Spoils Introduction/Welcoming Post

Welcome to Spoils! 

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!)