Latest News for ThePoeticLink.com

To Write to me, simply send mail to: Webmaster@ThePoeticLink.com I read all of your comments and suggestions... don't be shy!

News Entry Date: 12/13/2000 12:08am

Hi guys, I hope you're all enjoying the Holiday Season! It's busy for me :) It's finally here... Volume 2 of The Poetic Link Anthology is now available for order! woohoo! Just log in and go to your user tools to find the Anthology Link or use this link: http://ThePoeticLink.com/sales/anthologies Volume 1 is now out of print and there are only limited supplies left. If you want Volume 1 you had better order it now. Volume 1 will be shipping to your homes soon, but I don't think they will make the Christmas deadline. I am sorry, but everything seems to get slower as Christmas approaches. At any rate you will have them soon :) I am also putting a new voting question into effect tonight. Please Log into your account and exercise your right to vote! I'll give you all a hint ...the voting question regards the location of our very first Convention! I am targeting Spring 2001 (that's just a few months away), so watch for new voting questions as I narrow choices down. Please help out by voting on the questions as they become available. If you see a "Voting Booth" in your User Tools, please click it! On a personal note, I just want to thank you all for your words of encouragement. I was flooded with letters from people saying just how much they appreciate this place and everything it stands for. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I only hope I can do my part as we continue to grow. We have got something truly amazing here guys and I think people are really starting to notice. Keep spreading the word, because whatever you're doing... it's working!

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Hi guys. I am writing this to apologize for not mentioning anything in the last newsletter. I had actually written 2 whole paragraphs about the matter and decided to remove the explanation from the news since I figured "Perhaps no one even noticed, so why make people upset." Wow was I wrong!!! Anyway, the November contest that just ended on the 7th had results posted for about 19 hours and then suddenly there was an "Adjustment" made. I can assure you that this adjustment was not a tampering with the scoring system or in any way a violation of anyone's rights, but for the record I will now divulge the inner-workings so that you may decide for yourself. I will also manually increase anyone's winning to what they would have received before this change if you feel that you have somehow been slighted and would like to receive the prize that you saw posted for the first 19 hours of December the 8th. Just e-mail me if you are one of these people. I was not trying to cheat anyone out of a prize, I was merely protecting you my users from receiving tainted results. OK... here is what happened. Lets say we have 5 people and they each receive 15 critiques during a given month. Their score is solely determined by those critiques. The thing you don't see (some of you remember in the past I used to show it) is "Poem Strength." Poem strength is just the sum of critiquer ratings of the people who have given you a rating. In other words if a critic with a rating of 7.5 gives you a critique, you just got 7.5 more points in Poem Strength. It is a way of determining how "Reliable" a poem score is. The higher the poem strength, the more accurate that poem score should be. Conversley, a newbie critic with a rating of only 1 would just add 1 point to your Poem Strength. Their word does NOT carry as much weight as the other critic. I use poem strength to ONLY determine WHEN a poem has received sufficient critiques to become visible to the Winners List. It is NOT meant to be a restricting factor in the final results. It is ONLY meant to prevent a poem that has just 1 or 2 critiques from showing up on that list. It is in a sense saying "OK this poem has been critiqued enough times that its score should now be very accurate." The poem strength has nothing to do with the actual score and it is certainly not calculated into the final results. It is ONLY meant to limit a poem from appearing on the list too early. Now I suppose I could actually remove "Poem Strength" entirely since poem scores are hidden until the end of the contest. But you would see poems with perfect 10's popping up at the top of the list and 1's popping up at the bottom. This would be a very "scary thing" to some people. I for one, would not like to see those scores and would much rather see a more accurate score (one that has a sufficient poem strength). So let's go back to our 5 people in the example above. They each had 15 critiques and each had scores as follows: Pers 1: score 7.32, strength 50 Pers 2: score 7.21, strength 33 Pers 3: score 7.02, strength 29 Pers 4: score 6.65, strength 42 Pers 5: score 5.43, strength 35 Remember that they each had 15 critiques OK. Now if I had the poem strength requirement set to 30 (to prevent poems from popping up on the list too early) it would actually restrict person 3 from showing up on the list EVEN here at the end of the contest. My "good" restriction suddenly became a bad one at the end. Person 3 had just as many critiques as everyone else. He worked just as hard and had an awesome poem. He deserves to be showing up. The only problem here is that I didn't catch it in time to lower the poem strength requirement. Poem strength is NOT meant to be a limiting factor for the end of a contest, only for the beginning when you start getting your first few critiques. The problem was simply that I had poem strength turned up just a tad bit too high for the number of critiques received that month. The Holidays probably had a lot to do with it. It is important to note that if this ever happened in a previous month, it was never drawn to my attention. This was the first month that someone asked me "why isn't my poem showing up on the winners list?" A simple look at their poem strength told me why. This was the first time I was ever aware of that happening. So with all of that said, again I stress that I in no way, meant to hurt anyone, I was merely reporting the scores accurately by making the necessary adjustment to poem strength. If you have comments or questions please feel free to call me or e-mail me 717-221-9202 is my number. I will honor any requests for people who wish to receive their higher "old" prize from the winners list. In closing I just want to say that you can always count on ONE THING here at The Poetic Link. You can be 100% assured that I ALWAYS have EVERYONE'S best interests in heart. I NEVER make a decision that affects you guys without deep thought. I am ALWAYS striving to report accurate and reliable stats in addition to having an accurate way of "quantifying" (putting into numbers) something that is very subjective (like poems). It is not an easy task but I ALWAYS do my very best for you guys. I protect the "little guy" and the "big guy" just the same. I do NOT take sides and I do NOT judge any of you. I merely try to run this place in the most efficient and reliable way that I can. I have a TON of improvements to add, but just very little time to do it. We are buying a new house so that I don't have to commute as far to work every day. That in addition to the 14 hours each day that I'm away from home, is seriously impacting how much time I can dedicate to TPL. It should get better soon :) Like I said before, if anyone wins the lottery or remembers to put TPL in their Will, it will be a wonderful day for all of us. I would happily dedicate 100% of my time to this place. I love it here and would love nothing more than to make this the BEST poetry site in the world. I can tell you that it would not be a very hard task. We have already done the hard part, and it works very well. Sorry for the long explanation. Comments, Questions?

