Prevent questions with movie/tv shows/game spoilers from appearing in the hot questions list

Can users posting such questions be asked to label those with a tag (such as 'spoilers') and then somehow have the network hide those from the "hot questions" list? Or possibly format them differently?

In general, what you propose there is a manual method to mark/format questions with possibly spoiling titles in some kind of way. Yet, this would only be for facilitating a possible filter in a feature external to the actual site and would not help with e.g. the questions lists on that site itself (except if it would implement the same filter). The far easier, less intrusive and much better solution would simply be to require users to write question titles which don't spoil anything. But you know what, this is already done on the sites you mention.

The two sites you listed in your question (namely Science Fiction & Fantasy and Movies & TV, not sure about Arqade, though, but most probably too) already have a running, enforced and working policy of not giving spoilers in question titles. So what you propose is actually already implemented in a much better and less intrusive way. Of course, as with any other manual policy this is entirely to be enforced by the sites' users through manual edits and if they don't do it that's bad luck. But this would be exactly the same for any other way of manually marking such questions and since there already are established manual policies to tackle this, there's just no need to add another one. And without manual intervention there is no way for the system to know what a spoiler actually is (which is an inherently subjective definition anyway).

The only option for automatic exclusion is then to exclude those sites from the HNQ completely. But this of course has to be done on a personal level (since the system can't just exclude a valid site from the HNQ because some user might possibly regard some question from that site as a spoiler) for which there already are other existing proposals.

Here's a userscript to hide individual sites from your HNQ list.

All credit to SQB and phantom42 from Sci-Fi and Fantasy SE. (I'm not a coder, so any questions, complaints, or improvements on this script should be addressed to them on the linked meta post.)

// ==UserScript==
// @name        HNQ SciFi  Hider
// @description Hides SciFi in the Stackexchange HNQ

// @include /^https?:\/\/(.*\.)?stackoverflow\.com/.*$/
// @include /^https?:\/\/(.*\.)?serverfault\.com/.*$/
// @include /^https?:\/\/(.*\.)?superuser\.com/.*$/
// @include /^https?:\/\/(.*\.)?stackexchange\.com/.*$/
// @include /^https?:\/\/(.*\.)?askubuntu\.com/.*$/
// @include /^https?:\/\/(.*\.)?mathoverflow\.com/.*$/
// @include /^https?:\/\/discuss\.area51\.stackexchange\.com/.*$/
// @include /^https?:\/\/stackapps\.com/.*$/

// @require     https://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js
// @version     1
// @grant       none
// ==/UserScript==
$('#hot-network-questions ul li div.favicon-scifi').parent().hide();

(This one hides SFF questions from the HNQ; to hide M&TV questions, replace favicon-scifi by favicon-movies, or whatever other site you want not to see.)

That seems like a lot of work for something that still won't solve your problem. To summarize:

• Spoilerific sites already have (and follow) rules about no spoilers in titles, which is all you see on the HNQ.

• Spoilerific sites already have (and follow) rules about using spoiler markup in post bodies.

• You're asking for manual use of a meta tag (against SE norms, additional work) to block the question from HNQ entirely (overkill) lest you bypass the spoiler warning and look anyway (avoidable). If we need to do anything, there's a better way than what you propose.

Right now you're asking everybody to forgo questions that would otherwise be shared because of a concern about spoilers in some of them that can be avoided by not clicking (or hovering, if you do click). Shouldn't these sites, and the authors of their hot questions, have the same opportunity for network-wide exposure that others have?

Further, it wouldn't solve your problem. Meta-tags like this are discouraged across the network, so getting users to do it here for reasons external to their site is going to be an uphill battle. Instead, these sites rightly focus on things that matter to them. Manual, extrinsic meta-methods don't work.

If we decide that entirely blocking questions with spoilers is desirable, we don't need to push sites to do meta-tagging. The system could automatically filter from the HNQ any question that contains a spoiler block. That at least would be an automatic method; it relies on people using those spoiler blocks, but sites that care about spoilers are already enforcing that. I believe the HNQ already filters out questions containing certain words in their titles, so maybe adding this check is feasible.

