Company Blog
Spoilers and Excerpt Tags
by Jason on 08/20/2008
I'm pleased to announce that we've got spoiler markup working in the Forums, and that writers can now tag their excerpts to give readers a better sense for their stories' categories than you can get from just a genre label.
Spoiler markup works by surrounding text within "[spoiler]" and "[/spoiler]" marks. Especially in the "Book Talk" forum, where you can discuss excerpts and books that some people may not have read yet, please be considerate and use this feature if you feel like you have to mention something significant about the story. So for example, if we had a discussion thread about, say, Citizen Kane, you might write:
"and at the very end, you find out [spoiler]Rosebud was his SLED![/spoiler]"
When you encounter one of these while reading, just click on it to see the spoiler.
Excerpt tags work like tags on most blogging sites do; you can tag your excerpts with whatever you want, and people can search against those in the Submissions area. If you've seen so-called "tag clouds" or "folksonomies" on sites like LiveJournal and many others, this is like that. Coming soon, we'll also have tags show up in the search results to help you decide which excerpts you actually want to read.
Writers, please take a minute to edit the details for your excerpts and add tags (go to Writer Zone, click the Edit button for your excerpt, and add tags on the Details tab). Try to choose tags that are relevant to a particular genre and help differentiate your work from other works in the same genre. For example, an excerpt with a genre of thriller might have a tag of political, while another entry in the thriller category might be tagged with courtroom. You can add as many tags as you feel you need to adequately describe your work.
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