Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Hidden Text

Alright, I've been using hidden text for quite a long time - a pretty big example of it is this profile here.

At the moment, I'm matching the colour of the text with the colour of the background. However, this has two drawbacks -

This can't be used on templates with a patterned background.
And although this is a useful ability to hide secrets within a profile, not many people know about it.

So I think there should be a [hidden] or [secret] tag which does pretty much the same thing. I think this could be accomplished by setting the property of the text within the tag to color:transparent;. This alone doesn't work because it also makes the highlighted text transparent. In order for it to work, you also need to set ::-moz-selection color to something.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts :c. I think it would be handy!";

We currently have the spoiler tags and the collapse tags to add information that isn't immediately visible.

I'm curious, why would this make a good feature for the community? What benefits are we looking at? If there's information that desperately needs to be hidden from view, even setting the text color to transparent won't stop the information from showing in the source. Wouldn't it make more sense to store this information in a notepad file? Or send a PM to yourself in a sorted folder?

Yes, I know that it will still appear in the source code. In fact, it'll even appear on the page if you highlight the text. Go and take a look at that profile I linked. Highlight the text on pretty much any page and see what happens. The point of this tag isn't to make the text completely inaccessible, but to reward people who search your profile a little deeper.

The difference between the spoiler tag and hidden text is the degree of secretiveness. A secret hidden with the spoiler tag isn't hidden in any way. This way you can tell half-truths or right out lies on your profile, and people with a suspicion of something deeper can search for it.

I know I'm not the only person who hides text in their profiles in this way. You can see another example here. (Don't worry, I asked the owner of this character permission beforehand.)

Huh, I personally find this a really weird way of providing information. I'm not sure how it's a reward. A lot of users which are on mobile don't typically highlight areas on a page unless it's for a spoiler tag, so this feature seems impractical for a large number of users.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not shooting it down as a useless feature, I just don't see the benefit in it. Maybe that's because I don't understand why it's useful. I'm curious to hear what Kim thinks of it.

Characters that do this frustrate me to no end. I am a mobile user a good 90% of the time, and my OS doesn't cause the text to appear when I highlight it. That being the way it is, I would really just prefer if I could actually see the info. Function over form.

If the profile looks cool, great. (See Experiment 00013) but in a situation where I want an RP and I can't actually see what I need to see (not even the vital info, really. Because it's all redacted) then it's very hard to RP with that character. Sending a PM to say "Hey your profile didn't actually do its job, so.... Could you just explain the jist of it to me?" Is pretty awkward, too.

Aaaand now I've typed a gigantic rant against something that I actually think is pretty cool. Dang it.


What I'm saying is:
If we're going to add features like this, could we at least make an option to disable such features for mobile?

As you surmised, the spoiler tag was not intended to be secret, just a choice for people to read or not read.

Your suggestion of a hidden tag, while interesting, would only work on a small selection of browsers. The -selection attribute you suggested making use of is considered an experimental attribute with no standardized agreement on how it is supposed to work or if it should exist at all between browser manufacturers, and a number of browsers don't support it. Those that do do so with the warning that it's experimental and they could stop supporting it or change how they support it in the future. Basically, it'd work as intended in Mozilla (that's why there's a -moz- in front of that attribute!) and require separate code guaranteed to be flaky and fill my inbox with bug reports when used in other browsers. =/ And then it might stop working in Mozilla and need to be redone at a later date anyway!

On the less technical side, I don't think I really want to support hiding text as a native feature of the site. We're here to provide information, not bury it! Take-an-action-if-you-want-it text, for sure, and we've got two methods of doing that, but outright easter egging is a bit beyond what I want to provide, I applaud your creativity for sure, but I think this is one of those extra steps that individual epic members will have to figure out and support on their own -- or people who want it can just use one of the many dozens of templates with a solid color background and user the color tag to create their own blended text.