The News-Gazette.com Weblog

The Daily Prophet

Spoiler season is in full swing

Posted by: Carol Lombardi

Thursday, June 21, 2007 10:56 PM

This week a hacker posted (on an obscure discussion forum) what he claimed was a summary of the ending of Deathly Hallows, obtained when he hacked into the British publisher's computers. In keeping with JK Rowling's own request to avoid spoilers, I'm not going to include the link to the actual post.

Think of it this way: You are a big enough jerk to have hacked a Bloomsbury computer, and found that all the employees there just happen to keep entire copies of the book sitting on their desktops. You now have the answers to the questions everyone is asking. Would you post it on some obscure board, or would you would sell it to a tabloid ? Right.

Other sites are taking a tough stance against spoilers. Mugglenet's Chamber of Secrets forums will actually be closed from July 14-24, and The Leaky Cauldron has posted a spoiler policy in no uncertain terms.

It is very difficult for me to use occlumency against spoilers because I'm impatient and I really want to know what happens. I did not read them for the last book because I was on vacation sans internet access.

Will I read them this time? Not sure. The desire to know the ending of the book before I read it is a multi-generational personality flaw, also affecting both my mother and my daughter. Knowing the ending means it isn't imperative that I get through the book to find out how it ends. I can read at my leisure (meaning I will take time out to eat and sleep) and not have to worry about whether Harry lives or dies.

But spoilers should never be inflicted upon people, or left where they could be tripped over. Our plans for this site include a review within 24 hours of the book release, but rest assured you will have to track it down and scroll through warnings to get to it.