contest winners, new feature announcements

First, I would like to thank the staff at Lulu’s Poetry for their recognition thus far of those poems of mine that have won prizes. I know that you must have a daunting task in sorting through and choosing winners from so many good poems. I understand that you need a process to cut away the chaff, by letting the community establish the 90% that is not considered, as explained in your contest rules. However, I must question the wisdom in allowing contestants to vote both for themselves, and against other contestant’s poems. First, you cannot possibly expect contestants to be impartial in this practice, it simply defies logic. A large percentage of votes cast are in fact the contestants themselves. Second, another large percentage of these votes are being cast by friends and family of contestants which cannot be considered impartial either. And third, what’s to stop someone from taking practically any chain e-mail, and creating hundreds of phony accounts from those addresses, to vote both for themselves and against other contestants?
I’m aware of no system of accountability to your voting system whatsoever, or at least until it falls under the judges sole consideration anyway. I myself am a Christian man with strong moral values, however let us face the facts here, People like myself find ourselves in a minority in that respect these days.
Anytime that money is at stake then there will be those people of low character who will use any, and every, avenue along with whatever resource available to them to acquire it dishonestly. This is unfortunately a sad, but true, fact of the society that we live in. So therefore, unless you establish safeguards to insure that these dishonest people cannot act successfully, then you can assure yourself that it is in fact going to happen. That is how I know that these malpractices of dishonest voting must be occurring even as you read this. Unless of course there is some system of accountability of which I’m unaware.
I also would like to express my utter joy with the changes that you have made since the transition from Poetry.com. In my opinion, before it was pathetic, and I considered it a fraud. As a result, I never submitted any of my poems. You have come light years from where it was. You have my complete admiration in that regard.
I believe that the only fair way to derive winners to any contest is to completely eliminate partiality. And, considering the established system as set forth in your rules, I have to question whether you actually believe that too.
I do have pliable suggestions that you could employ to insure impartiality in this contest should you care to contact me at brumleytim@yahoo.com.
Thank You,
Timothy I. Brumley

P.s. This is by no means a complaint! It is only a suggestion motivated by concern. The fact is, I simply
Love your site, and therefore your staff.

Posted by Timothy Brumlry on 6 October 2009 @ 10am

Good Day,
I noticed that as I submit new poems, then previously submitted poems fall off of my list. Why?
Also, today I submitted my poem “Autum’s Lulaby” and “A Specter Speaks To War” no only fell off of my list, but it fell off the leader board as well! If I’m only allowed a certain number of poems, Then I would rather forfiet “Ten Brothers” and give me my Specter back! That’s my best work! Are we only allowed just so many entries? If so then how many are we allowed? And why wan’t this mentioned in the by laws? Thank you, and keep up the good work!

Posted by Timothy Brumlry on 7 October 2009 @ 6am

Once a poem is chosen as a winner for either a daily or monthly prize, is it still eligible to win again for any future prize daily, monthly, or annually?

Posted by Timothy Brumley on 8 October 2009 @ 12am

My profile seems to only allow me 15 entries. Why? I have submitted 20 poems, and 5 of them have fallen off my list. Are those poems not listed in my profile still ellibible to win? If so, how can people see them in order to vote for them?

Posted by Timothy Brumley on 8 October 2009 @ 12am

How do I search other people’s names?…How do I get others to Read My Poetry?

Posted by Bev J Baker on 8 October 2009 @ 9am

Hi Timothy,
To answer your questions:
1) I understand your concerns about allowing the community to rate poems for the contest. However, Lulu Poetry receives a high volume of submissions and there are a lot of wonderful poems to choose from. Having the community rate poems helps the judges to narrow the contestants. There is always the possibility of cheating with any contest, but we hope that all our poets will show integrity. You must register on the site in order to rate poems, which does help. If we find that a poet has cheated, their prize may be revoked.

2) Once a poem has been selected as a contest winner, it cannot win that same contest category again but it can win in another category (categories are Daily, Monthly, and Yearly). For example, once a poem has been selected as a winner for the Daily Contest, it cannot win the Daily Contest again. That poem is still eligible to win the Monthly or Yearly contest.

Poems do not have to win the Daily contest in order to win the Monthly or Yearly contest. Poets can submit as many poems as they like to the contest, and a poet may win the contest multiple times with different poems.

3) There is currently a bug on the site that only shows 15 poems on your profile page. We are working on it, and that should be fixed soon. You are allowed to submit as many poems as you like to Lulu Poetry, and we have a lots of poets that have uploaded several hundred poems. Poems not shown on your profile page are still eligible for the contest, and you may still edit them at any time. Poems not shown on your profile are still able to be found through search.

Congratulations again on having two of your poems selected as winners, and thank you for your comments.

