Spoiler Handling

I hope you will try Giganews or UsenetServer for your news subscription -- especially as a holiday present for your friends, family, or yourself!

When reading groups like rec.arts.sf.written and alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer, people frequently don't want to have their enjoyment of works they haven't seen/read yet "spoiled" by finding out what is going to happen in advance. To help them avoid it, posters are encouraged to insert the "spoiler char" (aka form-feed, 0x0C, control-L) -- when newsreaders encounter this character they take various steps to prevent the reader from seeing the rest of the message. Here's pictures and descriptions of what some of those programs do.

Spoiler protection on the Mac:

A picture of MacSOUP showing a spoiler warning
A picture of MT-NewsWatcher splitting a spoiler into sections.
A picture of YA-NewsWatcher splitting a spoiler into sections.
A picture of Xnntp showing a spoiler warning.

Spoiler protection under Win95/NT:

Dialog: before and after. It uses color to hide the text (changing both font and background to a bright red color by default).
WinVN: before and after.
A picture of AdBuster showing a spoiler warning.
A picture of Turnpike showing a spoiler warning.
A picture of an as yet unnamed windows newsreader.

Spoiler protection under unix:

Gnus: before and after
slrn: before and after
tin: before and after
trn: before and after
When XRN sees the spoiler char, it calculates how many lines tall the article window currently is and replaces it with that many newlines to ensure that the text after it (the spoiler char) will be hidden below the bottom of the window until the user scrolls.

Misc. Spoiler protection:

Mozilla has spoiler support in Build ID 2004031605 and above. When it encounters the spoiler char, it turns it into an empty page.
A picture of NewsReader.Com showing a spoiler warning with a WWW-based newsreader.
NewsRog (an Amiga newsreader) before and after.
When Newsview encounters the spoiler char it causes 24 blank lines to be inserted/shown.

The alt.fan.warlord faq has a section on spoilers.

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