Hey all,

I am SO stoked! One more day till the World Cup! The beers are already in the fridge, the 42" HD LCD TV is on standby, and a bunch of friends are coming tomorrow to watch the first game between South Africa and Mexico LIVE! This is the best show on earth! Nothing beats it, IMO. It IS the beautiful game.

About that... I just wanted to pop in and make a teeny-tiny, small request of the rabble.

Re: Spoilers

For most of us, many of the World Cup games are being played at odd hours of the day and night, meaning that watching many games live may not be possible. As a result, I know many of us will be watching them on time-delay or pre-recorded.

As a courtesy to the folks who may not be completely caught up on each day's results, I'd just like to ask for people to be careful how they may be posting spoilers... If you are talking about scores or certain countries winning or losing certain games, please know that there might be fellow forum members who don't know that yet, but might still be looking forward to watching the game.

It's best if random results aren't brought into a topic, but if they are, the next best thing might be to add a bit of a warning or header, like: ***WC SPOILER*** or something similar. I know that on some online forums, they have a special "spoiler" tag that causes the text to be blacked or whited out unless you mouse over the block, or hit a special button to reveal the text. But anyway, that's usually only on the hardcore sports forum sites. All others usually just add a quick warning into the header. ith:

I know that on some forums there's also 2 official discussion threads that deal with everything related to the festivities. One is usually a "no-spoilers" thread and the other is an "anything goes" thread where spoilers are allowed.

Anyway, the reason why I thought I'd mention it is because we can all get pretty excited about sports, especially when a team we particularly love or hate does really well or really poorly, and it's only natural to want to share it with our friends. Just the other day, I was reading a forum posting (forgot where it was) and had an NHL game that I was hoping to watch ruined for me because someone divulged the results off-handedly on an otherwise unrelated topic... Of course, I can't get mad at the person who did it (well, I CAN, but it wouldn't help much)... But that sort of thing is very much avoidable, and it's the sort of thing I would like to protect against.

Thanks for your help and kind consideration everyone

Hope you all enjoy the games to their fullest! I know I will!