Thank you,
Annie

Posted by Annie on 8 October 2009 @ 11am

Annie,

Thank you for your quick response to my query. I know that you must have your hands full there and the responsibility must therefore be great. I also understand that the costs deferred by letting the “community” ,as you call us, vote in order to decide the top ten percent is most likely necessary. However the process is still tainted by partiality by allowing the contestants and their friends vote, and no amount of “hoping” that people will conduct themselves properly will ever change that.
I don’t just come with criticisms alone, and if you will consider it, I would like to make the following suggestion…
You could tap into that greatest resource at hand which is the community however, the impartial readers.
This could be done by announcing and then taking applications from the community for poetry judges.
These judges would be exempt of course from the contest itself. You already have a large number of people who visit the site just to enjoy the poetry. You could send these judges poems to rate in lots, of lets say 10 poems each. Along with each poem would be a rating form with different categories to grade them on. Such as content, form, creativity, originality, structure, diction, spelling, etc.
And you can pay the judges a fair price per poem rated, say like .05 cents a poem. Or, whatever is appropriate.
There are a lot of people who love to read poetry who need some way to earn extra income and would love to participate in the contest.
You could even send the same lots of poems to several different judges to better insure the fairness of the ratings, and to make sure that the judges themselves are not trying to scam you.
The process might take a day or two longer to get the same results, but it would be completely unbiased, and impartial.
Of course, you would have to carefully screen these people to find the ones best suited, and they would have to pass a certain level of education and ability.
This entire process could be done on line. Therefore the only costs to you would be only for the rating of the poems themselves
I myself would feel a lot more comfortable with this process than the one being used currently. I would also be curious the see the difference in ratings of the same poems by the two different processes.
Anyway, this is just a suggestion, a little food for thought. I know you must be bombarded with complaints from people who offer no suggestions, and I just wanted you to know that I’m not one of those people.
Tim I. Brumley

Posted by Timothy Brumley on 8 October 2009 @ 2pm

Annie,

I know that you must be thinking that I show a lot of nerve, and am trying to tell you how to run your own show, but I assure you that is not my intentions. I would like to point out to you one final fact in support of my concern.
Both the “Butterfly” and “Four Sisters” previously enjoyed high ratings before they were chosen to win. In retrospect, since they have won and since they were placed at the top of the leader board, they have plummeted to an all time low, in the 7’s, as did Novels after it went to the top last week.
Now these are poems that your own people picked as winners, from the top 10%. Now they are no longer in the top 10%. But if you notice other poems of mine, lesser poems, which are down lower and more obscure due to their placement still enjoy a high rating. An intelligent person would realize that the reason is obvious in that those other certain contestants, who by lacking otherwise in talent or faith in their own work, feel threatened by those entries at the top of the list and are voting very low ratings in order to try and raise their own chances.
The reason that those poems further down the list don’t suffer the same treachery is because only someone who is actually reading the poetry for pleasure would normally scroll down to read and vote for a poem further down on the list, while someone doing a bit of head-hunting would go to the top.
Actually, it’s been a death sentence for most of my poems to see the top of the list. Now you may just write that off as a temperamental writers egotistical ranting over constructive criticism, but I think that you know that I have a good and valid concern. And that concern is doubly magnified by the amount of the annual prize money.
OK, that’s the last that I will say about this. I’ve made my point and I hope that it has been well taken. Thank you.

Posted by Timothy Brumley on 8 October 2009 @ 9pm

Annie,

I’ve been trying since late last night to log in, but I can’t seem to pull up Lulu.poetry. This is the only portion of the entire site that comes up. Pray tell good lady, what transpires there in that land beyond my screen?

Posted by Timothy Brumley on 9 October 2009 @ 3pm

Timothy,
I am sorry to hear that you are having trouble with the site. I just tested the site and was able to log in and use all the features in both Firefox and Safari. It all appeared to be working fine. Can you please tell me what web browser you are using?

Thank you,
Annie

Posted by Annie on 9 October 2009 @ 3pm

I have several, Google, mywebsearch, and Stopzilla. They all say the same thing. That the site is broken. And it’s not just me, my mother who lives in Crawford Ga. is having the same problem. Also, I am here, and I should go staight there by clicking onto the highlighted titles of winning poems. But they all say the same also.

Posted by Timothy I. Brumley on 9 October 2009 @ 4pm

I just used Yahoo and they said that Lulu.poetry does not exist. I have previously gained access by using the old poetry.com site which no longer seems to be available. Exactly what site do I need to type into my browser?

Posted by Timothy I. Brumley on 9 October 2009 @ 4pm

Timothy Brumley is right. Since about 1 am GMT on Oct. 9 (or earlier), the web site poetry.com has been inaccessible by the outside world. In particular, I have tried to access http://www.poetry.com and http://poetry.com with Windows Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4 and Netscape 7.1. All of these attempts failed with error messages indicating a time out, i.e. no response was received by the browser within the normal time limit.

Of the several variations to the above URLs I tried (e.g. including search criteria in the URL), only http://blog.poetry.com worked.

Pinging each of the above URLs failed, even blog.poetry.com, again on the time out condition. Even lulu.com fails to respond to the ping command.

I hope that your technical staff will succeed soon in getting poetry.com back on the “air”. A down time of over three days is much too long. I had begun to think that poetry.com had closed down for good.

Posted by Robert Laurence Baber on 12 October 2009 @ 3am

Everyone,
Lulu Poetry had an unplanned site outage that began at 12am ET on Oct. 9th. As of 9:15am ET on Monday, Oct. 12th, the site is back up. The problem was related to our firewall- from inside Lulu everything appeared to be working perfectly, but no one outside of Lulu could access the site.

I am extremely sorry for the inconvenience this has caused all of you. We are actively taking steps to increase our external monitoring of the site, so that a situation like this will not happen again.

Thank you all for your comments and feedback as we worked though this situation.
Annie

Posted by Annie on 12 October 2009 @ 10am

Now we can access poetry.com from outside again.

However, the anonymous problem has not been fixed yet. Two target dates for fixing it have now been missed. I wonder which old saying will apply: “Three strikes and you’re out” or “All good things are three”.

Posted by Robert Laurence Baber on 12 October 2009 @ 4pm