If you need help with the site or have any other questions, send email to kaolin.fire@poemranker.com.

Please unsubscribe me from chat@poemranker.com!!!?

Please unsubscribe yourself! To unsubscribe, log in, choose "edit user info" (next to your name), uncheck "subscribe to chat@poemranker.com", and click on "submit". You signed up for this when you joined by checking "subscribe to chat@poemranker.com". You have *not* been opted in, gotten from a mailing list, or subscribed without your notice.

I don't know anything about poetry!

Neither do most people. It's okay (well, relatively). Try some tasty links or purview this popup. Or check out 'an excellent source for examples of "show me, don't tell me"'. [hey, you can refer people to read the FAQ if they talk too much ;)] Another good list of links is at writersmonthly.us poet's workshop.

What about plagiarism?

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
--T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). "Philip Massinger"

The poemwanker award has been created to help address this phenomenon, and others.

What are the weird characters to the right of the Users list?

The first (!) is whether the user is on the chat mailing list; the second (a) is whether they receive administrative notices; the third (c) is whether they receive comments by email.

Why don't the averages tally up right?

The main reason to weight it is to make the "top ten" and "bottom ten" lists work less erratically. Even limiting the lists to five votes, poems that really didn't belong on the one list or the other were showing up. I've implemented some rudimentary weighting, making stuff with less votes tend closer towards a 5.0, stuff with more votes tend closer towards their arithmetic average. I'm using everyone's favorite sigmoid. ;)

Why don't the comments tally up right?

Poets can delete comments left on their pieces... but the comments aren't gone entirely; they're still used to calculate the last comment on a piece and the number of comments on a piece.

Do you have to join to use this site?

Not in the slightest -- only if you want to submit your own poetry for rating/comments, or leave comments on others' work.

Is there a way to ensure that a user at a certain terminal doesn't randomly get the same poem over and over again?

No. If you're logged in AND you vote on it, then you won't see it "randomly" again. That's my best concession. And if they "edit" their poem, that wipes all votes, and as such chances are you will see it again.

"No more than 3 poems a week? It's not like I just started writing for this site!"

the problem was that folks were flooding the site with every poem they've written in their 60-odd years or whatnot. With even one user adding 70 poems in a week, it was a bit absurd -- add on the fact that there's usually a couple of new users a week and in general people simply post all their poetry and disappear... this is my attempt to keep site use a little less lopsided, and attract users back to the site

So what exactly IS this "3 poems a week" thing?

More precisely, it is: If you have not posted a piece within the last two days (to the "second"), then you are allowed to post a new one. Deleted poems do not count towards this tally.

Do you plan on having advertising on your site?

Not really. I've left a few links on the "about" page, but that's probably the extent of it. I might eventually set up a cafepress bit to sell shirts or mugs or whatnot. But really, I'm just happy to have made something that folks are using.

Where can I go to chat realtime?

try #poemranker on DalNET; -=Dark_Angel=- was kind enough to set that up.

What improvements are you planning?

• putting statistics of some sort back up
• ...?