Avoiding Spiders
 

Having trouble protecting from spiders your workshopped verse you'd like to submit to Poetry or other journals with illiberal policies toward online appearance? Here's a trick that might work.

1. Use a title for the workshop version different from the one you would use in submitting to a print journal.
2. Precede the workshop version with several lines of boilerplate: masking verse, doggerel, or whatever --in italics so critters in the know can ignore it but search engines will treat it as real text of the search result, and a search for your subsequent title or first lines will turn up nothing.

Here's what I plan to use as a mask when I next post a poem at TDE.


Il Ragno

Hence, loathsome robot spider,
Of Cyberus and blackest motive hatched;
on wireless web dispatched.
Probe not this poor provider
to my anorexic purse,
this embryonic, unbyronic verse.
A proper spider boldly moves on missies.
Creeps like you are misbegotten sissies;
So hence, begone, avaunt, and take this buffet,
back to your boss and bid him stuff it up his tuffet.


G/W

Thanks, Shaun. I didn't know the method you mention. It seems less disruptive than my suggestion. I'll try both and see what google searches turn up. In the recent past I've had four poems declined , with apologies, because of their prior appearance online.

G/W

I'm not sure that works, Shaun.

Clive

Some people report good luck with the tags, but it's also important that you not put the real title of the poem in the title field. If you do, the bots will find that.

If anyone else's post refers to the poem's real title without protecting it with tags, that too will mess things up.

I've been using it for awhile now and it seems to work. I just double-checked, since you mentioned it, and have found a number of websites that mention it as a foil to archiving robots. Specifically "...for sections of a site that shouldn't be indexed and shouldn't have links followed."

I think it was Stephen Collington who first mentioned it around these parts awhile back and I've been using it ever since.


Edited to add: that's a very good point regarding poem titles as subjects, though.

Yes, it was from Stephen that I first heard of it, too. Like you, I tried it out - oh, last autumn, I suppose. For a while, my thread was indeed masked, but after week or so, it was discovered.

Clive

I just googled "Avoiding Spiders" and the first hit was this thread, including your first response, Shaun, so the tag did not work at that level. I think I will risk one poem at TDE with the tag, a poem I probably wouldn't send to a journal like Poetry anyhow --unless you folks improve it greatly. I'll call it something or other and hope there aren't too many poems by that title out there. Here goes:

G/W

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

But! If you Google:

President robots bearing dishwasher cardinals

I bet this post won't show up. And I hope to god that no others do either...

It takes a little time for the bots to find the post. Check tomorrow, and the next day.

And as an example of how long things stay in the cache, consider this. My poem "Rose Catalogue in January" was pruned at whatever time I got the January pruning to work correctly, at least a couple of weeks ago. It still shows up on a Google search.

I still don't understand why the critique forums can't simply be restricted to logged-in members only, which would solve the problem without all this fuss. Why on earth should people's in-progress drafts need to be made available to the general public?

Harrumph!

Drat! My mention of the title I intended to use for the test poem at TDE has brought the accursed spider to this thread again, though not to the Test thread. So the tag seems to work, so far, for the purpose intended, but as was pointed out by MaryAnn, we still have to watch out for repeating the true title elsewhere on the net.

G/W

Good point, Rose!

Clive

Aaargh. What Rose said, in spades.

The changeover to the new format is wonderful, but it has meant that all sorts of tricks that worked under the old system don't seem to work now. (And yes, Clive, the ROBOTS tags did actually work until the switch, even if in theory they weren't supposed to. That didn't mean that things didn't sometimes get snagged anyway. There were backdoor vulnerabilities. If someone used the "Print Thread" or "Quote" button, and left the resulting window open long enough when the robots were around, then the text would indeed be scooped--the only thing protected was the main thread page as seen on the board. And no, there were never any illusions on that score. All of this has been discussed, in detail, at various times over the last year.)

Anyway, bloody hell, nothing seems to work now. Check out, for example, December's "Deck the Halls" threads on Distinguished Guest, and look at what has happened to all of Sharon's beautiful decorative efforts. Gone. And worse, the ROBOTS tags which protected the texts are gone too. This means that people who submitted their work for the event on the understanding that it would be kept away from the spiders' eyes are out of luck. All is now wide open.

