Nice catch. spikesides is working as it should (the spikes don't extend on the axis walls) when turned on. But, showspikes is indeed broken for surface traces (but is working perfectly fine for scatter3d traces as far as I know)

Thanks very much for this report!

OK @jdugge showspikes doesn't remove the hover guides on surface traces by design. Sorry about the confusion.

To remove them you'll need to set

contours: {
  x: { highlight: false },
  y: { highlight: false },
  z: { highlight: false }
}

in your surface trace object. See example http://codepen.io/etpinard/pen/peoajB

I think it's fairly easy to realized that this is all very confusing. So perhaps we should merge the surface contour highlight and the spikes behavior into a single attribute in v2?

Ah, amazing, that's it! Thanks, I completely missed that option. I guess because of the visual similarity to the spikes and spikesides, I didn't even consider looking in the options for the surface plot.

Maybe instead of merging contour highlights and spikes into a single attribute, a note in the documentation linking the two topics would already be enough?

a note in the documentation linking the two topics would already be enough

Good idea. Will be done in plotly/documentation#702

Thanks again for the report!