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How to avoid Game of Thrones spoilers

The next season of Game of Thrones kicks off this Sunday on HBO and if you’re reading this in South Africa you’re likely sad.

Sad because unless you’re a DStv subscriber you won’t be able to enjoy the show legally at the same time that folks in the US might and that presents a problem – spoilers.

With so many twists and turns that influence the story, fans would rather be partisan to a recreation of the Red Wedding than have plot points revealed before they are meant to.

So if you’re not keen on having the goings-on in Westeros spoiled we’ve compiled a few tricks you can use to hold the door.

Chrome extensions

If like us here at htxt.africa your job requires you to be online for the greater part of your day it’s a given that somebody is going to spoil your favourite show for you.

GameOfSpoils is a free extension that will not only black out mentions of Game of Thrones (and related keywords) but can also hide mentions of it completely for those that don’t trust themselves.

Looking at the extension page it appears as if you can block spoilers on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google News, Feedly, YouTube, Tumblr, Slack and a host of news websites.

For those that don’t trust themselves at all you can use Filter by WOT which will completely block sites containing keywords you assign. Finding all of those keywords might be tricky though given how wide the GoT lore is.

Filtering on Twitter

As you might be aware you can mute certain words on Twitter to stop them from showing up in your timeline or notifications.

To do this on the web head to Profile and Settings, then click Settings and Privacy. Once in that menu you’ll see Muted words, click that and you can start adding words to your hearts content.

In the Android and iOS Twitter apps you can do this by tapping your avatar then tapping Settings and Privacy. Then look for the option marked Privacy and safety, tap that and then scroll down to the Safety section and tap Muted words to begin blocking potential spoilers.

Review your Facebook settings

Sadly Facebook doesn’t appear to have native support for muting keywords so we had to get a bit creative with this.

We’re going to assume that you aren’t actively following fan pages and the like on Facebook while trying to avoid spoilers so we suspect the only hole in your defense might be your own timeline.

To change who can post to your timeline open up Settings and then head to Timeline and Tagging. From here you can select who can post to your timeline and if you don’t want to block posting off completely you can set posts you’re tagged in to be reviewed before they appear.

Beyond that we recommend one the GameOfSpoils extension for blocking other spoilers.

Getting creative

When asked what they were doing to avoid spoilers htxt.africa staffers came up with a few solutions we thought we should share.

The first is disconnect. That’s mighty big coming from us who spend eight hours a day (perhaps more) tethered to the internet but there’s something to be said for just logging out now and then.

Sure you might get FOMO but if having a few plot points spoiled for you is such a big issue perhaps disconnecting from the internet for a bit is not that bad of an idea.

As for our most extreme idea. Cut your internet connection and hide away in a bunker because with an average viewership of 7.9 million in the US alone, Game of Thrones is going to be all over the internet next week.

 

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