Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.

J4SfkA

Hey, you guys! I know some people are visiting this discussion already. Let me know youve been here and give an opinion of this topic and my discussions store tobacco webpage devoted to store tobacco. zofran during pregnancy webpage devoted to zofran during pregnancy. too!

Hey lookie! It's "Spamfeedback" down there.

Good design!
My homepage | Please visit

Nice site!
[url=http://hsqvedpe.com/qqoz/cybj.html]My homepage[/url] | [url=http://vywddiqp.com/ziln/wxxe.html]Cool site[/url]

pmc72n1z9j9r1mh9 ky6fe4t8suh4doqx [URL=http://www.218383.com/219068.html] nqruybnkego3 [/URL] wc0cp90f4qbchf

240pwpv3hiiq 2onep7h7 [URL=http://www.550624.com/609856.html] vrobuy6tvyiynt [/URL] 66rrxlo9bs7

DID YOU KNOW YOU ARE A GOOGLEWHACK!!!! CRAGSTER1PRETTYBOY@HOTMAIL.COM

Some poems (e.g. the recent alphabetic-ish couplets) aren't getting through to the Golden Treasury

/m119 Thank you.

/m118 the offending lines have been removed

Peter, some "clever" poet has seen fit to add several lines which seem to be well beyond the bounds of good taste.

Spoonmaster! Master of Spoons! One with a mastery of or for spoons! Is it, some might ask, not time that the Spoonbill News was of a little less Antient character? Whilst he is writing, The Agent has thought to ask whether the Chief Spoonsmith had a good Caribbean holiday 'on the back of' recent 'winnings' from submitting TSG poems for competitions...

/m115 Thanks Peter, I'll check again later.

/m114 Yes, the server that holds the poems has been down for the last few hours. They're working on it now.

Peter, I'm getting an error on the home page. The left side of the page is visible but the main part of the page is blank and there's a message at the top that says "Could not connect to MySQL: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'scorpio' (146)". I get the same thing when I click on any of the poems or the Golden Treasury, but I am able to view all the proses pieces and the Platinum Treasury. Thanks.

/m112 OK, will investigate.

Some finished pomes (the last Indigo, for example) appear not to be making it into the Treasury

/m110 Done.

Edited by author 11-17-2004 10:30 AM
We appear to have a spoiler on Blue, Red and Green. Will the Spoonmaster take appropriate action, please. He's also added to the prose pieces, but I'm not sure it's possible to spoil those!

No I am not, who wrote that gabbage?

The Agent was under the impression that The Pontiff Elect had only made, many years back, a temporary remission of, from and through the rule that only an author of any line in a poem might submit a suggestion for its title. This was said to have been done with the aim of securing some suggestions for poems for which none (of any worth) had been suggested, but was taken to have been rescinded when the finished batch of titles was released. From his last visit, The Agent is not aware of the point being addressed by the FAQ, so was mystified to find the duet between F and him with a title suggested other than by her. It is perhaps worth observing that it is curious to have a voting system for the House of Fame, but for the choice from the suggestions for titles to be a sinecure.

Edited by author 10-04-2004 03:34 AM
Peter, where can we find the finished private prose pieces?
(I realize, of course, that if you answered that question here, it would no longer be a private prose site ;-)
   But let us know somehow or other.

Edited by author 09-20-2004 11:38 PM
Rather embarrassing that all our recent gaffes and revisions are shown there on the homepage. Is that really necessary? ;-)

I've had no prob adding to prose, Nym.

/m101 & /m102 Nym, I was able to add the Ziti prose just now.

I've just started a new Ziti piece with no problem - it must be you, N!

In fact, it's not just Ziti prose - seems I can't add any prose at all.

It's an ongoing problem - still occurs even after a new piece has been started. Happens the same from two different computers (although they probably have the same external IP address).

/m99 On SB QT, Peter posted that he is away on vacation.

Ziti Prose is giving me grief - have only been able to submit to it once so far.

