Using Spoiler Tags

[Fishface]

When you don't want to ruin the end for everyone, which is important around here, try using a spoiler tag. It's a link you create using html, with the word SPOILER in pointy brackets before the spoiler, and /SPOILER in pointy brackets at the end. It looks like this:

(view spoiler)[ it was Colonel Mustard in the library with a lead pipe (hide spoiler)]

[K.A.]

If you want to see which html tags you can use here, you can also click on the (some html is ok) link above your posting box. It will show you how to do Things.

[Shelley]

With true crime, isn't it hard to know what is a spoiler? Some books are about famous cases and everyone knows the plot and ending. Often the cover and the title itself is a "spoiler" ... we know the "who done it" . Can you give me some points so I will know what would be consider a spoiler? Thanks!!

[Fishface]

I agree that in recent years, publishers have totally forgotten that people might like to learn the facts of a case by reading the book, not just the jacket blurb or the photo section. Once upon a time it just said (to give a real example) HELTER SKELTER: THE TRUE STORY OF THE MANSON MURDERS, and the jacket blurb said something general like "This was the most incredible killing of our time. Over 7 million copies sold. Told by the prosecutor who tried the case!"

Examples of spoilers, by my lights, are:

Telling you who did it, of course! And why! And how! Can't you just let me read the book???

People who summarize the whole book for you when they review it, including the bombshells, needs to be jailed. Don't tell me the name of the surprise prosecution witness and exactly what they revealed on the stand, and how that made the jury decide to form a lynch mob and kill the defendant's wife. That stuff definitely needs to be tucked inside a spoiler tag!

Telling you any of the twists and turns, say, when the defendant nearly got off on DNA evidence that turned out to have been mixed up with some other guy's, saving his butt at the last minute.

Anything along those lines is a spoiler.