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Hello, this is a little pet peeve I have, but this seems like a good place to say it.

There is definatly use for spoiler tags in this hobby. I'm not discussing that.

But I often see people (ab)using the spoiler tags in posts made in the painting and modelling subforums. It makes looking at the work they have done a pain in the ass and is pretty much on par with making new threads in there that don't have any visible pictures, but just a spamming of links. People visit that bit of the forums to see FINISHED work. Adding a spoiler tag might prove usefull to show a few WIP shots, but all spoiler tags...

In essence, making your entire post full of spoiler tags in this subforum is pretty much the equivalent of just linking URLs to the pictures, right? I mean... It's just one click away. But somehow, one thing is allowed, while the other isn't, despite both of them being equally annoying.

They use them because sometimes people don't want a large massive post taking up their screen... Spoiler tags help reduce that, and if you don't want to see it? Don't click it!

Loading pictures also takes quite a while, especially on slower connections.

It is my understanding that pictures in spoiler tags don't load until you click them.

So if you are on a slow connection you can go to the first unread post and only load pictures that you haven't seen yet.

I don't feel like it is anything like spamming URLs to drive traffic to their own blog.

I use them to collapse the table of contents since it's just a massive wall of links at this point. I guess some people do it to avoid cluttering whichever thread it is, it seems pointless to do if it were a blog unless they thought the picture was perhaps borderline NSFW in some cases.