Are you being shy?

[Tamien]

Also, Alicorn very nicely implemented some spoilertext features! If only part of your post is possible-spoilers, you could maybe just spoilertext the part in question and post it wherever seems appropriate?

[Alicorn]

I don't really understand how spoiler-averse people work, so I'm at a bit of a loss for how to define policy on it. But yes, Spoilerland is always fine and spoilertext is there for you.

[Tamien]

I am highly spoiler-averse and could outline my preferences for how spoilers be treated, but I could not claim to speak for all spoiler-averse people.

[Marri]

I am highly spoiler-averse and could outline my preferences for how spoilers be treated, but I could not claim to speak for all spoiler-averse people.

I would personally appreciate such a thing, even with the caveat! I am also somewhat confused by spoiler averse people. (This may or may not explain my tendency to reread my favorite books so often they literally fall apart.)

[Tamien]

I actually frequently re-read! What I am trying to preserve by being spoiler-averse is the experience of the first time reading a thing, not knowing what's going to happen and trying to figure it out, having the surprises actually be surprising, and so on. Thereafter I very much like to re-consume media and try to look for deeper things that I missed the first time around and can now understand the significance of with my broader perspective. The first time is for the joy of finding out what happens, and later ones are for finding out how and why. The best things for me are those which are both engrossing on the first consumption and which stand up to further scrutiny later.

In any case, I am okay with vague overview type information, but not with information on the level of specific events. "Bad things happen to John but he's okay in the end" is generally fine; "Anna beats up John with a rusty shovel" is pretty much never okay. Exceptions to vague overview information is when it really badly contradicts a belief the author intends the reader to explicitly hold before the reveal - if the story is crafted such that I'm supposed to believe "Anna killed John with a rusty shovel" then knowing "he's okay in the end" counts as a spoiler.

My general preference is for any specific event-level information or information that would count as a "reveal" (contradicts something the audience is intended to believe for part of the story but not at the end of the story) to be redacted using spoilertext. The general difference in how I would use the "spoilers" tag and the "spoiler-text" tag is that I would use the "spoilers" tag for short (on the order of a sentence) things or things where the general type of contents of the spoilertext can be determined from context, while I would use the "spoiler-text" tag if I were going to give long (on the order of a paragraph) spoilers or ones that would need content labeling in addition to the context of the rest of the post in order to decide whether to read the spoilertext.

[Marri]

Interesting. Thanks!

(So saying "This is Alicorn and bad things will happen to people a lot" is not a spoiler then xDD)

[Tamien]

Indeed it is not! I am okay with general overviews and content warnings because they are major components of book recommendations and if I weren't okay with them I would never know what to read at all. (On the other hand, if a story comes to me through highly reliable recommendation systems like friends who know me very well, then I do prefer to not even have that information because I can trust that the story has been vetted for having Stuff I Like and not having Stuff I Don't Like and I can go into it with no other expectations.)

In any case, I have now read enough Alicornfic that I have built up my own belief of "This is Alicorn and bad things will happen to people a lot", so telling me that wouldn't count as spoilers at all, but even if someone had told me that before I had read any Alicornfic, I would have found it useful information and not a spoiler.