Edited by author 08-27-2004 02:26 AM
/m97 Rest assured, I won't blow your cover, Agent ;-)
(Nor try to diagram your sentences!)

/m94 Or, The Agent wonders could, as with some Windows drop-down menus and the like, Alt S select Submit, and Alt C Cancel/Clear? The identity of Mr Bond is not known to The Agent, but it is clear that the actor Toby Stephens is, if not meant, then the person who should be meant.

/m94 How James Bondish!

/m90 The Agent is not so easily deflected, since the cgi-bin would instantly detect any such informationally deficient would-be entry & hold it up to the would-be contributor's gaze. Besides which, assuming such a hominid insists on the futle practice of using the mouse, clicking on one point on the screen rather than another to seek to submit the line poses no insurmountable problems that the available software - and not the layout of the form - should solve. QE2

/m90 That assumes that user convenience is the sole criterion. In this case it isn't: Anyone pressing the return key when they've only completed one field is being so negligent in their approach that they do not deserve that their effort should be rewarded with addition to the poem! This is just what new visitors are likely to do. Anyone else will know better!

/m91 the first 80 or so poems lack author names at the dn of each line. This would have to be fixed by hand, and there are other priorities!

Edited by author 06-20-2004 06:22 AM
Eldred's glum, glum spleen: The Agent observes that the option for showing authors on this and soem other pomes in the House of Fame does not provide any authors' names, merely a substitute button that offers to conceal what has not been displayed.

Some might say that for the form on new TSG to default to the option of 'clear line' is perverse, since, in terms of the unnecessary clicks (or tab-key depressions) that others have noted in other contexts, it is more likely by far that one wants to add the line that has just been entered, rather than to delete it by the too hasty depression of the self-styled return key.

/m88
"- I just tried to end Green, but inadvertently ended the stanza instead. However, the machine allowed the blank line - is this intended?"

For the moment I haven't implemented the blank line trapping, but will do so before the full bevy of poems goes live.

"Trying to add a title to the latest work in the Treasury, the title words were missing"

Yes, there was some oddity about how this poem was finished, and I'm going to have to update the treasury manually, but haven't done it yet.

/m87 Thank you

A couple of more serious possible kinks in the system:

- I just tried to end Green, but inadvertently ended the stanza instead. However, the machine allowed the blank line - is this intended?

- Trying to add a title to the latest work in the Treasury, the title words were missing

/m86 Your wish is my command! - now implemented.

P, an extremely trivial suggestion, but when we click on "add a line" could the cursor default into the composition box, thus saving the time and energy of an additional click?

/m84 /m82 Don't know why IE6 doesn't can't deal with the button, but now fixed.

/m83 So they are! I'm using IE 6.0.

/m82 They are there - you just need to scroll down. I will look into the back to poem button - which browser are you using?

I noticed that when you are adding a line to the poem you can't see the title words. Would it be possible to make that available? Also, after I added a line to green, I clicked on the button "back to poem" but nothing happened. Thanks.

/m77 & /m78 Ok Peter thanks.

/m78 /m75 Now redone.

/m72 There isn't a log in yet, but there will be.

For the moment however, as long as you've got cookies enabled, it will remember whatever name you last used and offer that in the Name field

/m75 Yes, something went wrong with the last 40 or so poems when I reformatted them - all the ones before that are OK. I'll be re-doing them in the next day or so.

/m74 It could easily be changed back if that's the general view, but I've always found that with anything longer than a few lines it's hard work to see who wrote what - hence the Show Authors facility

/m73 I've done a quick fix for the prose treasury to include all the completed works. With any luck the prose pieces will all be moved over to the new system in the next week or two.

I also noticed that some of the completed poems seem to be just one long stanza with no breaks, although we did put breaks in when we wrote them. Again, is this some kind of glitch or an actual change in format? Thanks.

