oh geez, lj

[eruthros]

So LJ has just instituted a new kind of cut-tag-thing - "lj-spoiler" - which theoretically can be used for in-line expansion and in comments and will be all pretty.

There's just one problem: it's so javascript dependent that there's no indication that it's there if you don't allow lj.com to run scripts. Like, not, "the in-line expansion doesn't work," but flat-out "can see the spoiler text without even a header or indication that it was under a cut." And it also doesn't show up in (most?) email-notifications at all. And some people have suggested that it does not interact well with screenreaders. So that's fun.

I realized this because otherwise some comment exchanges I was looking at made no sense at all. So here are some screencaps + descriptions of how it looks:

I was browsing comments on the news post reading along when I came across this comment thread:



It reads:

blueymcphluey: I am a monkey

reply: blueymcphluey: oh cool, I like it!

reply: blueymcphluey: can somebody do me a favor and respond to this post with a spoiler, just so I can see what it looks like in the email notifications please?

reply: subsequent Hello! :)
ETA: Sorry! Ignore the first comment, I forgot to add the '-' and it broke the tag. This one should work now, though. :)

reply: blueymcphluey oh no... it just shows up as straight text :/ that's unfortunate
thankyou for your assistance though!

And I thought, huh, that's weird, that conversation makes no sense. And then I realized, wait, maybe they're trying out spoiler cuts and I can't see them!

So I allowed javascript, and this is what it looked like:



It reads:

blueymcphluey: [Spoiler (click to open)] (clickable text)

reply: blueymcphluey: oh cool, I like it!

reply: blueymcphluey: can somebody do me a favor and respond to this post with a spoiler, just so I can see what it looks like in the email notifications please?

reply: subsequent: [I did want to test this out, may as well try it here!] (also clickable text)

reply: blueymcphluey oh no... it just shows up as straight text :/ that's unfortunate
thankyou for your assistance though!

So basically, it is an awesome idea and I would love to be able to put spoiler cuts in the comments! But if you use them, when I browse not only will I not see them, I won't even know you meant to use them unless you also say "this is a spoiler!" in the text. Ditto for people who receive text notifications (like me); I don't know what happens when people receive html notifications. But if the point of using spoiler text is to avoid spoiling the person you're commenting to, it may or may not work, depending on how they read/respond to comments.

Comments

[chagrined]

Thanks for this post; I saw LJ's release post about that feature and was mildly curious about how they'd implemented it but was too lazy last night to actually go into the post? ^__^ Heh, so now I don't have to. Too bad it's not something like, how KB does spoiler tags for spoilery content notes/etc. I use that often and it's annoying to look it up each time, haha, so I'd love if DW and/or LJ implemented something like that as an automatic thing.

[eruthros]

Yes, agree! Or the ability to use cut tags in comments would also be cool. But there's such a notifications problem, I think, that would have to be worked out - because plain-text emails are a problem.

[wychwood]

Yes! So annoying. I feel like they've really chosen the wrong fallback option - surely the expectation should be that it should default to being hidden, instead of displayed. It's going to end up that people who are sincerely trying not to spoil their friends by using the new cuts will actually now be hiding things less successfully than before, for all those groups you mentioned. Gah.

[eruthros]

Yes! Absolutely -- if the point of it is to hide information (and not to make posts on the friends page shorter, which is how a lot of people think of cuts) then it should hide information for everyone, or 99% of everyone! Even if I'm a no-javascript-weirdo who fits in that 1%, it should hide the information in notifications at least.

[azurelunatic]

My mental image of the ideal fallback actually harkens back to manual spoiler spaces in emails. Something like:

*** SPOILER: (custom spoiler text) ***
*
*
*
*
*
(text)
*
*
*
*
*
*** END SPOILER ***


It is clearly marked for what it is, looks kind of oldschool but serviceable, contains both scrolling space for visual users so they don't immediately absorb a paragraph of text if they're amazingly fast readers, and readable characters which should with any luck allow a screen reader user the time to say "Whoa, wait, maybe I do not want to read this" (actually, having the "end spoiler" bit as the next tab stop down might allow them to skip it easily once they realized what was up).

[kore]

readable characters which should with any luck allow a screen reader user the time to say "Whoa, wait, maybe I do not want to read this" (actually, having the "end spoiler" bit as the next tab stop down might allow them to skip it easily once they realized what was up).

Such a good point. Accessibility really does not seem to have been a prime concern, here.

[azurelunatic]

I feel very lucky to have been exposed to the amazing group of accessibility advocates in and around Dreamwidth, because it's contagious in the good way.

During my time as an LJ support volunteer looking at beta features, one of the first questions I asked myself was "How are permanent users and early adopters going to react?" because that was who spoke up in news entries if they weren't mentioned. (I don't think I was the only one to have this mental test.)

At DW, it's "what about the screen reader users?" (And usually I am *not* the first one to ask this question.) I like this much better.

[eruthros]

Yes! That would be a much better fallback.

[neotoma]

Apparently the spoiler-cut doesn't work for tablets and smartphones either, which is just programming fail on someone's part.

[eruthros]

Yeah - they clearly haven't thought through what they want it to do at all!

[justhuman]

It probably depends on the phone and how you're accessing LJ. I'm using an Android and was able to see and use the spoiler cuts when I was viewing the full version of LJ. In the mobile version of LJ I saw nothing - just as eruthros described in the post. The image place holders also don't work on the mobile site, but did work on the full version of LJ my Android browser.

[justhuman]

Hey, this is on DW -- paian pointed me to your post.

During my exploration this morning, I found a big issue for crossposters from DW to LJ. As you'd expect, the code doesn't work on DW. What you end up seeing is the spoiler on DW or IJ. I can see a lot of people innocently trying to crosspost and not realizing the impact on Dreamwidth.