On spoilers and formatting
 

We have a policy against including avoidable spoilers, but I'm wondering just how far it should go; the precise issue being Se7en. For those who don't know, this movie takes great pains to hide the killer's identity, even excluding the actor's name (no need to say who it is in this thread) from the opening credits.

However, he's seen holding a gun in the movie; normal article format would be for us to say "John Doe ([[Actor's Name]]) uses a [[gun]]," but this is a major spoiler as he appears in scenes before he's revealed as the killer. I'm of the opinion that it should be included like this anyway since otherwise there is no link to the actor's page, and the page does not fulfil part of the site's goal for live-action of stating which actors used the weapons in question.

Ben41 has disagreed with me over this, and I'll let him put forward his own case on the matter.

Can you go the "Highlight for spoilers" route?

I would make an exception about listing the actor's name next to the character because the filmmakers took great pains to not reveal who was going to play the killer in the film.

I can see maybe mentioning the actor once, but the numerous times throughout the page is too much.

Additionally, I think mentioning in the spoiler warning that you're going to list which actor is going to play the serial killer probably defeats the purpose of the warning, so it's been taken out.

No, font colour markup doesn't seem to work on hotlinks.

I don't think that's a good enough reason to fail to credit an actor for his role; it's a horrible precident that we should skip over actor names if they could be considered spoilers. We should not compromise the site's entire purpose for a handful of hypothetical readers who haven't seen Se7en and don't know the twist; the page has named the actor for over two years with no major objections from anyone.

IMFDB's purpose with live-action works is to identify both the weapons themselves and the actors who used them; that's why we have actor pages in the first place. Where this results in unavoidable spoilers due to the nature of the work in question, we simply have to shrug our shoulders, clearly advise the reader what they'll encounter in the article at the top of the page, and accept that's how it's going to be. The other option is as bad as leaving guns out because some aspect of their appearance could be considered a spoiler.

It's twice. The second probably isn't needed, but the first (under the gun entry where he uses one) is, according to the same basic formatting rules followed by every other live-action page on the site.

Um, how? The only way it would defeat the purpose is if you told people who the actor was in the spoiler warning. "If you don't want to know this thing, don't read this page" is exactly what a spoiler warning is supposed to tell you. The warning leaves it crystal clear what the reader is going to encounter if they continue reading and they only have themselves to blame if they do so.

Just mention the actor once and leave the spoiler generic and call it a day. I don't want to waste any more time arguing over this.

The rules for Spoilers state clearly that we avoid it only if "possible". If spoilers are truly unavoidable, then we have no choice. We DO have a choice in how we protect the plot for our viewers. Stating an actor uses a gun is not a spoiler, but if the ONLY screenshot is a spoiler, then have a generic spoiler warning is appropriate and we take as many steps as we can NOT be give out spoilers. After all, once we mention the actor name and gun (generically) we have fulfilled our primary purpose.

Yeah, this is a problem in the specific case of Se7en because what the creators tried to conceal was the identity of the actor playing John Doe. Since he uses a gun in the movie, we can't identify the actor without spoiling that. Though that said, a quick glance at Amazon shows that most of the entries name him in the product description anyway, so they don't seem that big on hiding his identity anymore.