of agreeing that everyone knew both of those things. However, this year when a good deal of us got accidently spoiled by the Tores spoiler, we didn't let the others know.

Angus G - I'm reading the show threads in time delay...just wondering, is the infamous "Torez spoiler" still lurking on one of them, ready to claim yet another victim, or has it been deleted?

Sophia Brooks - ita deleted it or perhaps whitefonted it, as far as I know.

s.a. - I think she sucked it, then deleted it. do NOT interpret that literally.

have we made any concrete decisions regarding spoilery? because we seem to have managed fairly well with our semi-lax spoiler policy so far: if you think it's a spoiler, whitefront it. otherwise post in nafda or the spoiler thread.

Lyra Jane - The decision as I understand it is the same as always, that it's a spoiler if it hasn't been broadcast on UPN/the WB, with some exceptions on a case-by-case basis -- e.g., no one seriously thought Buffy was gonna stay dead.

If nothing else, David's prescience is confirmed.