Thanks Maralynn, that makes sense.
Roger, thanks. I'd understood what the working titles were for, but please thanks for the heads up on using tags. I've searched and found the instructions. Since that took some time, and others may be interested, the suggestion is this: Add this line as the first line of your post.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE,NOINDEX”>
Then change the font colour to white to make it disappear.
There are several reasons why I'm rather dubious of this. First, the proper place for a meta-tag is in the page header (which we have no access to). A robot has no reason to look in the body of the page for these instructions.
Second, if the web browser were interpreting this as an HTML instruction it wouldn't appear on the page (and we wouldn't need to make it go white to disappear it). So if my browser doesn't see this as HTML, why should a bot.
Third, although has been suggested by those who've tried it that it has some effect
E. Shaun Russell's test failed, as you can see
if you search on the phrase he tried protecting about six years ago.
Of course, that doesn't mean I won't try it, it's no effort after all, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.
Michael, thanks. What you say makes sense. I'm very new to the whole publishing thing and so have no personal experience in this area.
Memo,
I see you are using an altered name to prevent yourself from being spidered. Good plan, I shall henceforth refer to myself as Natt
Janice thanks, that's interesting and useful too.
Thanks all, I guess I'm just used to posting everything with complete impunity, but now that I've starting thinking about the possibility of publication, I suddenly feel a little exposed ....
Thanks again,
Natt