[Marcia Karp]

Dear Alex,

If previosly Sphered poems can be submitted, why can't poems once published elsewhere? Being searchable can't be the reason, since it's been made clear on Matt's thread that the Sphere poems can be found and since the honorable thing for commenters and voters is not to search (or remember what they've seen here before?).

[Ann Drysdale]

Right. I've got this so far. Now, let us take a hypothetical situation.

Let us suppose I have a sonnet that hasn't been published or even workshopped anywhere. There is no way it can conceivably turn up in an online search. It is therefore truly eligible for the Bakeoff - but it's also eligible for any other competition or journal to which I care to submit it. For now.

But will this latter circumstance still prevail after I have submitted it to the Bakeoff?

Since I am submitting it via email, I can't do that clever thing of putting wotsits in the post to protect it from Beelzebots. Can I?

So is it, therefore, a straight choice between this or any other competition. A competition, let us say, with a closing date in the more distant future, to which it may have already been submitted as never having appeared...?

If it is, so be it, but it would help to know. For purely hypothetical reasons, of course.

[Maryann Corbett]

Annie wrote:

Since I am submitting it via email, I can't do that clever thing of putting wotsits in the post to protect it from Beelzebots. Can I?

This would be a good time to re-explore the question of the code that is, or was, supposed to protect individual event poems. In theory, the "noindex" code, placed at the very top of each contest poem's thread, was supposed to protect the poem from the bots. The tricky part was that the contest host--not always a person deeply adept at the techy parts of this board--HAD TO REMEMBER to put that code in at the start. Inserting it later sometimes meant the bots got there first.

Alex, is any of this still correct?

Editing back: Here's a link to an older, relevant thread with info about the code:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=14442

[Alex Pepple]

Marcia - blanket Eratosphere exemption -- notwithstanding rssing scraping, etc. etc. -- is a part of the rules this year, given that I know for a fact that Eratosphere is not a publication venue but a workshop, and especially because I can't control what appears elsewhere, but at the Sphere, I can take further action, before the postings start, of removing finalists from the workshops if they've not already been pruned.

Maryann - I specifically instruct the DG to add the code before posting. Indeed, I usually check when the posting starts to verify that it's properly in place.

Cheers,
...Alex