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Spoiler alert! Voldemort is Harry's father. Hermione's a dude. Neville is Keyzer Soze! Are we done yet?

Almost, but not quite. With Harry Potter season upon us again, spoiler paranoia is catching. At the end of April, someone claimed to have hacked into the publisher's computers and made off with a copy of the manuscript. Saying he was part of the anti-pagan goon squad that emerges every time a Potter product appears, he started spreading rumours that gave away the book's ending. In the end, he was deemed a fraud, but the very mention of a leak was enough to set tongues wagging and mice clicking.

It's such an easy book to spoil, too. For one thing, the new Harry Potter is being promoted as an event, not a novel. The whole exercise, especially the ballyhooed secrecy around its plot, is building toward the grand reveal on July 21. That $45 list price is really an admission ticket to a race with a 12:01 a.m. start time, a dash to the final chapter to see who dies, and how.

These are fraught days if you're trying to stay on the right side of ignorance on this count. Respectable publications like this one shield their readers from spoilers as a matter of course. You certainly won't hear me whisper that Professor McGonagall dies in a vicious slap fight. But the Internet offers no such assurances. Click on one false link and you could find yourself on an unscrupulous page, unable to hit the "Back" button before your eye has glanced across the words "Voldemort" and "chokes on a duck." By then, it will be too late; 800 pages is a lot of Potter to get through with that stuck in the back of your head.

This might be why some of the major Harry Potter fan sites are taking the most un-Webly step of swearing spoilers off entirely. At the Chamber of Secrets (http://www.cosforums.com), a thriving Harry Potter forum, its thousands of members are asked to snitch to authorities as soon as a spoiler is spotted. "Constant Vigilance!" admonishes a notice below, bold, in red. And at The Leaky Cauldron (http://www.leakynews.com), a hub of Harry Potter news and speculation, the story of the fraudulent hacker prompted the editor to post a vehement anti-spoiler screed.

"We don't want to see them, we won't post them, and we'd want to stop you," wrote Melissa Anelli, who edits the site.

"If Harry dies, we don't want to know about it until [author] J.K. Rowling decides to tell us," Anelli continued. "And if you decide to tell us before that, you'll incur the wrath of a staff of almost 200, most of whom have been waiting almost 10 years for these final revelations and can NEVER get back the moment you rob by spoiling them."

Yikes. Spoilers, of course, are an Internet staple, the stock in trade of fan sites paying tribute to all manner of fictional franchises. Spreading unsubstantiated rumours about unaired TV programs and unreleased movies has always been one of the Web's mundane raisons d'être.

Even on spoiler-free sites, facts and fandom do a funny dance with each other. Big Potter fansites like The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet.org collect the hints that Rowling drops in media interviews with religious diligence. These are used to compile scriptural compendiums of what has been established and denied in the forthcoming plot.

These aren't considered spoilers. It's as Anelli said: Information is meant to flow when Rowling wills it, and if Rowling sees fit to announce that Hagrid meets his fate at the business end of a dragon, it would remain only to endlessly debate which end she meant.

At the same time, these sites are stuffed to the gills with speculation, deduction, postulation and fan fiction. You could log on and read over every plot permutation the Potter putterers have on offer, or go over a jargon-riddled formal analysis of the seventh novel's prospective story ("Harry will solve VI 1 and VI 2 before the PNR so that he will have at least a fighting chance going into the battle"), or run through analyses of romantic pairings, or present your latest theory about horcruxes.

These aren't spoilers either because, technically, it's hard to have a story ruined on a mere suspicion. There's no authority behind these notions. Call yourself a Harry Potter fan, and you can publicly moot any ending to the saga that you so desire. But log on to one of these sites, and write the same thing, claiming to have the inside scoop, and you'll be booted before you can say "lawsuit."

All the same, I wonder what purpose is served by remaining "spoiler free" after having collaboratively brainstormed the daylights out of the story. The guessing-game could turn out to be more rewarding than the book itself. Can anything surprise people who have thought through every permutation? Spoilers could be the least of their concerns. Speaking of which, I have it on good authority that Harry does die after all - but it's just a petit Voldemort.

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Quick clicks

Means to an ending

Curious to know how a film ends without actually wanting to see it? Try Spoil That Film (http://www.spoilthatfilm.com), which more or less lives up to its name. It provides complete, if turgidly-written, walkthroughs of the entire plot. Also see The Movie Spoiler (themoviespoiler.com), which does much the same thing. But if you really want to cut to the chase and get some succinct answers, you'll find none better than Ruined Endings (http://www.ruinedendings.com), where no summary is more than three lines long. It will put you in touch with any movie's lousy climax before you can say "M. Night Shyamalan."

The art of the knobs

Whatever did we do before we had Etch-a-Sketch bloggers? The Etch-a-Sketchist (etchasketchist.blogspot.com) renders topical images using only two knobs. Look, there's Steve Jobs with an iPhone, and Tony Soprano, sort of. Then there's George Vlosich (http://www.gvetchedintime.com), who takes 70 hours to Etch-a-Sketch surreal photo-quality montages of celebrities. ("The studio is his dining room, his canvas the Etch-a-Sketch," pronounces his site.) Want to try for yourself, but 20 years too late to have one on-hand? Head for the Online Etch-a-Sketch: etchy.org. Use arrow keys to draw; do not shake computer to erase. I.T.

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