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Hello guys. I just sent out the Winner Notifications for the November contest. Congratulations to all of our Winners! I will try to have the checks in the mail shortly so that you can have some spending money for Christmas! A very important bug has been discovered with some versions of Internet Explorer (IE) 5.01. If you find yourself suddenly unable to LOG INTO The Poetic Link, it is due to this Bug. The symptoms are as follows: 1. You log in normally and get to your User Tools Screen. 2. You click on any link to a "Protected Function" like "View Your Poems" and it tells you that you must log in again. 3. You click the "Log IN" link again and it says Hello, you're already logged in. This is very frustrating since you just keep going in circles and are never able to do anything beyond this. Now for the important part! ...The fix is to upgrade to Internet Explorer 5.5 since Microsoft does not currently have a fix for 5.01 to solve this problem. You can go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com to update your browser if you need to fix this problem. If you are NOT experiencing this problem right now, you do NOT need to update to the new version. One final thing... some people have been asking about Poetry.com a lot lately. People be VERY cautious about this site. If you don't believe me, just search for POETRY SCAMS on any search engine. They are the WORST Poetry Scam on the Internet in my opinion. I do NOT advocate anyone using their site. If you don't believe me, submit something to them like directions off of a cereal box, or perhaps items off of a local restaurant menu; anything that you can think of that is definitely NON Poetry. In a few weeks you will likely receive their "Congratulations letter" for your wonderful work. The rest of their scam to get money out of you becomes obvious at this point. I will pay anyone who sends me their original "Congratulations Letter" that they have received from Poetry.com for a NON Poem. In other words, if you have a Congratulations Letter from them for something that is DEFINITELY NOT a Poem, please contact me. I will buy it from you! 717-221-9202 is my phone number or just drop me an e-mail. Happy Holidays guys! Stay warm and safe!

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My goodness. I was utterly flooded by people with questions, comments & concerns regarding publishers of the type mentioned in my last newsletter. OK Guys, for the record... I have heard that GlobalPublishers.org charge $199.00 for their poetry book. This means you pay a rather large amount of money just to see your work displayed in a book of perhaps 5,000 other poems. Many of you do not like those odds and asked for alternatives. ...Well read on your solution is at hand. We PUBLISH a Hardbound Poetry Book! Yes folks we publish a real book as well as our daily online publications. Our book is a very professional Perfect Bound Poetry Anthology that we publish every quarter. The cost to you (including shipping to the US) is only about $35.00 per book. If you submit work from now until December 31, it will be included in our Volume #3 covering October - December 2000. I am currently trying to get Volume #1 (March - June 2000) out by Christmas, but we'll be cutting it close. The link to order Volume #2 will be posted shortly and you can look for delivery sometime in February 2001 for that one. Every volume of our Anthology will include up to 3 poems (1 per month) from each poet who submitted work to our site during the timeframe of the Anthology. I will do my best to keep the Anthologies under 500 poems. So we may need to do more than 4 volumes per year once we grow a bit more. At any rate I'm just trying to stress that I am putting a LOT of work into our Anthologies. They should be absolutely beautiful and I think you will be extremely pleased with the value for such a small price. So enough with this "Looking Elsewhere" mentality, you've got a gem right here before you. Please, I implore you... use it! One last thing guys... funds have been dropping of during the last 2 months. I know that the holidays probably have a lot to do with the decrease, but I need your help if I am to keep things up and running. You probably noticed that I had to decrease the prizes as a result :( If you in a giving mood and love what we have built here, please open your heart and visit: http://ThePoeticLink.com/sales/donations From that link you will be able to donate some money to us and directly help The Poetic Link. I don't know if any of you are wealthy, but if you're trying to decide on some charitable organizations to include in your Will... Please consider us an option. It is my dream to someday do this 100% of the time, without having to have another job to support my family. My wish is not to become rich, but only to be able to support my family from this site. Please help if you can.

