[Julie Steiner]

I'm for increasing the frequency of pruning, mainly because new members overeager to pad their crit count occasionally search back three or four weeks for short poems that look quick and easy to crit, and exhume them...much to the disgust of everyone whose more recent work has been bumped off the first page by these antiquities.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's a major annoyance.

[Michael Cantor]

I gather from a reply by Golias on a related thread that, actually, his report of " having several poems declined by major print journals" related to a single personal rejection (of several poems work-shopped here, including one that also appeared in the Bake-off - which is not a workshop) by Poetry. Golias did not indicate other publications. As far as I can determine, what he encountered is what we had already heard about Poetry, and it may have been exacerbated by the Bake-off post.

Golias - any clarification would be appreciated.

[Marybeth Rua-Larsen]

Sorry to interrupt...but Roger, I tried to PM you my thoughts on your earlier post, but your mailbox is full. If you're dying of curiosity, empty your mailbox and I'll send it again.

If not...the extremely abbreviated version is: Sorry I missed your "guest sign-in" idea, which would work, and yet I'm not swayed.

OK...returning to our "pruning" program...

[Michael Cantor]

Roger. I'm puzzled. Why is your suggestion regarding guest sign-ins any different than what we now have? As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), guests can read the Forums, but not post, and only members can post.

We have to have some mechanism for allowing non-members to see what's happening - or we'd never get new members - so they can look, but they can't touch. And if you want to post - you have to join.

What am I missing here? It's true, your approach asks the casual browser to sign in as a guest - so I agree it's somewhat more exclusionary - but there's no screening process, anybody can be a guest - and anybody can see what we're posting.

Regarding protecting the Forums (and the site) from googling - I'm in complete agreement. If I was still working, I would be very uncomfortable knowing that any business associate who googled my name would be able to read every thread, and poem, and political pronouncement I made. I'd be posting under a different name (which is a bummer if you start publishing, because it would be nice to publish under your own name.) I know you've been through that. But I regard google-proofing the site as a different element than members-only access. And I also feel that - even with google-proofing - stuff leaks. (There are periodic complaints on the Gaz, even though whatever they do seems to work fell, brom the most Google-averse.) So I think that, if you post on the internet, you have to accept the fact that whatever you put up may be seen, but proceed on the premise that you will try to encourage whatever steps are possible to limit the chances of this happening.

[Maryann Corbett]

Once again, with feeling: could we put the matter of Google-proofing on the OTHER thread? This one is about the question of more frequent pruning, which is the only one I can do something about.

[Alex Pepple]

I've been working on a tag equivalent to the standard HTML noindex meta for a while unsuccessfully. However, I've accelerated the work rate in response to this and similar concerns expressed elsewhere. I'm happy to report success! Now, you can prevent Google indexing by placing this new bbcode as the first thing in your workshop poem thread that you want to hide from search engines:

[noindex][/noindex]

Although I haven't tested it yet in practice to verify the final outcome on Google, the generated HTML is equivalent to noindex meta tag and should, in theory, stop indexing of anything that follows it.

Cheers,
...Alex
--

[Janice D. Soderling]

If there were a Knighthood connected to the World of Cyberspace, you would get it, Alex.

Complete with a real castle and a jousting lance. And attendents playing the lyre. And you could sit in the House of Ether Lords when it was in session.

Thank you so much.

[Golias]

Can someone who has a poem ready for Met,TDE, Non-Met or Translations please try out the tag Alex has just posted? I'll get in line to offer a crit at halftime.

G/W

[Alex Pepple]

Wow, Janice ... Thanks!

But, that's not why I'm posting again. I have even more good news. I've been able to modify the forum code to add a directive that instructs Google and others to stop caching or archiving content in the poetry forums (i.e. Met, Non-Met, Deep End, Translation). With this in place, even if you did not use the [noindex][/noindex] tags to prevent indexing by Google and others, any references they may have to the poem will become unreachable once we prune or delete it here, with no lingering tell-tale cache being served by Google.

Cheers,
...Alex

[Mary Meriam]

Thanks, Alex. I feel ok about workshopping poems again.