[Bug][Forum] Spoiler tags are ignored in pms

[IchoTolot]

Related to: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4394.msg76927#msg76927

Spoiler tags are not displayed in personal messages without any indication to the sender.

Either they should work as intended or give the sender a message that those don't work in pms.

This has already lead to some misunderstandings!

[Forestidia86]

Spoiler tags are not displayed in personal messages without any indication to the sender.

Just to clarify, it's actually the forum email, that is sent when receiving a PM, where the spoiler tags don't work. Problem remains the same.

It looks like that ('abc' was put in spoiler tag):

"The message they sent you was:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
abc
"

[Simon]

Email is designed (correctly so) for _unformatted_ text. HTML email is rant topic.

Interesting question how to handle spoiler tag in email, will see how we solve that.

-- Simon

[namida]

My proposal here: Replace the spoiler tag with something like "(Spoiler tagged content removed; please check your private messages on-site to read)". This should be easy enough to implement.

A possible alternative is to, alongside clearly indicating what's part of the spoiler tag, to apply some kind of simple cypher to it, most likely ROT13 or similar.

[ccexplore]

Either redaction + removal notice in email text, or maybe additionally also provide the full spoiled text as some kind of attachment in the email.

[ccexplore]

I suppose we could also potentially have the spoiler texts be footnotes at the end of email, separated by sufficient number of line breaks (starting with something like "WARNING ALL SPOILER TEXT BELOW" followed by however many blank lines we feel is enough separation to prevent accidental peeking).  This could be preferred for various reasons over making it an attachment in the email or requiring going on-site.  The original text (before the bottom section of many blank lines + all spoilers) will still have the same redactions and removal notices.

[ccexplore]

More generally, it is good to think about the email notification feature as there are definitely users of it, and experiences that might not seem all that problematic (or totally problem-free) on-site could sometimes be more problematic when in form of email notifications.

For example, during one of the level solving contests Minim hosted, I sent a lot of PMs (and many around the same hour or so IIRC) for every little tweak to the solution and didn't think much of that.  But then Minim made me aware that each such PM was also going to be an email in his inbox, as he is using that notification feature, and while ultimately it's not a huge deal it was also obvious that I should've been more restrained in my PMs (eg. batching), had I been aware of what's happening.

[namida]

I suppose we could also potentially have the spoiler texts be footnotes at the end of email, separated by sufficient number of line breaks (starting with something like "WARNING ALL SPOILER TEXT BELOW" followed by however many blank lines we feel is enough separation to prevent accidental peeking).  This could be preferred for various reasons over making it an attachment in the email or requiring going on-site.  The original text (before the bottom section of many blank lines + all spoilers) will still have the same redactions and removal notices.

There is going to be a setup where that doesn't work. Even using an attachment, some email clients / webmail sites may inline text attachments, so it's not reliable IMO. I think fully redacting the text is the best option here; perhaps even with a link to a text file on the server that the user can click (I'd be very surprised if any email client inlines the text of a link).

The question of how complicated it will be to implement is also a factor. Simply redacting the spoilers and saying "go to the site to view them" is easy enough. Is there anyone who makes heavy enough use of reading their PMs via email, and receives spoiler-tag-containing PMs often enough, that this solution wouldn't be acceptable?

[ccexplore]

Is there anyone who makes heavy enough use of reading their PMs via email, and receives spoiler-tag-containing PMs often enough, that this solution wouldn't be acceptable?

That's a pretty good point.  After all, pretty much every solution mentioned starts with redaction anyway, and then the additional suggestions are all just about whether there might be a need to be able to provide access to the spoilers directly through the email.  So might as well just start with redaction only, and then evolve from there later if needs be.

[namida]

I have a preliminary version of this in place. It does still need a little bit more work - it will successfully hide all spoilers, but might leave some hanging "[/spoiler]" tags (as in, the exact raw text of the tag) when spoiler tags are nested.

I'm going to try and tidy this up, but what's there now should at least achieve the intended purpose.

EDIT: Tidied up now. PM and topic notification emails should now be spoiler-free.