From the Desk of Devin Jeanel June 07 2008: Bulletins, Privacy Options, Ads, Critiquing Comments First, let me say... Happy Birthday to my mom. She is the greatest. If you get a chance, please send her a note at her home page of Barbie_june . She is very special to me and to many of you at Starlite. Happy Birthday MOM!!! There has been a lot happening at Starlite Poetry in the last month. Let me use this newsletter as a way to catch you up on any of the features that you may have missed. As well as some of the features that will probably be released before the next newsletter.

This may be the biggest feature that was released this month. It has been high on the list of most requested items. This feature is an ideal way of communicating a short message to your friends. Do you want to reach out for help? Wants to let your friends know about something special that happened in your life? You want to let your friends know that you are going to be without a computer? Maybe you just want to say say hi. Regardless, bulletins is a great way of sending short messages to your friends.

The last 5 messages from your friends will appear on your homepage. You can see all active messages for you via a link below the last five messages. Remember, you only get bulletins from your friends. If you delete someone from your friend's list, then you will not receive any future bulletins from that person. All bulletins will be deleted after 5 days.

Privacy
Check your Privacy Options

We have continued our efforts to give you more privacy options. You can now mark your homepage or poems (2006 to present) as private. When you mark something as private, you restrict access to your material to just your friends. These options are helpful in lots of ways. If you are a new poet, and want to be very very careful about who reads your work, then make your poems private and control the access by who you make your friends. If you had a fight with some people, don't leave the site. Just remove the person from your friends list.

Friends

We will be building more and more features for Friends only. As you can see by the previous features, we believe that you should be able to share special times and information with your friends. Your friend circle is your place to have small group interactions. We plan to continue to build features to add to that like the private challenge. Private challenges is slated to be released by June 21, but you know me. I have a hard time keeping things until the date (so expect it sooner he he he).

A little peak at the private challenges. This feature will put the power of the challenges into YOUR hands. Have you ever had an idea for a challenge? With private challenges, you will have access to the Create Challenge Form and can create your OWN challenges. When you create a private challenge, it will be reflected on the home page of each of your friends. It is almost your challenge to them to come and play or is that more to see if they can do better that you have done for a phrase or challenge words (laughing). Private challenges are only open to the friends of the challenge creator. The challenge creator is the moderator and will have the power to select which decision model will be used (voting, host, panel). The challenge creator will also be the decision maker over what poems fits and doesn't fit. Again, you are in charge of your friend's list. If you want to add a friend or remove a friend it is up to you.

***Starlite Policies over content will still apply. Private Challenges that violate our policies or that allow entries that violate the Starlite Policies will be removed. ***

From Starlite Administrative side, this will be Renee's baby. She has done a fantastic job of growing the sitewide challenges from five challenges to up to thirty challenges a week. I have faith in her wisdom and experience to guide us to this next level. We may be cautious at first and allowing only our contributors to use the feature, but with Renee at the helm, we will get there. Thank you Renee for everything you do.

Advertising on Poems

Recently, we made two major technological breakthrough. The poem page have always had advertising hardcoded into them. This made it impossible to remove advertising or even change advertising on nearly One Million Poems. We are currently testing out our ability to do change these advertisements.

As you all know, Starlite is supported by advertisement revenue and individual contributors. We need both revenue streams to pay for the site. We recently looked at the finances and found that we do not currently have enough revenue to remove all the ads. We would need about 10 new monthly subscribers. Even if we can't afford to take the advertising away for everyone, we plan to go ahead and help our current contributors (who have contributed since Nov 15, 2007) by displaying their poems without advertisements.

We really do not like advertisements on the poem pages and will work to get them off. If you are not a current contributor and would like to help remove the ads from all poems, please consider a donation. We are close to our goal. You can make it a reality.

Critiquing Comment

I am sure that you have all heard my description about the different growth levels of poets. I do believe that poets tends to go through stages. We start out with some uncertainity about whether we are good enough and being very careful about who we share our words. We progress through the stages until we are much more thick skinned and are able to separate ourselves from our words. At Starlite, we offer the ability for readers to offer comments. This feature is ideal for the stage 1 poets. It allows them to receive back the confirmation that they need for that level.

We feel that it is time to give the next stage some feedback. In the next month, we are going to offer a Critiquing Comment Section for you. This is a place where you can get comments that can help you to improve your writing. It is only one feature of many that are coming in this area, but should help.

Our own KajunCutie is currently gathering information about what YOU would like to know from your readers. This form will be pretty static so we need to get as much of the questions as we can right the first time. Do you have ideas, email her with the questions you would like answered by your reviewers? Kajuncutie can be contacted at KajunCutie@AOL.COM.

Here are the rules that are currently planned for this feature

1) Each poet can decide to opt out of the Critiquing Comment process. If they do so, then anyone reading their poems will only see the comment area (as it is today)
2) Reviewers will be anonymous to the writer.
3) Reviews will be available only to the writer. They will not be shared like comments.
4) Poets will be able to tag problem reviewers as unprofessional (which block that reviewer from doing more reviews). If a reviewer is blocked too many times, then they will be blocked from reviewing any more poems.
Future option: Poem can only be reviewed by the poet's friends.
5) Poet will be able to see the reviews for all poems or for a specific poem via the Critiquing Comment system.

Summary

I think that catches you up. There is so much in the works that I can't even touch on all of it, but maybe this helps with the bigger things. We will be putting together a tribute book for Albert in the next couple months. The current plan is to review all the poems submitted to Albert's Garden of Remembrance. We will contact those authors to request permission to publish their poem in his book. All proceeds from this book will go to the American Lung Assoication in Albert's name.

Devin Jeanel
Starlite Poetry


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