Peter, I noticed that under the "Contributors" heading the author's name doesn't seem to appear for each line contributed, but only once for the whole poem. Is this a glitch or is it supposed to be like that? It's kind of nice to be able to see the author of each line at a glance without having to hit the "Show Authors" button. :-)

Edited by author 05-03-2004 07:05 AM
I'd love to be able to read a prose piece once it's finished. (Our recently completed Greek myth is at present inaccessible.)

/m67 I'd love to be able to log in, so I wouldn't have to retype my name every time I add a line.

Thanks, Peter!

/m68 /m69 I had been aiming to track down what had caused the original problem before doing so. But in fact it now makes more sense for me to devote the time to developing the new database-driven treasury than troubleshoot the old.

So there will be a new PT unveiled soon. Meanwhile all the completed work are still there. I've done a very quick (and ugley) fix so there are links to all of them.

Anyway, some of us were wondering--will our past prose pieces ever be retrievable or have they disappeared into the cyber ether??

Peter--will the Platinum Treasury be up and running any time soon? Know you're busy, just inquiring. F.

Spoonbill Developments

The server on which the Spoonbill sits has recently been upgraded, and now has much better facilities for dynamic web pages (PHP & MySQL for those who wish to know).

I will be redesigning the site to take advantage of these, so now would be a good time for people to make any requests suggestions for possible improvements or additional features!(Incidentally, once the new design is up and running, it will be easier to make changes than is the case with the present system.)

Among the things that could now relatively easily be done:
- some sort of protection for the private pages
- a proper rating system

Purple: At least from where The Agent is looking, something strange is going on with the display of this page - no bad thing, in a way, if no one has the courage to draw it to a close, some'ld say!

/m62 Quite true, - I agree it would be nice to have something more hypertextual, But I suspect you have no idea of the immense number of man/hours needed to set up such a thing!

Also, because of the limited programming facilities on the machine which hosts the Spoonbill, it would not be the ideal environment to develop this in.

/m63 Odd. I'll fix it over the weekend.

The Platinum Treasury still appears to be unobtainable

Venerated pontiff-elect Cardinal Christian, Has it ever, in the uttermost wisdom of your thinking, crossed your mind to have pomes of greater potential than those boasted presently by TSG? Although the four-dimensional web-page might be technically, if not technologically, challenging, it must surely be true that the potential for, say, hypertext wormholes that insert contributions randomly within pages other than that at which the contributors are looking, or within those that are already completed or are yet to be, are not currently being in any way exploited by the self-styled generator.

Yet such is surely central to the true & subversive work of the QWB, in whose name this entire edifice claims to have arisen...

/m60 yes, I know - I fixed that at the same time. I'll go back and correct the finished pieces later.

/m57 Similarly, the completed prose pieces ask you to "suggest a title for this poem".

(I noticed when hoping there were the necessary words on spuun0053 for me to spell out "I'm really, really sorry". There wasn't.)

Well done conciever and contributors alike
 ___
/\__\ 'what is the world coming to?"
\/__/ www.wolispace.com

/m57 Yes, I'd overlooked that. Now fixed.

I found a tiny, minor, little bug in the SB script.

When you end a prose piece, it says the piece has been added to the "Golden Treasury". That should read "Platinum Treasury".

Not really an issue; just thought I'd point it out.

Edited by author 11-14-2003 09:54 AM
/m55 "Having been some days in preparation / a splendid time is guaranteed for all" -John Lennon

(Garsh, that sounds like I'm nagging. I'm not, though--just coun't resist the quote :-)

/m54 Yes, this would be useful and something of the sort is in preparation. Can't give you a date for its unveiling, though!

i have an idea.

could you set up some sort of voting system for pomes, so we can vote for the best pome(s) of each month, and they would go into the spoonbill hall of fame or something? i was just thinking that as a newbie, it would be nice to have the best of spoonbill right at your fingertips (the golden treasury is pretty daunting).

/m52 all ok from here - all finished pomes are in the treasury. http://www.spoonbill.org/treasury/spoon1818.html is the last at present

You probbaly need to clear your browser cache, or look at the traesury with a different browser - sometime they don't register a page has changed.

