A Quick Question

Is the Short Story section hidden from search engines and only visible to members?

Thanks in advance.

 

Only visible to members, yes. Hidden from search engines? Maybe. Take a story a few months old, and throw a sentence into Google, surrounded by double quotes, and see what comes up. Don't forget the site:writingforums.org modifier to restrict results to this site.

 

Search Engines give higher creditability to forums and rank them higher based upon content.
Not this forum, but another I recently found some of my old work based upon pulling up a search for a term from google so more then likely yes, unless of course the forum has a robot.txt written specifically to tell search engines not to search the directory where the forums is storied or to only go but so deep. Good question no one could definitively answer it but the person who is actually running the site, I doubt a mod would even know.

 

I don't believe that the Review Room is visible to search engines. Certainly the threads within those forums can only be viewed by members.

 

This question goes along with the question I was about to ask. I know that a lot of publishing companies will not publish you if you have posted your work "even a chapter" in a public place. So I was kind of wondering the same thing that the above asked as I don't want to post any of my work if it rules out me ever being able to publish it if I ever got the opportunity.

 

You should take a look at this thread, regarding first publishing rights.

 

You don't want to publish anything on this site that you intend to have published in the future, even if it is only a portion of the work. The First Rights issue is one concern. In addition, according to the site rules you relinquish control over your work as soon as you publish here. Not a good idea if you have commercial aspirations for that work.

 

Thanks for the information...I won't post anything then more than maybe a sentence or two.

 

If the forum is hidden to non-members, first rights are protected. Since it is, you can post what you want & you'll keep your first pub. rights.

 

You should check with your target publication first. This is true of most publications, or at least was the last time I've looked. But I've seen a few that consider even forums that are hidden to non-members to extinguish first rights if any member of the public can sign up and access the forums for free (i.e. the forums aren't limited to a small group). For those publishers, if you have a ten-second registration process and suddenly you have a password to the protected forums, they don't consider that a significant barrier.

And you still have the issue of losing control over the work.

 

aside from the first rights issue, consider this:

if you were a publisher, would you feel like paying for something that you hope to make people pay to read, when it can be read for free on a website?

 

The more reputable search engines do not have access to the Review Room. However, there are bot accounts that feed rogue search engines and archives, although we ban them when we detect them.

A "member" is any successfully created account, and of course we don't require proof of identity such as Verisign certificates in order to join.

 

I've banned a number of "archive bots" in the past. They aren't easy to catch, but sometimes you see them over several days never posting but following a systematic traversal of the forums. Also, they are often detected and tattled on by honeypot sites.

I've seen them particularly from certain geographical regions.

I'm sure there are many such accounts that have never been caught. I don't generally have time to chase them down, so it's only when the behavior is blatant that they catch my attention.

Only anonymous search engines are actually prevented from archiving Writing Workshop posts. There is a "don't catalogue" attribute you can attach to a set of web pages (I don't recall exactly how it is applied), but compliance with the request is voluntary.

 

cog...

if i'm reading you correctly, this means that one can never consider any supposedly 'safe' review section completely safe and thus still never post a complete piece of work that one may want to submit for publication later...

yes/si/oui or no/no/non?

m

 

IIRC from my days actively doing web development, it's in the robots.txt file in a particular directory. As Cogito said, it's completely voluntary, and I would specifically expect non-mainstream crawlers (i.e. things that aren't Google or Bing) to ignore it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

Edit: looks to be per domain/subdomain, not directory

Edit2: rel="nofollow" also looks to be an optional command for crawlers, but to suppress following links on a particular page

 

A truly closed critiquing circle is relatively safe. By this, I mean a room in which only a small set of members have access, with each member approved by the other members of the group.

That is in contrast to a room open to anyone is a member of the site or of a global group.

The problem is, the site has to support it, and have suypport staff who can create a new custom group at need and assign limited access to a room based on that group. As you can imagine, that could become quite a logistic burden.