[Mark McDonnell]

Thanks folks,

There's potential for tension, I guess, if one person is calling out a journal for its ideological position, and another person is sending poems there, but that's not a reason not to have a thread about it, as far as I can see.

I agree with this on principle, Matt. I mean, the thread was messy and fairly exhausting but so is life, I suppose. As long as the Sphere's 'ad hom' rules are upheld, there's no reason not to have these conversations on GT. People have the choice to get involved or not.

I suppose there's also no reason not to have the other ideas in place too. So people can use the thread on Eratosphericals if they wish and anyone is free to start a more general 'Publication Talk' thread on GT too. Is there a reason why access to Eratosphericals seems difficult for some members? I remember being given a password, but for a long time I didn't know about it. And now I don't seem to need the password. I'm not sure if this is because of my 'mod' status.

Jayne, do you have any thoughts? (he says, passing the buck)

[Matt Q]

Hi Mark,

This is how it seems to work (for non-mods anyway):

Once you've entered a password to get into Eratosphericals, a cookie is set.

If you don't log out of the Sphere, the cookie means that a) you don't need a password to get into Eratosphericals again, and b) all new posts in Eratosphericals will show up for you in the "New Posts" list.

If you actually log out of the Sphere --- as opposed to just closing your browser or navigating away -- all are cookies are removed. In this case, when you next log back in, you'll need to enter the password for Eratosphericals again to see the forum. And until you do that, new posts in Eratosphericals won't appear in the "New Posts" list, so you won't know they're they unless you go looking.

The same applies to the password-protected forums in Deep Drills.

Since I access the Sphere on a private computer (and phone), I don't ever log out, and so I don't have any problems with seeing new things in the password-protected forums.

Someone in the habit of actually logging into and out of the Sphere every time they visited wouldn't see new posts in Eratosphericals unless they also logged into Eratosphericals every time they logged into the Sphere.

[Maryann Corbett]

For the sake of fairness, I'm going to report an addendum to my story above about Smartish Pace. After 20 days, they did reply to my query. They discovered that, although they believed they had cleared out their old email submission system, my sub had apparently slipped through the e-cracks.

So perhaps they don't as a rule take over a year to respond to submissions.