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Star Wars: The Force Awakens – how to avoid spoilers as movie launches
This is a dangerous time for you, when you will be tempted by looking at details of the film on the internet
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The internet is a tricky place right now: full of Star Wars spoilers, which are only likely to get worse. But there are tools for fending them off.
Though many websites will be littered with plot details from the new films, a couple of customisations of your browsing can mean that you’ll hopefully avoid most or all of them.
The first thing to do is to install the Unspoiler Chrome extension into your browser. That little tool allows you tell it what you’re interested in, and then have any headlines or stories that contain relevant words hidden by a big red bar.
Other extensions exist for Chrome, such as Force Block. But that and similar tools are a little over-active — instead of hiding the relevant bits of a page, they will just them down entirely. And if you want to see anything on the site that you’ve navigated to, you’ll have to remove the protection and then be liable to see the spoilers after all.
On social media, you can use tools like FB Purity for Facebook or TweetDeck for Twitter. Both allow for the use of muted words — so on each you can add a range of words, like “Star Wars” and any other relevant characters or keywords. You will also be able to mute anyone who might be likely to send out spoilers.
FB Purity works as a Facebook extension which can be downloaded through Chrome. Once it’s installed, you can head to the setup and choose “Newsfeed Filters”, where you can add a list of everything you want to hear about.
TweetDeck can be used either online or in its app. In its settings are mute options, which allow you to either hide phrases or people that you don’t want to hear from.
On your phones or tablets, rather than on desktop, hiding spoilers is a little more difficult. Mobile apps are often much less customisable, which means that it’s harder to add useful things like extensions.
Some tools like Spoiler Shield allow you to navigate through your social media accounts through a devoted app, which will get rid of anything you don’t want to look out for. But it slows down the experience hugely, as well as not being entirely reliable, which means that you might just want to avoid browsing on your phone entirely.
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