ADMIN: Spoiler-Free for HBP? Get Your News from TLC.

As the release of book six gets closer, we have noticed a lot of fans making concerted efforts to stay away from fan sites, including TLC, because they don’t want to even risk finding out any more about the upcoming tome, even official information…even the slightest hint of anything remotely related to information about book six. We know how you feel, believe us – we’ve already begun squinting our eyes while reading our e-mail, just in case a well-meaning HP citizen sends us more good info on HBP than we’ve interest in reporting.
It all sounds sort of silly, doesn’t it? Why can’t you get your HP news for the next few months, and still remain unspoiled? We think we have a solution. If you are going Spoiler-Free for HBP – and please, pass this on (here, use this link) to those who are already avoiding this site for fear of getting spoiled – you can still get your news through TLC.

How? Easy! We have created a category for our news items called NotHBPSpoiler. Anything that is not an HBP Spoiler will go into this category. That means, you can subscribe to the category and get ONLY non-spoiler items delivered to your inbox (see the end of this item for the subscription box); that means you can subscribe to this RSS feed (here’s a tutorial on RSS) and only get info on non-spoiler items. On LiveJournal, you can add the leaky_nospoil feed to your LJ friends list, and still, no spoilers. Or you can simply bookmark this specific Leaky page, and use that as your TLC homepage.

All of these links will be added to our sidebar shortly.

We also figured it would be useful here to clarify TLC’s spoiler policy. There are VERY important informational bits below, including exactly what we consider a spoiler – so if you’re coming from our main page please click to read more.
1. Comments are spoiler areas. Just be prepared for that. If you click on Leaky’s individual archive entries, the comments also load on the same page, but there is ample space between the end of an item and the comments so that you won’t be inadvertently exposed. There shouldn’t be spoilery comments in non-spoilery items – that is, comments should be on-topic – but exceptions do happen. Of course, we will deal with them as best we can but we don’t catch everything.

2. Nothing that is not an official spoiler will be posted on TLC AT ALL. This is a hard-and-fast rule from pre-OotP days: the only HBP spoilers that will get posted on this site are ones that come from JKR, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, Christopher Little, or any other assorted official agency. That means if book six lands in a field – or sprouts wings and makes a full earthly orbit before landing serendipitously in a tabloid editor’s lap – nothing of what gets published will be posted on TLC. We will tell you, however, that the item exists, if only to warn you not to open your favorite rag if you don’t want to be exposed. An alert that the item exists WILL, therefore, be published in the “NotHBPSpoiler” category – without any telling detail regarding what is revealed. If you don’t want to be spoiled, you clearly need to know what to avoid.

3. So what constitutes a spoiler? We consider HBP spoilers to be ANYTHING that gives you more information about the books. For instance – there is an item on Leaky’s main page about a Scholastic book six ad – it gives absolutely no detail about the book that we don’t all already know, but this is something that would be excluded from the NotHBPSpoiler category. Why? Just in case. We’d rather err on the side of caution. So, if there is a summary of book six it is a spoiler. (And, don’t count on it this time – while the backs of the books were not released for OotP, a summary was, and we don’t expect anything similar for book six – the item appeared in the summer/fall 2005 Scholastic catalog, and the summer ’06 one is already out, no summary. Don’t hold your breath for the fall one to have a summary, either). If there is more art released, it is a spoiler. If JKR drops a hint on her Web site, we will first post about her site update and then do a second post sans-HBP details (and containing a note about which part of her site to avoid if you don’t want to be spoiled). Only the second post will get sent out to our NonSpoilery people.

4. So what is NOT a spoiler? Information about July 16 events, alerts that JKR/others involved will be interviewed, book info that is not related to book six (for instance, if Bloomsbury’s Web site updates with a little factoid that does not seem to relate to HBP), and more related to the books but not specifically to book six.

5. We’re really happy to bring you this service and hope you enjoy it! Please use the comments below to ask any questions you may have (as well as, of course, comment).