jfgw wrote:Regarding looking at spoilers, speaking personally, it feels good to be the first to post a correct answer and, once a (correct) spoiler has been posted, there is slightly less incentive to try to solve the puzzle myself. (Whether or not I try will depend greatly upon how much time I have.) I think I would be more inclined to look at a spoiler showing a Lemon's own workings than an external link to a solution. If someone posted, "I solved the puzzle and this is a link to a solution which is the same as mine", I would probably be more inclined to look than if someone posted, "I didn't solve the puzzle but I found the answer by Googling, here's the link".
Agreed with that - but assuming I haven't yet solved the puzzle myself, reading any posted spoiler basically amounts to giving up on solving it myself. So as long as the spoiler is adequately 'signposted' as being a spoiler (i.e. makes it clear that it is a spoiler without revealing the answer or even part of it to a casual glance, instead requiring a deliberate action on my part to read the answer), I'm not going to take that action without making a conscious decision to give up on solving it myself.
It's impossible to prevent readers making such conscious decisions to give up on puzzles and trying to find the answer without solving the puzzles themselves, and for most puzzles, it's impossible to prevent them finding the answer pretty quickly by means such as Googling or using brute-force chess programs. So basically, I regard trying to remove the temptation to follow such shortcut methods of finding the solution as a pretty futile endeavour: those who want to solve the puzzle themselves won't use those measures (other than inadvertently as a result of inadequate 'signposting'), those who don't (or no longer) want to solve it themselves won't be prevented from using them.
So as far as I am concerned, it's inadequate 'signposting' and concealing of spoilers that needs to be discouraged. And in that context, I think I'll mention that when a puzzle is like this one, with ten independent parts, I would strongly prefer
all spoilers to all of the parts to be adequately 'signposted' and concealed until after
all parts have been correctly solved. The reason for that preference is simple: I saw the thread on Tuesday morning (not having looked at TLF on Monday evening due to being tired after a bank holiday day out) when it was already reasonably long. I had ideas about a couple of the objects and so looked down the thread to see whether it would be worth posting those ideas - no real point doing so if others had already posted them and/or had identified the objects. As it turned out, it wasn't worth posting my ideas - but in the process of establishing that, it was impossible to avoid seeing unconcealed spoilers like "jelly crimp" about other objects. I'm not hugely upset by that (I reckon I stood no chance of identifying the objects concerned, having e.g. never been aware of encountering even the idea of a jelly crimp!), but I would have preferred to make the decision to give up on them myself! This sort of thing strikes me as far more likely to spoil someone's enjoyment of the puzzle than a "Spoiler" link that they would have to actively choose to click (or hover over and carefully examine the link expansion) to see any more detail.
Gengulphus