A spoiler block, by which you mean folks could *choose* to read it or not? 'Cause the GM already has the option to keep things secret, and honestly anything that needs to be kept secret from the GM can just be stored offsite. Lord knows Vahla and I email all the time behind Florimel's back. ;)
Okay, now explain to me why one wants to keep a page size down and how this would help. I don't see where it does any good in adventure writeups - the whole point is to jot down everything, yes? The MORE tag helps keep the adventure log itself tidy.
Wiki pages can be kept short by breaking large topics into several pages.
kaeosdad, do you want to be able to use a spoiler block to be able to make things public for those as who might be following your campaign log/wiki and who don't *mind* being spoiled, but at the same time give those who are following and who want to be surprised right along with the players the option *not* to be spoiled?
If so -- The GM-only section doesn't accommodate that since, well, only the GM can see it and s/he doesn't need to avoid spoiling him/herself.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the div class="spoiler" trick (the only one I know) works here.
I would use it to keep the page size smaller. I guess spoiler blocks would be helpful but it's not necessary
The areas it would help are with secret GM stuff such as tracking major NPCs and power groups, which contains their goals, secret backgrounds, and stats. Breaking down the sections into more pages/sub-pages and using more tags would work though, I'm still learning as I go.
What other sites use the div with a 'spoiler' class? That would be fairly easy to implement (assuming the viewer has javascript turned on), and I'm a fan of following conventions set by other sites. Can you point to an example?
In general, I'm not a big fan of doing something like a spoilerblock in this case. It looks like intead of trying to hide spoilers, you're trying to manage the length of the text. One of our goals on OP is to figure out what the underlying need is and then shoot for that. That's why the system is built from the ground up instead of being based on an existing wiki, blog, or forum. None of them had the right mix of what we wanted, so we started fresh.
What about (and no promises here, just brainstorming) some sort of auto-generated table of contents, like on Wikipedia? Instead of using spoilerblocks to shrink data, each wiki page had an autogenerated TOC that jumped to places on the page.
Here's an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roleplaying_game
The TOC shown there (and on every Wikipedia page) is autogenerated based on the header tags (ie. h1, h2, h3, etc.) It allows for quick jumping to the indicated section.
I'm not saying we could make such a thing on OP (we could, but probably won't), but we might be able to make it easy to make a TOC of your own for a page. At the very least, we could provide a quick guide on how to do this with anchors.
I worked on this a little this morning. I've added 'name' to the list of acceptable attributes on a tags. This essentially means that you can place markers on your pages that you can jump to, which would allow for creating a table of contents, like so:
My Table of Contents
Go To Section1
Go To Section2
Then, way down below...
blah blah about section 1
blah blah about section 2
Obviously, this requires some knowledge of HTML, but as you get more and more advanced, that's going to be unavoidable.
My interest in spoiler tags would be more for people who visit/read up on other campaigns. I'm currently running a Rippers game where I've interwoven some of the stuff from the plot point adventures and I try to put spoiler warnings and try to avoid details when I know stuff may have happened that came from the plot points.
This could encourage the community sharing of campaigns while not spoiling module events for people who may want to be surprised when they play in them.
For me, Spoiler Tags would be awesome for one reason: Not page size, or page navigation, but page sorting. I can have a wiki page with every monster my players will need to deal with for a session. Drop each one into a separate spoiler block.
This way when I'm running my game I can minimize every block of monster that I'm not currently using and simply, quickly, and easily, scroll between my monsters without having to either re-navigate, load a separate page, or spend time looking around.
I also do multiple plot threads. With a Spoiler tag I can drop all my threads in separate boxes, and just like the monster example, have what is currently going on open and everything else hidden. I would know that everything that's open is useful.
As for delivering information to my players... Some of my players might not care what the motivation for Baron Von Kickass is, so I can drop that into a spoiler block. Now all my players know that's extra, none essential, information at a glance. If their interested in why the vile Baron Von Kickass is murdering his serfs... they can find out with a click.
Comments
Wiki pages can be kept short by breaking large topics into several pages.
If so -- The GM-only section doesn't accommodate that since, well, only the GM can see it and s/he doesn't need to avoid spoiling him/herself.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the div class="spoiler" trick (the only one I know) works here.
As for the wiki, one example would be a menu-type deal, inside the spoiler block, so it doesn't cover a large chunk of the page.
The areas it would help are with secret GM stuff such as tracking major NPCs and power groups, which contains their goals, secret backgrounds, and stats. Breaking down the sections into more pages/sub-pages and using more tags would work though, I'm still learning as I go.
In general, I'm not a big fan of doing something like a spoilerblock in this case. It looks like intead of trying to hide spoilers, you're trying to manage the length of the text. One of our goals on OP is to figure out what the underlying need is and then shoot for that. That's why the system is built from the ground up instead of being based on an existing wiki, blog, or forum. None of them had the right mix of what we wanted, so we started fresh.
What about (and no promises here, just brainstorming) some sort of auto-generated table of contents, like on Wikipedia? Instead of using spoilerblocks to shrink data, each wiki page had an autogenerated TOC that jumped to places on the page.
Here's an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roleplaying_game
The TOC shown there (and on every Wikipedia page) is autogenerated based on the header tags (ie. h1, h2, h3, etc.) It allows for quick jumping to the indicated section.
I'm not saying we could make such a thing on OP (we could, but probably won't), but we might be able to make it easy to make a TOC of your own for a page. At the very least, we could provide a quick guide on how to do this with anchors.
Thoughts?
My Table of Contents
Go To Section1
Go To Section2
Then, way down below...
blah blah about section 1
blah blah about section 2
Obviously, this requires some knowledge of HTML, but as you get more and more advanced, that's going to be unavoidable.
This could encourage the community sharing of campaigns while not spoiling module events for people who may want to be surprised when they play in them.
This way when I'm running my game I can minimize every block of monster that I'm not currently using and simply, quickly, and easily, scroll between my monsters without having to either re-navigate, load a separate page, or spend time looking around.
I also do multiple plot threads. With a Spoiler tag I can drop all my threads in separate boxes, and just like the monster example, have what is currently going on open and everything else hidden. I would know that everything that's open is useful.
As for delivering information to my players... Some of my players might not care what the motivation for Baron Von Kickass is, so I can drop that into a spoiler block. Now all my players know that's extra, none essential, information at a glance. If their interested in why the vile Baron Von Kickass is murdering his serfs... they can find out with a click.