So, yep, there's a problem. And really, the only way to fix that problem is for Alex to insert ROBOTS tags into the <head> coding of the board pages themselves. That is, after all, how it's supposed to be done. Our quick'n'dirty cheat method may have worked in the past, but it really doesn't now. (Shaun, the META tags coding should be invisible; if you can see it on the "finished" posted page--like in your post above--that means it isn't working. And hiding it by colouring it white won't make a lick of difference to the search engines.)

Can we, collectively, come to some kind of agreement about this? The whole board doesn't have to be made invisible, but the workshop forums shouldn't be vulnerable to prying editors, and it should always be an option for anyone convening a special event (a Bakeoff, a Deck the Halls, etc.) to make its pages invisible too. In fact, it's even more vital for the special events; a workshop thread is eventually deleted, and when the search engines return after a few months for a refresher and fail to find it, they unlist the page and delete the cache. (Otherwise every other link on Google would be a 404 error eventually.) But special events threads are up to stay--and worse, the contributors have no editing access to their own material, since it is posted under someone else's name. Unless we can fix this problem, I can see it having a real chilling/killing effect on many of the events that make the Sphere such a lively place. If posting a poem here means rendering it ineligible for publication or prizes elsewhere down the road, then people will simply stop participating. The better the poem, the more the poet will hesitate to share it. That's got it exactly backwards, no?

Posting a poem on Eratosphere for critique or conversation is not publication. But if Google and Co. can find it and make it accessible across the Web with a simple keyword search, well, that won't make much difference, will it. Eratosphere is open to all, and that's a good thing. By all means, let's keep the main page available to the search engines. There, they can google up such useful keywords as: workshop, poetry, verse, critique, metrical, non-metrical, serious writing, translation, literary criticism etc. etc. etc. More than enough to advertise what we do here so that people looking for a great online workshop experience can find us. Everything else, the search engines can keep their noses out of.

Can we please fix this problem?

Thank you for your excellent summary of the problem, Steve. I do hope something can be done about it. We will surely lose great poems to critique and from which to learn.

Cally

Indeed. Thanks for this handy analysis, Stephen.

I’d just add that, checking my files, I find that my failed experiment with the blocker-text to which I referred above dates from before Alex redesigned the site. That is to say, it did not seem to work – reliably, at least – even then. There were, as you say, “backdoor vulnerabilities”, though I never use (have never used) the Print Thread and Quote facilities.

As to posting my own stuff – that is, stuff I feel reasonably confident about – well, I post little anyway and send out less; but the vulnerability of the site to robots is certainly one factor that weighs with me somewhat. If Alex could institute some overall remedy, either along the lines you suggest or following Rose’s hint – or in some other way, I do think that would be advantageous.

Though there are apparently hundreds of members on the books, the number of active participants is relatively small. In my experience this has always been the case. Running the site as if it were a kind of reality-TV show open to the passing eyes of the world, may not be such a good idea.

Clive

What are the publications that reject?
 

Stephen, thanks for an excellent wail! I've added emphases in the citations below.

Please pardon the emphasis below. It may be justified.

There are sure to be Eratosphere members who want to learn which other journals search the net and reject on the basis of Eratosphere trials. I know I am one of them. Would others share their experiences, or at least name the problem publications?

There are plenty of bad spiders out there that ignore robot tags. The only foolproof way to keep them out is to require a login.

This is a little alarming. I just googled my poem and it was right there at the top of the list.

I vote for this and for making the workshop forums accessible only to registered members.

David R.

As I independently suggested it on the other thread, I naturally agree with the idea of making the site invisible unless you are logged in. I repeat my suggestion that the home page provide "guest" log-in information for people who do not want to register, and do not want to post, but just want to check us out. That would keep us from losing potentially good members because they did not want to register before finding out more about us.

In the makeshift Erato in Exile site, I had a separate forum for people who wanted their poems to be invisible to those who were not logged in. The feature worked perfectly, near as I can tell. And as I mentioned in the other thread, I am a member of a very, very active site for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrtors. It is busier site than Eratosphere for sure. But it's only visible to logged in members (paid membership, in fact), and it never shows up in search engines. In fact, children's book editors are notoriously fussy about prior publiction, yet I have seen manuscripts at the SCBWI site that later went on to be published as books. The invisibility option works. I strongly favor it.

