Are we ever going to get proper spoiler tags here?

[Monkeyfinger]

Hate to make a bawwwww thread here, but it's necessary.

This "blacken the text" stopgap doesn't fucking work on a board where half the posts use a gray background. You can skip most of the spoiler post, but... not all of it, and "most" can end up not being good enough.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Better stopgap seems to be to use text that is too small to possibly read. It may be vulnerable to anyone who uses a web browser that forces all text to appear the same size, but whatever. It's pretty easy to c/p it into the nearest text window (the post box works if you're too lazy to open another program!), and yeah, the black text can be annoyingly readable.

I still call for a real spoiler tag feature, though, but make note that Hal is busy and I have no idea who else could set such a thing up.

PS: <size=2pt> blah blah blah </size> for what I just did, replace <> with [].

[Cmdr_King]

Tiny text is only useful if you want to spoilerguard something specific (ie a name).  Paragraphs of it would be ungodly annoying.  Besides, isn't the point of spoiler-guarding just to provide fair warning, not to make it impossible to read in case people ignore the warning and just keep reading for no reason?  I dunno, maybe I'm just absolutely abnormal in my ability to not mind spoilers much.  Certainly everyone else seems to get up in arms about the oddest things...

[Dark Holy Elf]

I dunno, I don't see what's so annoying about this:

Ah, Mimes... probably one of the most useless classes in Final
Fantasy Tactics because of the complexity involved in coordinating
their mimicry.  However, this one job, seldom actually used in the
game, presents a host of new gameflow possibilities due to its
continual copying of whatever action just happened.  Well, sort of.

Whenever a fast action or slow action resolves, a mime-cycle ensues.
During the mime-cycle, each mime in battle will have a chance to
mimic the last action that was taken (call this the last_action).
ONE last_action is stored in the game's memory, along with who
performed that last_action.  Reaction abilities are NOT written into
the last_action.  If the Mime in question is not on the same team
as the person who performed the last_action, the last_action is NOT
mimicked (this prevents mimicking enemy actions).  Note that
mimicked actions do NOT count as fast actions; they, like reaction
abilities, are 'faster than fast'.

Upon mimicking an action, the mime's target(s) get a chance to
react to the mimicry in order determined by the character list;
then the next mime in the character_list mimics.  This goes on
until no more eligible mimes remain.

---

Of all FFT's 400-or-so spells and effects, there is one that
presents more gameflow nightmares than any other -- this is the
Time Mage spell, Quick, and its related reaction ability,
Critical Quick.

When a target is given the 'Quick' status, his CT is set to 100
(or sometimes 154 for mimed Quick -- probably a glitch) and he
receives a 'quick-flag'.  This quick-flag indicates that the
character is in line to receive a quick-turn.  A quick-turn is
distinguished from a normal turn in that it can occur during
ANY phase of battle, not just the CR.

What creates the difficulty are our friends, the Mimes, which
can mimic the Quick spell and hand out quick-flags during the
mime-cycle!  And to boot, Quick can be Counter Magicked (WHY,
Squaresoft?!), which means a mimed Quick can be thrown back
at the mime in the middle of the mime-cycle, creating a really
nasty gameflow mess.

But yeah, given that at least some people mind spoilers significantly, I don't see anything wrong with an -option- to have a decent spoiler guard existing.

[Shale]

The problem isn't how it appears on the page, it's that when the spoilers get too big to fit in one text-entry window you either have to scroll a window-within-a-window to read the entire paragraph or go another window entirely (either opening a text editor or hitting "preview" so you can dedicate the entire thing to the "post" you're "writing" instead of just the quick-reply box. Either way it's way less user-friendly than being able to read the text at normal size in the natural flow of conversation.

[Cmdr_King]

More or less what Shale said.

Anyways, spoiler boxes are good stuff in general, convenient in a number of ways, just don't think they're really a priority since tagging your spoilers is really more important than making sure no one can possibly read it without meaning to.

[Excal]

I don't think anyone is advancing the argument that spoiler boxes are a bad thing.  Just that we don't have any coders who have a lot of free time, nor that having that option is a pressing enough need for them to disrupt their lives in order to add it.  (I am assuming there might be one other person beside Hal capable of this task, though I may also be wrong).  Especially given that we have the expedients of small texts (Highlight, Ctr+C, Alt+Tab, Ctr+V, is not a hard operation to perform) or simply spoiler tags warning you not to read something, I can't really see why there would be a rush.

[metroid composite]

If I did for some strange reason find myself with time on my hands (ha!) I'd try to do it like the MtG.com spoiler boxes (you have a shrink/expand button for them) rather than the text-colour based spoilers from our previous forums.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I don't think anyone is advancing the argument that spoiler boxes are a bad thing. 

I am, if only to be contrarian, and because I don't care. Here I go.

People who need spoiler boxes haven't played enough RPGs to not be surprised by anything that happens in them anymore. BAWWW.