Permanent spoiler mark.

[Empanadas de Dulce de Leche]

Some people haven't gotten around playing all games, some scenes are incredibly memorable and surprising and are best left as a surprise to the first time player.

Spoiler tags expire after 4 weeks and can't be applied to old screenshots.

I suggest adding a setting to mark a screenshot as a spoiler permanently, maybe even adjusting the time period before the spoiler tag vanishes.

It's just courtesy to other players that don't want their games to spoiled.

[Black Blade]

I do agree, and honestly did not know the spoilers even expire..
Even that i assume its made like that just to block it from showing on the activity/hub to spoil, and not from the profile

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

I don't see why they made expiring spoiler marks a thing in the first place.

The only explanation I can come up with is that it was made by people who had gameplay-centric and multiplayer-oriented games in mind.

Because expiring spoiler marks is a pretty bad idea for any game that is very plot-centric.

And it's worse now that Steam's started to sell visual novels and other games that have relatively little in the way of mechanical gameplay but are very story heavy (e.g. To The Moon).

In fact, I'm posting this now because I just ran across someone who said they searched the screenshots for a particular image and end up running into a ton of spoilers.

[Empanadas de Dulce de Leche]

NOTICE ME GABEN SEMPAI

[Caethyril]

I agree. For any game with a plot that is either community-driven or continuously in development, it might make sense. But that is by no means the majority of games on Steam.

I suspect that the automatic-tag-removal routine is bugged or something; the manual "remove spoiler tag" option seems to work fine, as many times as I like (though have not yet tested leaving a 4+ week gap after removing manually). Also, unless I'm missing something, stopping this auto-tag-removal feature would cost nothing in terms of cloud storage, since there must already be a flag in storage for all screenshots that can no longer be marked with spoiler tags.

This has been an issue for years. Fingers crossed and all that, though.

[snaps ツ]

Yeah ur right

[Oberon's Top Guy]

Maybe they could make it to were you can select a time amount that you should play a game in order to veiw it without spoilers?
What I mean is "This picture contains spoilers not reccomended for under 20 hours of gameplay."

[ЧЕМПИОН]

я

[Caethyril]

Bumping, just for information: I quickly spoiler-tagged one of my screenshots and immediately un-tagged it back when I last posted here. Checked today and I can't spoiler it anymore. Definitely looks like a rogue boolean.

[AwesmePersn]

This need to be fixed in my opinion as in some games, all the lower level people haven't gotten to a certain point will be heavily spoiled and potentially have a part of the story line ruined for them. I mean, why would spoilers be temporary? Spoilers will remain to be spoilers for at least someone.

[Diprosalic]

This is a great idea

[Caethyril]

Originally posted by AwesmePersn:

This need to be fixed in my opinion as in some games, all the lower level people haven't gotten to a certain point will be heavily spoiled and potentially have a part of the story line ruined for them. I mean, why would spoilers be temporary? Spoilers will remain to be spoilers for at least someone.

Exactly. I can't fathom why Valve made them temporary in the first place (more work to do that than make them permanent, right?). Some obscure marketing reason, I guess.

[Washell]

Spoilers don't spoil.

[Akagami]

mm

[Caethyril]

To clarify (for those avoiding spoiling themselves): the current spoiler system appears to initiate a 4-week countdown after a given screenshot is tagged as a spoiler. Regardless of further operations on that screenshot, when this countdown reaches zero, the spoiler tag is removed if present and cannot subsequently be re-applied. This applies separately to each screenshot for each user.

Originally posted by Washell:

Spoilers don't spoil.

Here is a link to the actual paper: pages.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Publications_files/Spoilers.pdf.

I disagree: over-generalisation, and study seems dubious. Apologies in advance for the explanatory essay, the tone of which is not meant to be aggressive. =)

First and most obviously, everyone thinks differently. Just to get that out of the way with. Also, everyone will want something different from story-based media: some will want to be told how a known outcome came to be, others might want something to think about and puzzle through, yet others may want more of an emotional rollercoaster. There are many different types of story, written in different ways, catering to such different audiences.

Sure, you can argue that Valve should go with the majority vote (something else with which I would disagree, providing the minority is sufficiently numerous...), which if you are right is to just ignore the ability to have spoilers in the first place. However, since evidence suggests timestamps in some format are already being recorded in the current system, it should be trivial to have (in addition to current functionality) a "permanent spoiler" option that sets the timestamp to some date 100 years (or something) in the future. Or, at minimum, to simply allow re-application of a spoiler tag to screenshots whose spoilers have expired. No? =|

Criticism of the actual paper: participants of the study were undergraduates, comprising a female to male ratio of around five to one, all from the "psychology subject pool" at a single university, reading short stories rather than novels. Each story's mean rating was derived from the scores submitted by "at least 30 subjects". How informed were the candidates of the experiment's hypotheses/metrics? With what instructions were they provided? Were the reading environments, time constraints, text size, and presentation uniform across all candidates? If not, have these (and any other) differences been accounted for in some way that has not been mentioned? So many questions, but then, this is an academic paper. =P

On a personal level regarding the article: "Instead, we feel embarrassed by our gullibility, the dismay of a prediction error". Do you? I don't. I've faced "prediction errors" pretty much every single day of my life, and doubtless will continue to do so, but do not feel like I am living in a constant state of embarrassment of dismay. I acknowledge the failure (with anything from content assent through resignation to angry outbursts, largely depending on my mood at the time) as a lesson learnt. And the article does not even bother to mention the sensation (pleasurable for me) of correctly predicting (without being told) what would happen, something else that happens every single day of every thinking person's life.

The article finishes on a note of "our hypothesis is that surprises are disliked, but maybe only in some areas" which I, given my scientific background, read as a fairly typical "we are pretty much clueless, but we'd love more funding". XD

Surprises (unspoiled) are great for giving a sense of immersion, but again, such escapism isn't for everyone. From my experience, I'd guess that goes double for most psychology students. But, eh, I've said enough.

[Quick!SaveTheChildren]

I agree with this. Actually, I didn't even know the spoiler covers expired until I was browsing my screenshots the other day. It doesn't make sense that you can't put it back either. Was it to prevent abuse, or to make sure a game hub wasn't filled with covered images?