/m51 It seems to be happening again

/m49 /m50 ok, fixed, they're all back now.

/m49
Red and green are new poems, but the Golden Treasury doesn't show their predecessors. Have we overfilled it?

I am fairly new to this game and was wondering, is it common for poems to completely disappear? There was a poem which (I) began yesterday on Red with the line 'A gerbil in a racing car' which was moving along nicely (the poem, not the car). I look today and it has gone.

/m46 /m47 temporary glitch! see message 3516 on the main message board. (Now OK)

Edited by author 10-02-2003 10:52 AM
/m46 Same for Green

I'm trying to end Orange, but it says: 'Your line has insufficient literary merit. Try adding some words.'

/m44 Whoops! Now fixed.

The Golden Treasury button now brings up the Platinum Treasury, as does the PT button. Lovely prose, but can we revisit some old poems please? Thanks!

bluenosed whacker

check out the link for this whack- it is a list of googlewhacks!:

http://home.earthlink.net/~joan.morgan/

/m41 I hope the "can't open file" error has now been fixed.

/m40 I just think we should leave it for a while and see how it goes. The trouble is, if the Spoonbill won't accept a line without a title words the lazy folk will just type in ramdom letters, which will be worse!

Edited by author 08-25-2003 05:19 PM
Well I was deliberating avoiding putting in title words yesterday, after we discovered that the randomly chosen ones quite often resulted in interesting pseudo-poems...such as "My, my! All my underpants" ;o)

Btw, I have a clue re "Can't open file ../front.htmlindex.html: No such file or directory".

Basically if you bring up a poem by clicking on a link on the left hand panel, and don't click refresh, back, forward or anything else, it works fine.
If you do click refresh etc., it won't work, and I think even the "Back to poem" link doesn't work (for corrections).
So instead of clicking refresh, or using back/fwd etc., make sure you always load up the pome by using the relevant link on the LHS panel, then you should be fine. You may need to click on the link a few times to correctly refresh the poem, but it will work.

Oh and Peter, your instructions in the FAQ say to use <it>, but I don't believe this works, only <i> works.

Edited by author 08-25-2003 05:33 AM
I think you said that people who didn't post a title-word-suggestion got a warning? A spate of new contributors seem(s) to be ignoring that warning ... should it be upgraded? Could they be threatened with excommunication if they don't play the game?

The parenthetic auto-contributions strike me as a tawdry substitute for the real thing, specially when there are so many of them concatenated.

Peter, agree on both counts...I think you need a clear message on new poems that if you wish to start something prose-like to go to page xxxx or whatever.

Edited by author 08-20-2003 06:22 PM
STATING A TOPIC

I notice people are quite keen to start pages off indicating a topic. It would be possible to provide a special field for the first contributor to do this - and the topic would then not have to masquerade as the first line of the composition.

PROSE

There seem to have been quite a few recent "poems" which have actually been prose. I think it would be preferable to have some separate pages for prose (which could then have facilities for proper paragraphing and no line breaks between contributions), and keep the poem pages for verse.

I'm not sure we really want that many extra pages on the go at once - too many to visit! - but perhaps one or two of the current pages could be reassigned.

Edited by author 08-20-2003 05:53 PM
/m35 Well, I could certainly get it to cut out after 10 lines or so.

/m33 This isn't a bad idea (and seems to work fine), but it tends to disrupt collaborative sentences. Perhaps it could stop after some number of (manual or automatic) title words, say, 10.

Edited by author 08-20-2003 10:43 AM
/m33 Is that where all the (parentheses) words are coming from?

Yep, answered my own question. Seems to work Peter!

I've just updated:

1) The Spoonbill script - it will now choose a title word for you if you don't bother. I have tested the new script, but let me know if anything odd happens when you submit a line.

2) The FAQ

/m30, /m31 I agree with archae.. Random selection if no word chosen - you should pick up articles, etc. along the way, at least in the longer pomes

/m30 Those are much simpler ideas. Option 2 sounds like the best idea to me. Randomly choose a word from the submitted line if no title word is suggested with the line.

