07-11-2010, 06:58 AM
(vikm) wrote: So, if you stop off at the store and the guys in line are talking about it, is it ok to admonish them for it? It seems absurd to me and if you're going to partake in a public activity, be it shopping or frequenting an online public forum, you relinquish your expectations to be ignorant to the outcome.
Even say it is 100% agreed upon that it's not ok to discuss an outcome of an event immediately afterward. What is the expiration date on that? 24 hours? 48 hrs?
Are you intentionally misunderstanding this? Whether people are free to discuss such topics is not the issue, and many threads discuss sports scores, exciting TV show episodes, cliffhangers, and the like. However, almost everybody who does that has the courtesy to not reveal the ending or spoil the cliffhanger in the subject line of their thread. Many people also clearly label threads with spoilers by typing the word "spoilers". This is just standard forum (or watercooler) etiquette. Intentionally putting spoilers in subject lines, whether it is sports, battlestar galactica episodes, newly released whodunit movies, american idol winners or whatever, is plain rude.