Announcement : Spoilers Policy

The Thirteenth Depository's TGS Spoilers Policy



With the release of The Gathering Storm not that far ahead, Jason Denzel's review published (and now with several imitators on various WOT MBs, so far with fake reviews), the possibility Tor sends out a few advanced reading copies after all and, of course, the strong probability an ebook of the prologue gets available to everyone next month (still no official word or confirmation on this yet, but rumours last spring have tied the prologue's release, or the announcement about its release, to the DragonCon convention in early september) we felt it might be time to publish our Spoilers Policy.

As you may have noticed, we've mentionned freely so far in our posts the general information about the length, structure, cover blurb etc. that surfaced about the upcoming book, that information released by Robert Jordan himself years ago - or along the way by Harriet McDougall, Brandon Sanderson, Tor or, recently, Dragonmount's Jason Denzel's review. We will continue to do this, with general information.

However, we want to establish clearly for our readers we're not a spoiler-site. We'll be the wrong place to come look for TGS spoilers before the book's release. Our aim is to share our enthusiasm for Jordan's books, not to ruin anyone's experience, beginning with our own. On general principle, we find spoilers disrespectful to fans and to the book's creators - we don't mind people who like them, but we don't.

• No TGS spoiler coming from 'unofficial sources' - ie: fan or professional reviews, leaks etc. will be used in our posts and articles. By 'spoiler' we mean the usual, anything specific related to the plot/characters (including chapter titles and so on). We do not have insider information, so expect us to remain on the side of caution - some of us here do not even intend to read advanced reviews beyond Jason's and perhaps from the few people we know and trust not to spoil anything (those reviewers we know have however been told by Tor publicists there probably wouldn't be ARC sent for TGS except to a few professional reviewers, but that can change along the way).



• We do intend to read the 'advanced prologue' if it gets released. We will review it, and we will make posts about it. However, whenever we include information from this prologue in a post, that post will begin with the following Spoilers Warning banner and a note explaining the nature/source of the spoilers:
  
  This post include discussion of material from the prologue of The Gathering Storm. Those sections are hidden by spoiler tags. Click the tags if you want to read them.
  
  
  
  
  The spoiler tag will look like this:
  
  
  
  TGS prologue spoiler - click to expand
  
  
  
  Cadsuane and Semirhage become best friends. They abandon Rand to go open a knitting supplies shop in Saliesin and are never heard of again.
  
  
  

  
  
  However, we will no doubt restrain ourselves when it comes to discussing prologue material in the Read-throughs (at least until we get to Knife of Dreams in October), and will rather try to keep those discussions to posts specifically devoted to the prologue.




• The content of those posts devoted to the prologue material will be fully hidden by the spoiler tag, and be posted with either The Gathering Storm Prologue or The Gathering Storm Prologue - Theory labels.



• We won't start updating any of our Reference Library articles for new TGS content before some time in November (and later). We will make announcements about those updates, and the updated articles won't have any 'spoiler warning' or spoiler tags (The articles might be noted as (Updated for TGS) in the index of articles, however).



• We are counting on readers not to post anything you've read from leaks/ spoiler reviews in your comments, and to keep their comments about the prologue material to the posts we make under the two TGS prologue labels. If we see any problem on this front, we might restrict the Comments function to the Blog's registered users (followers) until november, or block comments. We plan to disable the Comments function altogether for the few days between the release date and the time Linda, Mark and myself have finished reading the book. That will probably happen sooner if we learn the book's content has leaked, or if "reviewers" with ARCs misbehave and spoilers are suddenly all over the place on the web.



• We will also keep using the Spoiler tag and banner for a (fairly short) time after the book is released. As we assume readers won't come read our comments on TGS before they've finished the book if they want to avoid spoilers - this time will probably be much shorter than what is usual on Message Boards. We'll make an announcement when we stop using them and when we start updating our articles for TGS content.

Of course, any discussion of TGS based on our own speculation will not be protected by the spoiler tags (our crystal balls aren't that good guys!)