How can I build a mobile-friendly app that blocks spoilers?
Asked by
MellowPine47
I'm a beginner working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I'd like to build a spoiler-blocking tool that works for mobile users, where traditional browser extensions may not be available. Ideally, it would recognize spoiler-related topics, movie or show titles, and possibly spoiler keywords, then hide or censor matching content. I'm not sure whether this should be a standalone website, a browser extension, or something else, or how spoiler detection could realistically work. What approach would make the most sense?
Answers
Identifying the actual spoiler is probably the hardest part. A title or character name doesn’t automatically mean the surrounding sentence contains a spoiler, and you also need rules for when content should become visible again. I’d start with simple user-defined keywords, regular expressions, and page-specific rules before attempting AI-based detection.
Reply to this answer
The first design question is how you define a spoiler and where the tool should work. Filtering the entire internet is extremely broad because every movie, series, game, and event could have different spoiler terms and contexts. Starting with a small list of selected sites and user-provided titles would make the project much more manageable.
Reply to this answer
A normal website generally can’t control or modify pages that are open in another browser tab. If the goal is to hide content across social media and other sites, you’d need something with browser-level access, such as an extension, a customized mobile browser, or possibly a filtering app with operating-system permissions. A standalone site could only filter text that users paste into it or content loaded inside that site.
Reply to this answer
A browser extension could inspect the page’s HTML, find visible text, and replace or hide phrases that match a keyword list. For more advanced detection, the text could be sent to an AI model to classify possible spoilers, but that adds cost, latency, privacy concerns, and complexity. Allowing users to provide their own model or API configuration could reduce your service costs, but it would still be a fairly advanced feature.
Reply to this answer
Add your answer
Answers are reviewed before publication.
MellowPine47: So the practical approach would be building a browser extension or a custom browser instead of an ordinary web app?