I recently made a post on /r/FairyTail about my thoughts on what spoilers are currently like (for Fairy Tail) and how I felt about the change over the year and a bit I've been reading, translating spoilers etc. Rather than make a whole thread dedicated to that, I thought I'd post it in the hangout thread, so here is my take on the current state of spoilers and how they've changed:
Spoilers. I've been translating them for just over a year now, and what we get for spoilers has changed a fair bit over the last year, so here is my take on how they've changed, for better or for worse etc.
I started out reading spoilers on MangaHelpers, where on a Saturday Night someone would link the latest spoilers from Jump-Netarabe, which were somewhat vague and didn't give too much away, and reading what they said was always exciting as you could still speculate and discuss what could possibly happen in the chapter. It was really great. Eventually, instead of waiting for accurate translations of these vague spoilers, I decided to have a go myself, and it took off from there. I now usually put in a translation for the spoilers we get as its something I enjoy doing, or perhaps I should say enjoyed when the spoilers were still vague and you could still interpret them in a few ways. One of the main reasons I really did like those days was because it was pure text spoilers, we saw nothing unless it was a colour cover which we'd get to see courtesy of Covers, who came around and posted a Colour Cover when they were about or if we were lucky we'd get an extra tease of the chapter with a small image of part of the chapter, just one, but it was enough to fuel the hype for the chapter.
Fast forward to late last year / early this year, and thats where things really did start to change. We'd start getting more panels and pages of the chapters spurred on by a guy who'd post spoilers, and the spoiler summaries we'd get from Jump started to become less vague and more dead accurate as we got more and more info. To say the least it started to cut away at the discovery we had when we could read the chapter, and while it may of fueled some hype for the chapter, the overall enjoyment of the chapter when we got it began to start diminishing, and I fully discovered this for myself. There was still some stuff to look forward to, but really you wouldn't get to discover as much.
Recently, the trend of getting more and more pages and panels of the chapter has continued with a lot of panels (Last Week had almost half the chapter), and literally everything that was good in the chapter had been well and truly spoilt by the time the chapter came out. That meant by the time I read the chapter, I found it to be incredibly underwhelming where I mightn't of found it underwhelming if we hadn't of had as much spoilers released, perhaps like what we had last year.
While I can't speak for others, I certainly do feel like the current way Spoilers are posted (More pages and panels, less vagueness and discovery when you read the chapter) is the wrong direction. While its all well and good to give someone a sneak peek at the chapter, there's a line to how much you should share. Over at MangaHelpers, there's a three picture limit per user for pages, and really, if you're posting pages, three should be the max amount you post. With no more discovery and actual fun reading the chapter, I'd say that for me, Manga Spoilers have definitely gone in the wrong direction, and I can only hope we can go back to the old days where we had vague spoilers that only hinted at things and left a lot to be discovered. It was in those days I enjoyed reading chapters for the first time more, and these days I don't have that same enjoyment. To add to this, I recently saw that someone had posted the entire dialogue for a chapter of One Piece well before the Chapter is released, and I've got to say "Wtf?" to that. Spoiling an entire chapter like that literally ruins the point of people reading the chapter, and spoilers are meant to only spoil a little bit of a chapter to intrigue people more, not give them the whole plot. I hope this doesn't happen for Fairy Tail, I really do.
So thats what I wrote about Manga Spoilers. To summarize the text wall, I feel like with the multitude of pages and panels we're shown these days, we're not getting the full enjoyment out of the chapter after reading spoilers that we would possibly get if we didn't get as much and the spoilers were much more 'vague.'