I agree with Bob's idea of a guest login. Add that to the tags, the members only workshops, and the frequent pruning. I just googled a poem that was cut in the lat pruning -- it was right on top with the first line or two visible in the google summary and a link to the cached page with the whole poem. If Wiley is right that mags are rejecting based on this, I am very deterred from posting anymore.

David R.

I have been deterred for quite some time. Children's book editors are extremely strict about prior publication. It's well known that they Google everything. As a result, I have declined to post many poems here because I didn't want to spoil their publication chances (though I've risked one or two now and then, which are, happily, no longer turning up on Google). As a result, I have missed out on getting feedback from the people whose opinions I value most. I would love to be able to start posting my work more. Only invisibility would make me feel completely secure.

Yeah, I would hate to lose the great feedback I get here. Until now I haven't been to concerned about it, but if people are actually having editors say, "sorry, but we found your poem on Eratosphere," then I don't want to risk it. Man! This rots!

David R.

Just to muddle the issue further.

The risk of proving plagarism is another issue. When poems are pruned, the only record that might show proof of ownership might be the googled records.

A week or so ago, I noticed at a web journal a published poem which was very similar to a poem I remembered from a workship (not here, on another site). It just so happened that I remember the author as well, because it is an author whose work I like. But the published poem was by a name I did not recognize.

With regular pruning, as we have here, there is no record of the poem having been workshopped EXCEPT through a googled record.

I don't publicly post the work I am most proud of, but I am very happy to have access to clever people to rework poems that I can't straighten out on my own. Sometimes this excellent help from my peers will allow me to turn duds into "real" poems i.e. make them publishable.

But then the next problem arises, EITHER find a friendly editor who won't mind (some indeed say that they prefer getting workshopped poems as such poems tend to be higher quality).

OR save it for publication in a context where it will not matter, a chapbook or a future collection.

After seeing that near look-alike poem, I think there are advantages in googling.

I also read recently somewhere about a young poet who had won a contest and googled herself just to see what came up and found that her winning poem had won two other contests under someone else's name. So there are both advantages and disadvantages with these creepy-crawlies.

It does help one keep a protective eye on one's work.

I would hate for this site to become hard to find for novice formalists and others. On the other hand, more and more editors seem to be Googling workshopped poems and then rejecting them if they can find them. Right now, the Drills and Amusements forum is apparently not being pruned at all, so if I post something there that I later decide to try submitting somewhere, I have to go back and delete it myself. More frequent pruning might help solve the problem, if posters can be a bit patient in waiting till well after a poem is pruned before submitting it somewhere.

I don't really like the idea of having to register (even as a guest) before I have a right even to see what a workshop looks like. I would never have found this site if Alicia had not directed me to it. The more difficult we make it for new people to find their way here, the fewer will come. At least if part of the site (where poems are not being tried out) is available to anyone, we might attract enough attention that people will then be curious about the workshops and register as a guest to see them.

I wish we could keep things the way they were, but people's use of the Internet keeps changing, so we may have to change with it.

Susan

Susan, was there ever a time when Drills and Amusements was pruned? I'm not pruning it because I wasn't directed to, but there's no reason I can't.

I agree that parts of the site can and should be kept fully public. In fact, there can even be a designated open poetry workshop for people who prefer the visibility.

Maybe the solution is simply to have a single "hidden" area that people can choose to use. Let the individual poet decide.

I'm guessing that more and more poets will opt for hidden.

I really don't see the problem with guest log-ins. When Alicia suggested the site to Susan, I'm guessing that Susan would have made the effort of typing the word "guest" in a box. What's the big deal? I can't imagine any serious metrical poet who stumbles on the home page declaring this to be the place for serious metrical poets being dissuaded from checking us out because you have to spend 8 or 9 seconds signing in as a guest.

I don't think Drills and Amusements was ever pruned, but times are changing. I have certainly seen poems that started there wind up in journals. Since we have many writers who are adept at light verse, perhaps if we talk about making the workshops available only to members, that should be another one that is protected from spiders.

Susan