[Roger Slater]

OK, though it sounds strange, I now understand that the poem doesn't go between the tags. You simply put both the tags at the top of the posting.

But I still thought Alex was saying:

1. The default moving forward is that there's no need for the tags at all in the workshop forums. (Though you can always put them in as a belt and suspenders sort of redundancy).

2. Moving forward, in the non-workshop forums, you can opt to use the tags to hide a given post or thread.

Is this correct?

When tags are needed, I still don't understand whether the tags will affect the whole thread. If they do, is this only the case for the posts following the one in which the tags are found, or does it affect all posts, even those that came before? If it only affects the single post, this could be a problem because you have to rely upon anyone quoting distinctive portions of your poem to place the tags in as well.

[Maryann Corbett]

To Roger's point about people quoting distinctive portions of the poem in critique:

The mods have had some discussion, in the past, about requests to edit out such bits of poems, and we've agreed we'll do it for blocks of text.

Those of us who like to do in-line critique probably ought to develop the habit of inserting the code at the top of our posts UNLESS the whole forum is hidden, and I think Alex is saying that it is.

P.S. I don't think the issue of more frequent pruning is moot or dead.

[Chris Childers]

Yeah, sure, prune every two weeks, sounds good to me.

How long do things remain in Google's cache? I just googled a poem I posted in January and was able to read the whole deleted thread by clicking on the cache. & will Alex's new code affect things posted a while ago that have not been pruned yet?

Chris

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Maryann

By all means prune more frequently if that is not too much of a chore for you.

Thanks for all you do around here!

Best...

Clive

[Rose Kelleher]

Lo, the use of an alias makes no difference when someone Googles a poem's title or first line.

Anti's submission guidelines say something like, "If I can Google it, I don't want it." I'm sure there are others.

Many editors don't want poems that have been "published" online. If they Google your poem's title, and they see the poem on Eratosphere, chances are they're not going to say to themselves, "Oh, well, this poem only appears on Eratosphere, which is an online workshop with 5,000 members; that's totally different from appearing in The Whatever Review, which gets 400 hits a year." They're just going to toss your submission.


[Edit: Oops, it looks like I missed a page or two! Nevermind!]

[Allen Tice]

I'm very interested in the content above. Absolutely.

Now, another question for the magnificent Alex Pepple:

Is it possible to overwrite a Google or other search-engine cache (Clusty, Kartoo, &&)?

What if one entered new material in place of cached material while retaining the same thread (or webpage) title?

When the thread is spidered again, will this new material effectively replace the previous stuff, or not? Especially at the start of a thread?

If not, is their any other way to scrub the caches of what you want to protect?

Let's make this work.

Allen

[Maryann Corbett]

Allen, it may not be possible. Don't forget that there's also something called informally The Wayback Machine, or the Internet Archive, a project to preserve states of Web pages that disappear.

Here's a link to a lot of old Sphere pages:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ablemuse.com/erato

This is the reason the geek-types are fond of the saying "What goes on the Web stays on the Web."

I haven't read enough background to know if the folks behind this are willing to take things down, but perhaps we should find out.

[Julie Steiner]

Re: pseudonyms, title changes, etc.

When I'm trying to find a poem on the Web, I never search by the title or first line or author's name. I try to reduce irrelevant search results by using a few unique phrases from within the poem.

Just sayin'. The anti-indexing measures seem to be our best hope.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Thanks Alex. Despite the fact that I'm one who has always viewed it all as a crap shoot, your efforts are reassuring and very writer compassionate.

I for one would never give up this work-shopping process despite it jeopardizing the occasional publication. What Rose says about frequency of hits is eye-opening. And the dialogue about a poem here, whether it results in substantial changes or not, is something one does not get in publication. I'm far more interested in the conversations than the kudos.

Nemo