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Hello Everyone. Recently several of our members have been contacted by a Publishing House GlobalPublishers.org I want you all to be aware that as we grow you may be contacted by some publishing agents and not all of them will be legitimate. I have spoken on the telephone with the vice president at GlobalPublishers and currently, nothing seems to be out of place with their organization. This does not mean that I am endorsing them or what they do, you have to make that decision on your own. They do charge for their poetry book if you want to see your work in print with them. I have heard them referred to as a "Vanity Press," but you should do your own research. The best advice I can give with any type of publishing company making you an offer, is BE CAUTIOUS! It is always wise to carefully read any offers and certainly any contracts that they send to you. It is rare to get something for nothing.

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Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (OK so I'm 2 days late) At any rate, things have been very busy here and I thought it might be a good time to let everyone know what is going on. I know it has been a long time since I sent a newsletter out... but I have VERY good news. The newsletters will now be automated so that anything I put into the NEWS on the site is automatically sent out as a newsletter. This should provide a perfect way to keep everyone updated on developments here at The Poetic Link. October Prizes were just printed up and will be in the mail on Monday morning. If you won, you should be getting your prize money in plenty of time for Christmas shopping. :) -woohoo! ANTHOLOGIES!! --- Yes folks Volume 1 (March - June) should be at the Bookbinders by Monday. I don't know if you will get them in time for Christmas gifts, but I will do my best. If anyone else wants Volume #1 please order it now. I only have 14 orders so far! Go to http://ThePoeticLink.com/sales/anthologies if you want to order one. I will soon put a link up to order Volume #2 (July - September) so watch for it. Volume 2 will turn around much faster since I have the system all worked out now. That's all for now ...Take care and have a happy holiday season everyone! You should notice a cute change in scenery on the site tonight since I love Christmas so very much :)

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Hi guys, it's been forever since I wrote to all of you. That is not by choice. I have been very busy lately trying to find a new house. This new job that I took, requires me to be in the office 5 days each week. I have a 2 hour commute each way to work, and needless to say I have ZERO time for my life anymore. I am doing my very best to find a solution as quickly as possible. The Poetic Link was growing so quickly and so strongly, now I feel like it's slipping. I have so many great new additions I want to add, but no time to add them. If anyone knows a wealthy poet somewhere who would be willing to give me a donation, enough to care for my family for 2 years; I think we would be set. I am fairly confident that if I could do this full-time, within 2 years I could expand it enough to support my family from it. But without a generous relative or friend, I am going to have to keep my day job. :( I am searching as hard as I can, for a solution. Please keep the faith. Something good will happen soon. I will try to write more news updates to keep you posted. For now, please know that I have NOT forgotten about you all, and I am doing everything that I can to make things work. -Chris

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Please be aware that my e-mail has been down for 10/8 and 10/9. If you sent me anything important during those dates you will need to re-send that information once I say that my e-mail has been fixed. So for now, I am NOT getting any e-mails please do NOT think that I'm ignoring you. Thank You, -Chris

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It has come to my attention that some people were incorrectly scoring or critiquing poems based on "THEIR OWN" scales. Please let me make something very clear. We are on a BASE 10 scale now people. You can score poems and critiques however you like but you must be consistent and use a 1 - 10 scale system. You may feel free to substitute different "wordings" where you like, but NOT a different number scale. If anyone is caught using a different Number Base scale they will face penalties. Remember, I can see all of the scores given. So just please be fair and use the 1 - 10 range properly. On another note, I would like to know if anyone living in the New York City area would be interested in speaking at a school. They are looking for a speaker with a background in poetry writing so contact me if you are interested. Thank You, -Chris

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Hey guys my cousin Rich is down here for my brother's wedding and I'm on a pseudo vacation. I think that I'm going to go drinking this evening (oh no!) *laugh* so I'm not sure how much stuff I'm going to accomplish this week. But I will try to keep up with e-mail and the like. I am sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause anyone, he's only getting married once you know! (yeah right!) Anyway, we won't go down that road. If you need something important please don't hesitate to ask and I will do my best to get back to you. Have a great week and weekend :) -Chris

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