[Roger Slater]

I don't think it's boonswaggling at all. Editors' concern isn't to make sure no one else has ever seen a poem before, or that it has never been workshopped, but to make sure that they are, at least for a while, the only public source of that poem. If I email the poem to a dozen friends and show it to another dozen friends in a workshop in my living room, there's no problem, is there? It seems to me that the no-follow tag isn't an attempt to fool the editors but a method of giving the editors what they want, which is to make sure the poem is not publicly available elsewhere.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Roger, with respect, I'm not following your argument. My reference to boonswoggling concerns the poet's intention to circumvent editorial rules.

[Ann Drysdale]

Is boonswoggling the same as hornswoggling?

[Maryann Corbett]

Ann, I think it's the love child of a boondoggle and a hornswoggle.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I think I meant to say "hornswoggle". But I found out that boonswoogle actually is a term in some places.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/20...gle-legit.html

But I like the idea of a love child so I'm willing to go with that.

[conny]

Roger,

but can you explain why they can't publish recently published
material? why not do so if its a really good poem? i'm still not sure
i get it. why be focused on being the only source of a poem ?

copyright..i get, but i suggest the obvious reason: they wish to control the
supply, or more importantly wish to be seen to control the supply, like
De beers in the diamond market. all gatekeepers are neurotic about the
raw material.

i am not sure editors are our best friends. sometimes (often) it feels
like they are the enemy. they are the cats and we are the mice.

eek..

[Lois Elaine Heckman]

As I understand it, the no index tag inserted when posting a new poem only works on that first page of the thread. If someone quotes the poem, or parts of it, on another page after that, a search can reveal it, unless the first post on that page, or the post with the quote, also has the no index tag. Can anyone confirm this?

[Maryann Corbett]

Originally Posted by Lois Elaine Heckman

As I understand it, the no index tag inserted when posting a new poem only works on that first page of the thread. If someone quotes the poem, or parts of it, on another page after that, a search can reveal it, unless the first post on that page, or the post with the quote, also has the no index tag. Can anyone confirm this?

I can confirm that quoted bits will allow the poem to appear in search results. I tried a search yesterday for one of my own poems, searching for a line. The poem at the top of the thread did not appear, but a post farther down in the thread, quoting the line, did.

I can't confirm that "noindex" coding in the quoting post would hide things, but it seems it should.

[Roger Slater]

That's news to me. I was under the impression, apparently mistaken, that the no-index tag worked on all subsequent posts in the same thread.

At any rate, I'm quite sure that I have seen many, many poems that were workshopped here at Eratosphere appear in many, many journals whose policy is not to take previously published poems.

I would not suggest trying to deceive an editor whose guidelines make clear that they regard posting to a workshop as "publication," but most guidelines that prohibit prior publication do not make clear that they hold this less-than-obvious view, and indeed, many journals do not regard posting to a workshop as prior publication. So it seems to me that in those cases it's fair to resolve the ambiguity in your own favor, but also take steps (like using no-follow tags) to minimize the chance that anyone who is not a regular at Eratosphere might stumble upon your poem here instead of reading it first in the magazine in question.