[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.

[Golias]

Maryann, having stirred up this matter again after having several poems declined by major print journals specifically on account of their appearance at Eratosphere, I must add my voice to those requesting something definitive be done to solve this problem. I would hate to have to give up workshopping as Alicia and some others seem to have done long ago. Online workshopping can be a pleasure in itself, but publication in major journals and good anthologies still seems to be the best way to build or to firm up a reputation.

So if bi-weekly pruning will do the trick, and you now find it easy to prune, then by all means let's try it---at least until we can see if it really works. It took only hours for the robots to find and cache the whole test poem, with a meta-tag, I posted at TDE yesterday afternoon.

G/W

G/W

[Roger Slater]

I posted my poem "As Winter Ends" recently to the Deep End. A couple of days before, I posted the exact same poem to Gazebo. A moment ago, when I googled a few phrases, the Eratosphere thread was the only search result. I don't know why it didn't show up for Gazebo, but the answer may provide a clue as to what we should be doing here.

Anyway, why can't we do "self-pruning," i.e., edit the poem out of our own threads? I would suggest that we simply invent a new protocol requiring those who want to "self-prune" to clearly announce their intention one week in advance. Perhaps the announcement should come in bold, capital letters at the top of the first posting, setting forth the exact date of pruning. That way, people will have time to copy the thread if they so desire, or rush to post a critique they've been working on.

I know that this would leave quoted portions of the poem in place, but maybe, as a courtesy, those who quoted chunks of the poem could edit out the quotes as well. Regardless, it's better than nothing, and ought to be effective particularly if people take care not to use the real title of their poem in the subject line.

PS--

My strong preference would still be to make the entire site invisible to anyone who is not logged in. Registration should remain free and easy, but those who want to view the site should have to be logged in to view it. This would be a complete solution to the problem. And quite apart from the problem of prior publication, I would very much favor this approach since I see absolutely no reason why we should want our work being displayed to anyone who casually wanders by. It really is a form of publication to allow that to happen, if you want to be honest about editorial reactions, and I would prefer to be able to post without shame or inhibition among people I trust and choose. This is especially true since (like most of us) I often post work that I know to be particularly flawed, since my more polished work is less in need of workshopping. Why would anyone want their incomplete work to be displayed to the entire world when there's a simple solution, i.e., just making the site invisible to anyone who is not signed in? That would keep the site from Google and prevent anyone from stumbling across our unfinished work. Not to mention preventing people from our "non-poetry" lives from sitting in on our poetry discussions.

It would really be a very minor inconvenience to ask people to log in before being able to read the site. It takes just a few seconds, and you can stay logged in for quite some time before you have to log in again. I really don't get why we let non-members read. It's like having a workshop in someone's house and leaving the door open with a sign inviting strangers to come in and have a seat in the back.

I belong to two discussion forums that are invisible if you are not logged in. One has 20 members, the other has a few thousand members. I have never seen any of their posts on Google. Ever. And I can be sure that no one other than my fellow members has seen what I have posted.

[Philip Quinlan]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

My strong preference would still be to make the entire site invisible to anyone who is not logged in. Registration should remain free and easy, but those who want to view the site should have to be logged in to view it...I see absolutely no reason why we should want our work being displayed to anyone who casually wanders by. It really is a form of publication to allow that to happen

I must say I have often wondered about that too.

It seems to me you could prune as often as you wanted. Anyone wishing to retain their golden words of wisdom (either poetical or critical) could cut and paste them elsewhere at regular intervals (or every time they change).

And how come in this age the pruning process isn't automated?

Philip

[Roger Slater]

If the workshops were invisible to those not signed in, you could still have a home page providing a "guest" sign-in procedure to allow people to read the site but without posting privileges. That would allow potential new members to look around before deciding whether they want to register.

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Maryann

I very much agree with Roger’s suggestion that Eratosphere should be visible only to members who have logged on. As I said on Golias’s adjacent “Spider” thread this morning, “Running the site as if it were a kind of reality-TV show open to the passing eyes of the world, may not be such a good idea.” Though I know nothing about managing a web-site, the fact that Roger belongs to other sites that operate in this way suggests that it ought not to be too difficult for Alex to put it in place.

Kind regards

Clive

[Clive Watkins]

Since we seem to have two threads running in parallel on this topic, Golias's "Avoiding Spiders" thread and this, I want to draw attention to Rose's most recent post "across the way": "There are plenty of bad spiders out there that ignore robot tags. The only foolproof way to keep them out is to require a login." (I am certain Rose knows a whole lot more about such matters than I do....)

Clive

[Shaun J. Russell]

I somewhat agree with Roger et al., but I can completely understand why the site is currently open (though read-only) to any who should happen by. I think a lot of newcomers would want to get a feel for the place prior to joining. It might seem like a very minor inconvenience to have to join a forum to see its contents, but I guarantee that you WILL see a decline in new membership. Which may or may not be a bad thing.

How about this: is there a possibility of making the three workshopping forums login-only alone, while having the rest of the forums open?

Edited to add: oh, like Rose mentioned in the other thread. I didn't see that.

[David Rosenthal]

Originally Posted by Clive Watkins

Since we seem to have two threads running in parallel on this topic, Golias's "Avoiding Spiders" thread and this, I want to draw attention to Rose's most recent post "across the way": "There are plenty of bad spiders out there that ignore robot tags. The only foolproof way to keep them out is to require a login." (I am certain Rose knows a whole lot more about such matters than I do....)

Clive

Maryann,

I hope you have noticed the other thread. Steve C's post there is informative, and others have posted some responses that bear on your questions here. I am for an all-out approach: (1) use the tags in the headings the way Steve C suggests, (2) make the workshop forums accessible only to registered members, and (3) prune more often.

David R.

[Marybeth Rua-Larsen]

Thank you for raising the issue, Maryann. I join the chorus of those who would like their poems "gone" sooner. Just yesterday I deleted one of my poems in Met. It hadn't been commented on in two weeks and I've long been done with it, but it didn't meet the guidelines to be pruned this month, and I didn't want to burden you with asking (again) that it be removed. I know some people get upset when poems are deleted like that, but as grateful as I always am for the comments and critique, I don't feel I need to warn anyone that I'm deleting my own poem. Speeding up the pruning process would help avoid this problem.

As far a making this a "log-in" site? I wonder if I would have ever found this place or made a commitment to it if it had been "log-in only." I doubt it. If I couldn't have seen the quality of the poems without giving registration info., I don't think I would have stuck around. I spent months reading here before I joined. I don't think I'm alone in that, though maybe it isn't common. It feels kind of elitist to me (but perhaps I don't fully understand the system Roger wants to implement). I rarely comment at the Gaz, but I do read there often, and I'm not logged in when I do, so whatever system they have, it isn't the one people here are discussing (I don't think). I'll go along with whatever is decided, but I'd rather see how pruning more often works first, unless someone convinces me otherwise.

marybeth