Listening to your feedback
Added: 04 June 2019
We received some helpful feedback from Places of Poetry users over our first weekend. Most of it was good – thank you, that matters a lot – and some of it gave us cause to tweak a few things. Or not.
Searching: poems & pins
The search function worked fine, but made it almost impossible to tell where a poem was actually pinned. We’ve changed this. Now if you search, you should get a high-zoom image of the Ordnance Survey in the background behind the poem-box. Once you close the poem-box, you should see the pin.
Line counts
The line-limit is forty, but some authors were getting frustrated that this included blank lines. And we get it: poets like blank lines. So we’ve increased the limit to fifty, and made clear that this includes blank lines. There are bound to be people who want more, but I really think this is our limit.
Likes not liking
We had reports of the ‘like’ function not working, usually when people were using older operating systems. We just can’t guarantee perfect compatibility with all operating systems – but this one thing we think we’ve fixed! So please like and like again; as we build up our archive the number of likes will be a useful filtering mechanism for readers.
Copyright
Some people were asking whether we would claim copyright in poems. We were a bit taken aback by this, because we never imagined trying to do that in a project of this kind. Admittedly, though, the terms and conditions were clearer to lawyers than the rest of us, so we’ve revised them, trying to make our position clearer. If you’re interested, see Section 11 of the terms and conditions. Yes, we need to be sure that you give us the right to publish your poem(s) once you hit ‘upload’; however, it’s a non-exclusive right and ‘all copyright subsisting in your content is owned by you or your licensor(s)’.
Changing your poem or its location once it’s uploaded
This is something we can’t change: as you’re reminded at the point of upload, once the poem is gone it’s gone, so please check it carefully. Giving authors the capacity to change things subsequent to upload would have required a different, more cumbersome and more expensive website, with individual logins for all users. That said, we have the capacity to approve, delete and edit poems, and we’ve accommodated several requests to take down poems so that authors can start again. There are no guarantees we can continue to do so if the site gets busier, but please feel free to ask. We really want all our poets to have a rewarding experience with the site, and we’ll do what we can to help.
What’s on the burger-menu?
We’ve had a few people saying that they can’t see how to pin a poem. Perhaps this is a generational thing: digital natives head straight to the burger menu, while for some of us in the older generations all we see is three horizontal lines. Now we could try to make this more explicit with a bit of text, but we love the simplicity of the site as it stands, with the map as the star. We also like a little bit of mystery, and want to draw people in to engage with the site in multiple ways. So for the time being we want to stick with the homepage as it stands. Maybe you will all grow to love it as much as we do.
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