Welcome to Spoils!
What is this strange, wondrous place?
What is this strange, wondrous place?
Something of a lounge for the Mark Does Stuff sites, this is a blog
created, run and frequented by fans of MDS (and Mark himself!), where
you can discuss current projects, start your own projects (known as
"verbing"), and talk about pretty much anything so long as you abide by
the site rules,
which you can always find at the top right hand corner of the blog.
Please note that these rules are taken very seriously because just as
with Mark's sites, we strive to create a safe space for people to hang their hats.
How does it work?
Every Sunday,
a new post goes up detailing the schedule for the following week of
Mark Reads and Mark Watches. Members of the community post in the
comments of the current post using the same IntenseDebate system as
Mark's sites do, which enables threading and sorting for easy-to-follow
discussions. It's basically a message board within a comments section
that migrates from post to post, so obviously we're pretty cool.
Holy shit there are a lot of comments.
I know, right? It's a very active community, which is nice because it's also the best one out there.
How do I get involved?
Just start posting! Introductory posts are well-received here, as
we're always happy to make more friends. If that's not your style, you
can just be a stealthy newbie and pretend like you were here all along
(because in our hearts, you were).
What's all this "collapsing" stuff about?
When a new post is created, there must be 25 comments before the threads
collapse. This is an issue if you're posting plain-text spoilers in the
reply of an uncollapsed thread, as you can inadvertently spoil someone
and despite the name of the site, that is like, the opposite of what we
want. It's Spoils etiquette to wait until the threads are collapsed
before you post plain-text spoiler replies, but fortunately you should
not have to wait long because there's usually a "collapse
the threads" post that achieves its goal pretty quickly.
What's the deal with all the nuns?
In order to avoid spoiling people, we use rot13 to cipher portions of our text in comments, with a plaintext warning beforehand so that people know whether or not it's safe to uncipher. "ahahahaha" becomes "nunununun", so "nuns", "nunning" and variants on that theme have become shorthand for laughing at unprepared people.
Anything else I should know?
If you make a Verbs thread, you can request its timestamp to be changed
so that you can find it easily on the first page of the comments when
sorted by "Date". Otherwise, most sort by "Last Activity" for that
authentic message board feel.
In addition to doing our best to maintain a safe space for our
community, we also want for this site to be as accessible as possible.
To accommodate our vision-impaired members, we strongly encourage you to include descriptions for any images that you post. We
won't penalize you for not doing so (we've forgotten to do it, too),
but it's a very simple and quick way to be more inclusive and allow
everyone to follow along, especially since we're a silly bunch who
sometimes have entire conversations in reaction images. For tips on how
to properly describe an image, please refer to this guide by the American Foundation for the Blind.
In a similar vein, if you have any tips for improving your
accessibility, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate
you! You can contact us either publicly via the comments, or if you're not comfortable with that you can also reach us through our Tumblr inboxes (our tumblrs are linked in the ID profiles that appear when you hover over our usernames).
For more information on posting using IntenseDebate, take a look at Mark's handy FAQ page!
(many thanks to MoElskerDeg for kindly writing this!)
