A group of Star Wars fans are threatening to spoil The Force Awakens, the latest episode in the franchise, on social media unless studio Disney agrees to film the saga’s abandoned “expanded universe” stories.

Lucasfilm executives announced in April 2014 that only the six Star Wars feature films, as well as the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars series, were considered part of the saga’s official canon. They also said that the new series of films, of which JJ Abrams’ The Force Awakens is the first instalment, would not draw on the hundreds of Star Wars novels and comic books published in the wake of success of the original trilogy.

An online organisation going by the moniker The Alliance to Preserve the Expanded Universe has been campaigning ever since for Disney to change its mind, for fear that characters such as Mara Jade, Jacen Solo and Cade Skywalker will be consigned forever to the garbage compactor of history. Now, members have been caught making threats to reveal The Force Awakens’ deepest secrets via social media in a process dubbed “spoiler jihadi” in online circles.