It does indeed seem that Alex’s blocker text works. Of the four test threads I have posted at The Deep End (two pairs: “Winter Morning Walk” and “A Winter Morning Walk”, and “The Cottage” and “ Thronging the Seas”), only the threads which are not protected by the blocker text (“Winter Morning Walk” and “The Cottage”) show up on Google. The two protected threads seem so far not to have been found.
As I said above, I also posted a subsequent comment to the unprotected thread “Winter Morning Walk”, consisting of some well-known lines by Dryden, and inserted the blocker text at the top of this comment. I have not yet been able to pick up the thread by searching on a phrase from the Dryden – that is, from below the newly inserted blocker text. This suggests that, in an otherwise unprotected thread, inserting the blocker text at the start of a subsequent comment will render everything that follows it (but not what precedes it) invisible too.
According to Alex in an email, this also makes it possible to protect a previously unprotected thread. As the person who initiated the thread, paste the blocker text at the start of your opening post. Then, once the thread has dropped from Google’s cache, which of course may take several months, it will effectively disappear from view.
Thanks for your help on this, Alex. I am sure members who post here frequently and who want to submit their work to editors will find this new facility helpful.
Clive
|