Our published notice that the #wow-bfa-spoilers channel in Discord would be retired generated some good discussion about spoilers in g-chat, Discord, etc. Here’s some general guidance on how we are thinking about spoiler chat.
For pre-release content, like the BfA beta, we’d like to limit spoiler talk in general channels. In that kind of situation there may be those of us with no access to the content and the desire to experience it as part of the release. Using a spoiler channel in Discord is an option for those situations if there’s a large enough population of people that want to talk.
Once the content is released, we want people to have the fun talking about the current content while in game playing the content. Yes, there’s a bit of a gray area if you are a world first type and it might be nice in that case to hold off on any major spoilers for a moment, but in general, most people are playing through the content at a reasonable pace and most of the big spoilers happen pretty quick as the content drops.
What we want to avoid is forcing g-chat and our main Discord channels to be a ‘zone of silence’ for some indefinite period. We’d also like to avoid tasking officers with being some kind of spoiler police and causing a bunch of friction.
For those of us that might be going a bit slower in the content and also wanting to live the 100% spoiler free life, we recommend minimizing g-chat for a little bit. That individual control we hope will give those that need it a bit of a quiet space when and where they need it.
Thanks for the discussion!