Why are Spoiler tags so schizophrenic?

Kresslack

So I tried applying spoiler tags to my forum sigs, to cut down on the size and still keep my quotes (for those who enjoy them), but they are being unruly to say the least. There are generally problems with them in posting as well, but I found out they don't work with new lines very well. So instead of being able to highlight and Spoiler off a certain part of the signature, it applied the tag to the entirety of the signature space and STILL didn't work properly. 

@Tecton or @Sarapis, please advise at your convenience. Danke.

Eld

Kresslack said:

@Eld, seems they work with single line breaks, but not with a line in between the lines of text or objects.

[spoiler]
For instance, this is the first line...

...and this is the second line.
[/spoiler]

[spoiler]And now they're going to make a fucking liar out of me...[/spoiler]

They're tricksy! For cases like your first one, I found that I had to add an extra extra line, so type two blank lines to get one.

Sena

It seems to ignore the tags entirely for me, just treating them as plain text and not actually hiding anything.

Kresslack

Sena said:

It seems to ignore the tags entirely for me, just treating them as plain text and not actually hiding anything.

Yeah I've noticed it does that if there are any line breaks in the selected area, which is odd.

Sena

It works fine is posts, but the tags are simply ignored in signatures, linebreaks or not. For me, at least.

Edit: I didn't know that the HTML spoiler tags existed, I've never seen that used before. I was talking about just using [spoiler][/spoiler].

Kresslack

The HTML tags don't seem to work any better, as I had tried those as maybe a potential workaround when messing around with my signature. They just seem really temperamental, which I wish weren't the case because it's a really useful feature.

Blujixapug

[spoiler]nobody cares about your sig

or anyone's

just cut it short

[spoiler][/spoiler]
[/spoiler]

edit: ok you can't open a second spoiler tag within a spoiler tag apparently? unfortunately I learned that while trying to be sassy

[spoiler][/spoiler]

It is possible to use the <font size="1"></font> tags to reduce font size, but it only goes one two sizes lower than the default. Size 1, size 2, size 3, size 4, size 5, size 6. Note that this is an HTML tag and must be entered in the HTML view. The forums will automatically reformat it to the type of font size tagging they actually use, which is: <span class="post-font-size-xx-small"></span>.  This is something different than is achieved via the Format ¶ button.

Other than that, maybe host your quotes on another website, or put them on an image uploaded to imgur, and put a thumbnail linking to that in your signature? Ideally you could open an image via the signature and have it hover over this same forum page, but no means of doing that seems to be supported here.

Kresslack

This isn't about my sig (was just using it as an example), it's about how buggy the Spoiler tags seem to consistently be overall.

Eld

The only particular issue I've had with spoiler tags in the bodies of posts is that they sometimes don't work properly if you put the tags on separate lines from the content of the spoiler, so you have to do 

[spoiler]This is a spoiler[/spoiler]

instead of

[spoiler]
This is a spoiler
[/spoiler]

That might only be for images, though.
And I guess you can't nest them, as Bluji discovered above. I don't recall ever having had problems with line breaks.
[spoiler] Just to test, this is a spoiler... with a line break. [/spoiler]

And like @Sena, I had no idea that there was a highlight-and-click spoiler option, but I guess that explains how people have been getting those ellipses.

Another spoiler test.
With a line break.

I wonder if you can nest these?

The only problem I'm seeing there is that if you have multiple line breaks inside the spoiler, like if you add an extra blank line between two lines of text, it removes one <br> when it formats the spoiler.

Based on past experiences with this forum software (see: quoting nightmares), I would guess that if you're having problems with highlighting something to spoiler it off and ending up with wonky results, it's probably to do with the HTML generation just not being very good, and if you can edit the HTML, you might find a misplaced end tag that you can move to the right place or something like that; that's how I end up fixing a lot of quoting problems. Not sure if you can do HTML editing in sigs, though.

Eld

And from a quick test, it looks like neither version works in signatures.

Sarapis

No idea.

Amarillys

[Spoiler] Am I doing it right?[/spoiler]

Kresslack

@Eld, seems they work with single line breaks, but not with a line in between the lines of text or objects.

[spoiler]
For instance, this is the first line...

...and this is the second line.
[/spoiler]

[spoiler]And now they're going to make a fucking liar out of me...[/spoiler]

Kresslack

Marking this as answered so the forums will stop bugging me about it like the MS Office Paperclip. Thanks for all the insight, @Sena, @Blujixapug, and @Eld.