Hi Maryann and All,
I think that there may indeed be a very simple solution to this, but it will require the intervention of someone with administrative access. Google does indeed have a function whereby one can block its (and indeed,
all) search robots. The fix is described
here .
If I understand the explanation correctly, all that has to be done is for the tag
< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" > (see p.s. below)
to be pasted into the HTML source code for the "Post New Topic" code in the workshopping forums. For someone with password access who is able to "publish" changes in the code to the website, this should be a very easy fix indeed. There are other ways also to block Google from the site, including placing a "robots.txt" file in the root domain, but adding the META tag might be easiest, since it would make it possible to deny access to critical forums without restricting Google from the rest of the site. Anyway, I'm not really the techie to explain all this, and I don't know how E'sphere is organized administratively, but all the pertinent information about search robot management is available in one stop
here . (The META tag option described above is the first option on the list.)
I for one would be very grateful to the moderators if they could deal with this issue. I think it's great that Eratosphere is open to the public--I would never have found it myself if I hadn't stumbled on it one day in a search. But poems are private things sometimes, and while poets may feel comfortable taking the leap in the company of other workshoppers, there is indeed a chilling effect in knowing that the results of a workshopping session may linger in cyberspace for years. I'm here under my own name, but I do wonder sometimes whether that may someday come back to bite me. And beyond that, what's the point of polishing a poem here if some boneheaded editor is going to reject it simply on the basis of prior "exposure"?
One last note: Google has a whole "Webmaster Help Center" with other potentially useful information
here . "Preventing content from appearing" is number four on the first list.
Hope that's useful . . . and yes, please could we fix this?
With thanks to
all our administrators,
Steve C.
p.s. I added the spaces between the command code for the META tags and the carets <> because otherwise the software does indeed read the line as code and fails to display it. (I wanted everyone to be able to read it, so I tinkered.) But this does raise the possibility that posters could merely add this tag in to their own "Post Topic" posting and maybe . . .
maybe (I don't know) that would prevent Google from indexing and caching the initial post (which of course would contain the poem). That may well work as an interim fix . . . I'm going to try it here by adding this ridiculous word "Comboptchachoptchulacious!" and reinserting the unaltered META tags at the top of the file (where you will not see them, of course, as per the explanation above). I'll try googling the word in a few days, and we'll see. Note, however, that this will not solve the problem of critters quoting a poem. If a generalized "system" fix is unavailable, posters may just have to request that critters use discretion. We'll see. S.C.