Barring that, I recommend that you not click those questions, or that you use a userscript to filter your own HNQ list. Three days after The Last Jedi came out, what are the odds that an HNQ about it didn't contain spoilers, after all?

Related:

• Weight Hot Network Questions sidebar by viewer

• Can you filter out certain SE sites from the hot questions list?

• How to avoid "Hot Network Questions" on the sidebar

Considering the sheer amount of things one can be spoiled by that doesn't seem like an issue that should be solved by the Stack Exchange network. There's at least the dimensions of what and when, possibly where.

Just consider this example:

Bob, like many others doesn't like to get spoilers about Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, the Marvel stuff and for some reason Suits. On the other hand he couldn't care less about Breaking Bad and everything from DC on TV and cinema but loves the graphic novels regarding the latter (and uses that knowledge to avidly answer DC stuff).

Also Bob doesn't live in the US, so any given TV-series or movie reaches him from a few weeks earlier to six months later compared to the US release date.

To make Bob happy all those factors had to be considered. And that's just Bob. One could also easily image people only caring about spoilers regarding character deaths or hookups but not caring about the more general events.

Summarizing, the configuration variables are too many.

Thus, that doesn't seem like anything SE should tackle. However there are fantastic browser addons out there which tackle exactly that sort of thing. For example unspoiler me, which allows you to configure the stuff you don't want to be spoilered about yourself. And it works on any site, not just Stack Exchange.

Another option could be to hide questions with tags that a user has added to their ignored tags from appearing in the HNQ list for that user. So if I know I haven't seen a movie yet, and I don't want to see spoilers for it (but I'm fine with still seeing questions for other movies or other questions from that Stack site), I would add that movie to my ignored tags, and wouldn't have to worry about spoilers. Then once I see the movie and am not worried about spoilers anymore, I can remove the tag from the ignored tags list.

This way, each user can specify what they don't want to see. It wouldn't just be useful for spoilers, either. For example, it would keep questions for programming languages I'm not interested in on SO from appearing in my HNQ, and leave room for other, slightly less hot questions that I might personally be more interested in.

EDIT: As pointed out in a couple of the comments, right now tags are created and tracked on a site-by-site basis (which I didn't fully understand when I first posted this answer). My suggestion really would work best if (at least some) tags are global between all stack sites, which I could see being a non-starter in a lot of people's minds. Still, I think it's a valid suggestion that could work (albeit with a lot of effort), so I'll leave this here.

Building on Jorn's suggestion, what about allowing sites to manually opt-out of the Hot Network Questions list?

Over on Science Fiction & Fantasy, there has been some discussion about willingly opting out of the HNQ list. It's clear that many communities considers spoilers to be an important issue (1,2,3,4).

Allowing each site to willingly decide whether they want to participate seems like a simple, low effort way of alleviating the problem.

While it's not a perfect solution by any means, if a site's community willingly asks to opt out of HNQ, I see no reason not to provide them the option.

If successful, this feature could later be expanded to give moderators the ability to hide either specific questions or tags from spoiler-heavy series, rather than opting out the entire site.

(For example: Temporarily hiding Game of Thrones questions while the season finale is airing)

To start with, functionality that could allow this already exists and is proven to work: questions having titles containing words like "incest" etc are blocked by the system from getting to HNQ.

If the list of such stop-words is expanded with "(spoiler)" this would allow users with edit privileges easily and quickly drop the troublesome questions from the hot list by adding it to the title.

At the sites that have (as pointed in another answer) a policy to edit spoilers out of the titles this would additionally serve as an indicator for concerned editors that title needs to be improved.

As a side note, while immediately editing a question to make a proper spoiler-free title may look like a better approach at a first glance, in the context of proposed feature it really isn't. If you think of it, making real, substantial improvements to titles is time and effort consuming while dropping from HNQ is typically about quick simple actions.