I'm proposing to modify the Spoonbill to ensure that each poem gets enough title words. I don't really want to force people to submit them, so possible ways to do it would be:

1) choose a random word from a dictionary
2) choose a word from the submitted line (perhaps first or last, perhaps random)
3) chose a word from a shortlist of useful but not often submitted words - articles, prepositions and the like.

Any views?

/m28 Well, I thought so! And you were the worst offender ;-) I agree there are still plenty of ways to do it, but fewer people will be able to work them out and they will be harder work!

Seriously (if that's not a ridiculous word in the context of the Spoonbill), the idea is for individuals *not* to have too much control over the direction of the poem.

(Some time back, there was a real nutter who wanted me to allow him to add consecutive lines so that he could write whole poems to communicate secretly with his family.)

C'mon Peter, we weren't abusing the multiple line facility that badly were we... (now I'm gonna have to do it using tables or multiple IP addresses or...well...point is, there's almost a zillion ways to do it, seems silly to only stop one or two)

/m26 Thanks for the suggestion, but I think this would be *very* complicated to implement! Also, the idea of only one title being voted on at a time doesn't seem quite right. I'll see if I can think of another way to do it. But...

...the real problems with titles at the moment are:
1) Lots of people aren't bothering with title words - one recent pome had only *one* word suggested.
2) people aren't making any title suggestions anyway.

I think I'm going have to find some way either to force a title word out of people or generate one in some other way!

Peter (and fellow spoonbillers and spoonbillerettes), as far as this poem naming business goes, how about this?

Anyone can create and suggest a name from the available words, and then someone else must approve it (since you are already using IP's those would work).
While a name is pending, no other names can be suggested.
Unnamed, pending, and named poems can be differentiated by a color scheme (i.e. green "" for unnamed, red text for a proposed title, and black text for closed titles).
If a name is approved (probably with a radio yes/no box), whatever mechainsim you use to name them automatically adds the name and "closes" the poem.
If a name is disapproved, then the disapprover gets the next chance to name it (You cannot disapprove your own name).
A rejected name may not be re-submitted.
An approved empty poem name field will "close" the poem as Untitled.
Spoonmaster would retain the right to change poem names at his whim.

This woulds automate the whole naming business and get poems named quickly. Everyone would have veto power until a poem named got closed, and if there are too many groans spoonmaster retains the right to change them at whim.

archaeopteryx

/m19 /m20 Archy's answer is quite right. I did consider making this info more visible but it clutters up the page too much.

/m18 I don't think there's any obligation on people to contribute to every poem! In fact I think there's a lot to be said for having one to or two "quieter" pages. At the current rate of contribution, anyone who visits the spoonbill only once a day, only gets to contribute one line to a poem before it's finished.

Edited by author 08-12-2003 09:13 AM
/m17 I see the problem but the trouble is that this would require a substantial rewrite of the spoonbill script, which I haven't got time to do in the foreseeable future. I would have thought the discussion too ephemeral for this to be a *big* problem.

Edited by author 08-12-2003 07:09 AM
/m15 /m16 well, it's only a moment's work to change the colours - the difficult decision is what colours to change to! I will give it some thought. I must warn you, though, that I'm unlikely to go for brown - probably my least favourite colour.

thanks archy, that's really useful. lots of other good information in the source too (IPs of authors, corrections, emails).

/m19

Hey quasi, I wanted to know the same thing. If you do a view source on a poem the author of the line will be in a comment tag next to the line.

archaeopteryx

Edited by author 08-10-2003 04:19 AM
hey peter, i'm not a spoonbiller myself, but i do very much enjoy reading other people's spoonerisms. (spoonbillisms?)

often i see a really funny line right in the middle of a poem and i want to know the author, but it's just too much work to sort through the list of names, count lines to match up, etc.

could you (or do you have a reason not to) put a number beside each line of the poem, and put the same number beside the author of that line in the list below? that way, it would be very easy to identify the author of any given line.

