[Maryann Corbett]

Recently the moderators have been receiving rather frequent requests to make a thread disappear for an individual poem.

I understand the motivation for these requests very well. Like the rest of you, I don't like to wait months to be able to submit a poem to a picky venue that doesn't want workshopped poems. And months is what it sometimes takes, since our policy has been to prune only once a month. That schedule can leave a poem up for a couple of months, and it can remain in Google's cache for weeks after it has been removed.

Other boards that maintain permanent archives have a policy of removing a poem to a nonpublic forum when a poet asks for that in order to submit. Knowing that, and wanting to be at least as cooperative as other boards, I've lately been moving poems to Reports when people have asked.

I don't want to keep doing that, though. It's clear that the requests will be numerous and hard to keep up with. It's also clear that that practice could run afoul of two other long-standing policies of the board: the policy that critiques belong to those who wrote them and are not to be removed willy-nilly, and the policy that (at least on some forums) poems should remain up for two weeks.*

So I'm starting this discussion about another possible solution: pruning more often.

Now that I've got the hang of it, I find pruning easy and quick. It would not be a burden to do it more frequently than once a month.

So let's have a full airing of the reasons for and against more frequent pruning. I'd like to get a lot of participation here, especially from those of you who don't post often but who enjoy coming here to read.

And if you're a non-member who only comes to read, and you've got an opinion, you can e-mail me.

*Editing back: I misspoke slightly. The policy of leaving poems up for two weeks is policy, but it's fairly recent.