[Matt Q]

All,

In part, for me, this was prompted by Rattle announcing a change of rules to fall more in line with what they consider standard. Here's the Facebook post.

Here are couple of comments from the editor Tim Green in response to questions:

"I Google lines from every poem before publishing, so see if they've been published anywhere else."

"The rule of thumb is that if you can Google some of the lines and nothing comes up, then you're fine"

My concern is that two of the poems I've just sent him violate this rule of thumb as a result of rssing.com, which is frustrating as if it weren't for rssing.com we'd be completely hidden here on the Sphere. Most likely the fact the poems have been / will be pruned / gutted will be enough. I'll email him for clarification. Besides, I imagine he'll have plenty of poetry-related reasons to reject my poems and so never get around to searching for them anyway!

Alex,

I appreciate that asking a scraper to cease scraping may be more trouble than it's worth, or ineffective. Searching around I did come across this blogger who did ask them to desist (full text of his email in the comments) and then reported back that he was successful; they removed all stored data and stopped scraping him.

best,

Matt

[Maryann Corbett]

Matt, I've always found Tim Green to be friendly and responsive to poets' questions and concerns. If you're following his Facebook posts, why not reply to that one and explain the problem? He's aware of Eratosphere and what we do here.

Or, how about this: give me an idea of when that post appeared and whether it was a Rattle post or a Tim Green post, and I'll raise the issue.

Editing back to add: A reasonable precaution is to avoid putting the real title of the poem in the title field. The site's front page is the one that's not protected from Google, and what's in the title field appears on the front page.

[Matt Q]

Thanks Maryann,

As I said in my post, I'll email him. Just doing that now in fact.

I posted this because I thought others might be interested in the information.

best,

Matt

[Matt Q]

Originally Posted by Maryann Corbett

Editing back to add: A reasonable precaution is to avoid putting the real title of the poem in the title field. The site's front page is the one that's not protected from Google, and what's in the title field appears on the front page.

Thanks Maryann,

The problem being that rssing.com makes the first two lines or so of text of your thread available to Google, which would include the real title if you followed this strategy.

-Matt

[Michael Cantor]

I don't see why it's necessary to make such a fuss over this and start contacting everybody. As far as I'm concerned, the Sphere is a workshop, and it's purpose is to discuss works in progress. Poems appear here for a short period of time, and then disappear, and - on my part - if I'm sending one out which is still up here, I take it down myself. And - despite Matt's problem - it works. It works just fine.

I take the stance that this isn't publishing - it's workshopping - and act accordingly. And 99% of the poetry world either takes the same approach, or simply doesn't think about it. Why do you have to bother bringing it up at all? Publishers who don't think it through, or who don't understand the nature of the Sphere, or who decide - if you insist on pinning them to the wall - that it's safest to be utterly holy - may think through something they've never bothered about, and decide that they don't want anything that's appeared on the Sphere. So what do we do then? Change the title and the first two lines? Stop workshopping? Or just let the dammed thing lie, and not go off and raise a fuss because the first lines of two of Matt's poems appeared on a scuzzbag site. It is not a big problem. Please don't turn it into one.

[John Whitworth]

I think you are right in every particular in this instance, Michael.

[Matt Q]

Michael,

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

Why do you have to bother bringing it up at all?

1. Insofar as there's any value in the poems on this site being shielded from search engines, I thought that people might be interested to know that there are currently reasonable sized holes in the shield. I was. I can find some of my poems very easily on Google, and I can find other people's too. I have read previous discussions on this issue, and this seemed to be new information.

2. The situation seems to be one that could possibly be resolved, made to go away, our shields be restored to full power. (Sorry, I seem to slipping into an episode of Star Trek).

These seemed to me to be good reasons for my original post. I see value in the points you make too. I imagine most if not all of the problems are resolved by making sure that the post is deleted/gutted on submission.

Best,

Matt

[Michael Cantor]

When I said "bring it up", I meant with the publishers. No problem in alerting Spherians. As a matter of fact, it served as a reminder for more aggressive cleaning of the Boards (and thanks to those who do that), so in that sense it was helpful. My complaint was about waving a red flag at publishers, and creating a problem where one doesn't exist.

[Maryann Corbett]

Michael, I know my view of this differs from yours, but here goes: I'd like it brought up with publishers because, honestly, I'd like there to be a general understanding among them that workshopping is not publication. That understanding does not exist right now. Unless we talk up that idea, it will never gain currency, and we'll go right on having doubts about whether we can safely submit things posted here.

Right now, there's a post at the top of all the forums that tells us we can't gut out our poem threads, that we have to leave the poems up a certain length of time. It's too long for my comfort, and that's another thing that makes me unhappy about posting poems.

Naturally, you can (and will) do what works for you. It doesn't work for everybody.