I propose giving poems a serial number when they are started rather than when they are ended (and displaying the number at the top of the page). The reason is that we could refer to them by number here in QT while we write them.

Currently we refer to them by colour, which is OK, but that doesn't mean anything to someone reading QT the next day (because three more with the same colour have been written by then. ;-)

/m15 As the primary one who's gotten confused here, I agree. "Brown" comes to mind as something that would be fairly hard for me to confuse (notwithstanding my considerable talents in that area).

That said, if I ever get un-confused on this, I'll probably just find something else. So, you'll never win. ;-)

Edited by author 08-07-2003 08:43 PM
Peter, seems that the similarity b/w violet and indigo has been a potential for confusion, maybe better would be purple and teal (or aqua/cyan/turquoise/ultramarine etc. etc), or just rename indigo 'purple' and violet 'pink'?

Oh and #6 of FAQ has some spare text...

/m12 so it does - well, not much longer.

/m13 forgot about that, now fixed. The correction facility is only meant for the thing that matters - the line; it didn't seem worth the programming effort to let people change their names/words!

Oh and you get that warning about no title words when you make a correction, but you can't change title words with a correction (why not, btw? You can't change your name either)

Edited by author 08-05-2003 07:08 PM
Oh btw Peter, it still says "There are three poems being written concurrently" on the title page...

Edited by author 08-05-2003 05:17 PM
/m10 not enact, memorise - and of course, if they fail to comprehend the plot...

Well can you automate the admonition in such a way that that people who don't submit a title word get taken as a forfeit to the Golden Treasury and are instructed to name a poem?

Those who refuse to do that are further penalised by being obliged to enact a scene from the Mammary Revival ...

Edited by author 08-05-2003 03:17 PM
/m8 Yes, people do seem to be a bit neglectful about title words. I don't really want to force people - but I might think about selecting a random title word when people don't bother. I've added an admonition in the response screen for those who don't bother.

I shall have to think how I'm going to deal with the problem of titling of all these great works. I have been doing them manually, but usually from a handful of suggestions. A voting system would be nice.

Edited by author 08-04-2003 07:18 PM
Peter...how about making title words compulsory (or at least until a certain number have been submitted), and having a automatic title generation system (based on votes or whatever)? I take it you are currently manually creating titles...

Blimey ... I leave the country and the Spoobill Generator doubles in size ... should have done this years ago!

/m2 Very puzzling. I can't do a traceroute from you to the server till next week, but I'll have a look then.

I see from the logs that your submissions come from two different servers - does that have any effect?
pool-141-154-217-243.bos.east.verizon.net
h0050da7426b7.ne.client2.attbi.com

What happens if you look at www.spub.co.uk? - this is on the same box as the Spoonbill.

Peter, I like your new split-screen thingy. Oddly, it seems to function very smoothly for me, unlike the original page. I don't know whether that's because of something technical, or it's sunspots, but I like it!

/m3 Done!

Oh, also, are you going to make the new colors frameless, too? It does work better for me.

Edited by author 08-01-2003 12:48 PM
Hi Peter,

I came to Spoonbill about the same time as Francine, Nym, K. Sam, and that whole motley crew, but I got frustated early on because it takes an eternity to load pages (for me, at least). I mean it can take 5 minutes or more for one of the poem pages to load, or for my line submission to get through, and by the time it does, someone else has gotten their line in ahead of me. Needless to say it gets extremely frustrating, particularly when I had a real good line (in my humble opinion).

I've tried the non-frames versions, I've tried both Explorer (my usual) and Netscape. Nothing seems to improve the performance and no other website runs slowly like this. I'm using a Mac G4, with enough added memory that shipping it to Iraq would be a felony. Any suggestions tech-wise?

Edited by author 08-01-2003 07:29 AM
This topic is for any comments, suggestions or requests for improving the Spoonbill Generator at http://www.spoonbill.org/

(You can post problem reports here, but you'll get a quicker response by mailing me directly at spoonmaster@spoonbill.org)