One of the downsides of the first social Olympic Games: it’s difficult for Olympic fans to shield themselves from Games-related spoilers online.
Greg Leuch, a developer The Free Art and Technology Lab has tried to remedy this problem with the creation of Olwimpics, an Olympics spoiler blocker.
The browser can’t block coverage entirely; indeed, in our tests, quite a few spoilers slipped through. But it does recognize keywords associated with the Games and places a different Olympic color over each one whenever they appear.
Keywords barred include Olympics, ceremony, medal(s), bronze, silver, gold, sports, meters (and other mentions of distance), as well as all sporting event names such as archery, boxing, volleyball and so on.
Olwimpics is available for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. It’s already been downloaded more than 2,000 times.
“I created this and other blockers as digital art pieces for public consumption, and prefer to not look at them as actual software,” said Leuch. He has created other similar pieces as personal speed projects Olwimpics took a mere two hours to build.
“There are a few minor bugs and quirks with some pages that load dynamically like Twitter, or really really long pages,” Leuch adds. We’ve noticed inconsistencies in word blockage on social networks that aren’t as apparent on news sites. (We’ve included some examples in the gallery below.)
While it’s nowhere near being a full spoiler blocker, the extension does at least give you a heads up when someone mentions the Olympics and allows you the opportunity to skip that post. It is also a little reminiscent of Mad Libs.
If you try it for kicks, be aware that it will block stories that make mention of other sporting events such as professional and college sporting events and even little league.
