squatting scumbags

if you could care less about (a) poetry and (b) website pedigree, then this post is not for you.

i care because i’ve maintained a poetry-focused website for ten years. it’s a lot of work: not just the physical maintenance of the site, but all the interactions with contributing writers, the agonies and ecstasies of rejections and acceptances, the never-ending requests to update poems and bios that are already, by internet standards, ancient.

i’ve pretty much stopped publishing new work on poetz. too little time, too many projects, too many other well-staffed high-end poetry sites around with which i could not, and do not care to, compete. poetz is presently an archive of the several hundred writers (some now deceased) published there and host to several very active poetry calendars.

you may be wondering what all this has to do with squatting scumbags.

a squatter is someone who buys a URL that is similar to another URL for the sole purpose of misdirecting visitors to a site of their own. it’s a cheap and dirty internet trick, one often used by obnoxious marketers. you know, the kind of marketers who fill your inbox with spam.

until now, i’d never heard of a poetic site using sich trickery against another poetic site.

e-poets.net is home to “the book of voices” and has been around even longer than poetz. the site, published by kurt heintz, has an excellent reputation and a wealth of very well-produced audiofiles in its library. it’s beautifully designed and entirely ad-free.

i cannot say the same for the site which is now squatting on a variation of the e-poets name. at the moment it hardly seems like a poetry destination at all, but more like the diary rantings of a schizo who’s gone off his meds, as the entire home page is nothing more than a long-winded screed against kurt. if you go to the squatter’s primary site (which i will neither name nor link to here because the last thing i’m interested in doing is driving traffic to a scumbag squatter) it advertises itself as being that city’s “Most Professional E-Poets Site”.

it’s not as if the term e-poets is commonly used among online poetry sites. it is not. nor is there anything even remotely professional about the page which now deceptively displays that banner.

all an honorable publisher has to do in order to draw traffic is provide consistent, professionally designed quality content. misdirecting traffic to your site by utilizing the sleazy tactics of online snake-oil salesmen is simply pathetic.