User blog comment:HiccstridFan92/Handling Spoilers for the Third Film/@comment-244709-20180524224622

Hi, admin on KFP Wiki here. Just dropped by and thought I'd give some advice on spoilers since I had to deal with them quite a bit for KFP3. My apologies that this is so long (the TL;DR is the paragraph just below), but hopefully my thoughts can be a little bit useful. XD

To get straight to the point: In nearly eight years of managing wiki content, I have yet to find a surefire, 100% foolproof method of covering spoilers on wikis. With every one I've tried, there's always been a drawback and/or a different party affected in one way or another. I think with the way MediaWiki software is designed, it's overall just not that great for handling spoilers (unlike Reddit that handles spoilers for the most part very well), and therefore I think it'll be impossible to ever come up with a solid method.

Now to go into a little more detail about each one I tried and eventually rejected:


 * A few years ago, I tried a text-hiding template similar to the ones you linked to, but the drawback with this is that the text still shows up on the mobile skin.
 * It's mainly Wikia/"FANDOM" (ugh, branding) that keeps pushing for wikis to follow suit to their mobile skin's layout requirements (like updating infobox template codes), and though I've been personally reluctant about it, I still complied for the most part. I'd highly recommend doing so, because the fact of the matter is: a LOT of readers (at least half, last I heard, and the number's growing) view wikis from their mobile devices. And when they do so, they use FANDOM's "Mercury" skin. You can view any page from this skin by adding  to the page URL. I have it stickied to my bottom bar via this code from the Developers Wiki (personal use only, gotta add it to your global.js).
 * Anyway, so I viewed some of the pages that use text-hiding script, and depending on the template, the text either shows up regardless or is hidden entirely, and there's no option for the mobile user to show/hide it. Text-hiding scripts, therefore, are useless when you want to comply to mobile skin requirements.
 * Another method I tried was from the Dev Wiki: a page-hiding script. I used an older version of the code that did basically the same thing (apart from the occasional code break that made it so it kept the content hidden even after selecting "Yes"), except it had no restrictions on its use. It's now against FANDOM's customization policy to use stuff to cover up an entire page's content, which is exactly what I needed the code for. Hence, it became worthless to me.
 * This code also does not work too well on the mobile skin. I experimented with the code's demo page, and not only is there no show/hide prompting on mobile (just like the text-hiding scripts), but the content is completely hidden unless you select "Yes" in the desktop skin to view it, to which THEN the text appears in the mobile skin. Too much hoop-jumping, too much of a hassle to store/clear cookies - yeah, lots of drawbacks for me. :P
 * The biggest issue I had with spoilers was images. Always had people uploading them left and right, and they'd be right there in the activity feed very quickly consumed by my poor eyeballs, lol. So I devised my own method of masking an image temporarily until it was no longer public spoilers. The mask looks like this. Sigh, lots of drawbacks with this one...
 * First and foremost, lots of people didn't know how to do it, even with my instructions. I ended up doing a lot of the masking myself (thereby spoiling me of the image's content), but then another drawback: lots of people complained that they didn't know how to view the unmasked version. Wasn't much I could do with this except to just teach people individually how to view a file's history, but that itself is too much hoop-jumping for the reader. And after all that, there's of course (again) the drawback with mobile readers: They don't have most of the viewing/clicking options that desktop readers do, so doing this method was a tremendous hoop for them to jump. As opposed to just viewing or uploading an image that takes a mere couple of screen taps.

So that's all the failed stuff. I currently still use only two less-fail methods of managing spoilers:
 * 1) Section spoiler tags via this template. I see you guys use a similar version of this here. I definitely agree that it's not really the greatest method of marking spoilers, but as long as the tag is very noticeable on the page (like ours is a bright red color), then I think it still has potential to do good. However, I notice that it (like the other failed stuff) also doesn't show up on mobile - really nothing that can be done about that. It doesn't really make sense to me that at least the template text would show in the mobile skin, but I guess that's one of FANDOM's filtering they added to the skin: to not show desktop page header tags.
 * 2) Spoiler filler text (see here). This is for use on article comments and forum posts so the text that's previewed on the activity page for that post is instead showing the filler text. Very simple solution for this - no coding or templates required. The only drawback with this is making sure people actually do it, lol. I've had to do a lot of marking myself because someone didn't read our policies before posting.

Again, sorry this is so long, but I think I've detailed just about every adventure of mine in marking spoilers. I hope you can use my experiences to aid in deciding on your wiki's method of hiding spoilers, but just remember to not get your hopes/ambitions up too high. There's going to be holes and cracks no matter what you use, and that's just because wiki software is too complex for spoiler marking.

Feel free to ask me questions if needed. I'm available most days - been working on some Manual of Style stuff on the KFP wiki (blech), but I'm also doing some prepping for the new KFP show airing on Amazon sometime this year. So I'll be having MORE spoiler adventures soon. XD