In that sense, adding "(spoiler)" to the title can be considered as sort of pragmatic intermediate step that relieves site regulars from need to hastily work on needed editing only to serve an irrelevant network-wide feature (hot questions) and allows them to focus on difficult part of this work without urgency.

It is interesting to observe how similar approach works at Math.SE, where they also have a policy and running effort to improve uninformative titles and in the same time use quick simple edits that inject MathJax into title with the purpose of dropping the question from HNQ (example).

I'm assuming the HNQ is generated completely automatically, without anyone ever having to review questions. One option might be to make it so that a moderator or a set number of high rep users need to approve sending a question to HNQ. It could probably be tied into the review queues that SE already has. That way, the chances of a user familiar with the "No spoilers in titles" rules editing the title to remove spoilers increases significantly. Additionally, I've noticed that every once in a while a pretty bad question ends up in HNQ (for any one of a variety of reasons completely separate from spoilers), and a review queue could keep those questions out as well. Of course, the downside is it is a lot more work for mods and reviewers to do. Also, as noted in the comments, this just increases the exposure to spoilers for the mods and reviewers.

Introduce Inline Spoiler Markdown, Make Available in Titles

Currently, in question and answer text, we can add spoiler markdown to hide text until the user mouses over the spoiler text with >!, e.g.

>! This is how you create a spoiler currently.

This is how you create a spoiler currently.

It creates a block through to the end of the line, which wouldn't be suitable for a title, where only a specific inline segment would need to be hidden.

How about adding a new feature: inline spoilers, available wherever you can add a normal spoiler and also in question titles? Inline spoiler text would be in between >! and !<. (Other reasonable delimiters would be fine.)

E.g.

Why did Darth Vader tell Luke >! sooper-sekrit plot reveal here! !< in Star Wars ESB?

Then, anywhere a question title is rendered -- in a questions list, tagged questions list, hot network questions, etc. -- the spoiler rendering would become effective. Perhaps it would look something like this:

Why would Darth Vader tell Luke in Star Wars ESB?

The spoiler section would be inline instead of a block that takes up an entire line.

This way, if a question that contains a spoiler in its title appears on the Hot Questions list, the spoiler is not initially rendered, but any user can mouseover the spoiler to reveal the contents at their discretion.

Users posting a question with a spoiler should know to use spoiler markdown already; they would simply use this new feature in the title of their question also. It would be easily edited into an existing question title when needed.

No filtering of the Hot Questions list would be necessary; they could still be displayed, with spoilers hidden.

The biggest problem here is that many titles are effectively clickbait. You see the interesting title (that may have no spoiler in it) and off you go looking to see what its about, and whoops - there's a huge spoiler.

I clicked this one today

Why was Spider-Man the only person to feel any physical sensation from this event in Infinity War?

Why was... don't go there if you've not seen the current Avengers movie, really.

The post itself is good, spoiler tags hiding the relevant bits. But what I think would make sense is just to add a 'spoiler' tag that can be added to posts with spoilers (manually is fine - people put spoilers in the text, they'd be responsible enough to add the tag), and then to exclude all posts with this tag from the hot network question lists.

Simple? Easy? Effective. If you wanted to modify it, you could allow spoiler posts back on, if it was older than a year - but I guess by then it won't be showing up on the HNQ list anyway.

This has been a problem for several years now, and it doesn't look like we're closer to a solution. So:

Let's ban at least Movies, Scifi and Arqade from the HNQ sidebar

Feel free to suggest other sites too.

While it has some negative effect on exchanging traffic between network sites, I think the spoiler issue on completely unrelated sites is worse.

Some other solutions have been discussed, here is why they don't work:

• Have a 'rule' that disallows spoilers in question titles: Won't work because there will always be (new) users who will (probably unintentionally) break it, and people will be spoiled before the question can be edited.
• Have a mandatory spoiler tag: We don't like this type of meta tag that doesn't actually describe a question. Previous argument also applies, users will unknowingly forget to apply the tag.
• Install an external script or plugin to block the HNQ bar: More of a workaround than a solution, and moves the problem to the user while the source should be fixed.