Recently in FAQ Category

Just rolled out some new editing capabilities for owners of open mike listings. If you've submitted one of the listings on the site, and you've registered an account, this means you.

Previously, you could edit the day of the week, the host's name, start time, and whether or not a night was still active. All that is still there, but now you can change a listing from "every week" to "1st and 3rd Sunday of the month", "every two weeks starting...", etc. In the past, this required my intervention.

Please let me know if you have any trouble with this feature, and of course tell me if there's anything else you'd like to see added.

I received this question today, as happens once a week or so. Often enough that I keep thinking it's in the FAQ list, but no. So now it is.

The primary excuse / explanation / underlying misunderstanding is: this is a one-man shop. Hi, I'm Paul, and I'm that man. A man with a full-time job that has nothing to do with this site, a wife, two kids, and some free time, at erratic intervals. It's during some of those intervals that submissions get seen, read, reviewed, corrected, published.

So usually, the answer is a simple "I haven't looked at submissions in a couple of days. When I do, you're in." It's almost always within a day or two, but sometimes the rest of the world doesn't cooperate. This has been one of those months.

So what can you do to speed the process along? Hint: the less touch-up I have to do, the fewer clicks needed to publish your listing, the sooner you'll go live.

Want to make sure things take a while? Here's how:

Leave out the address, or give vague directions in lieu of an address

Now I have to look it up, make sure it's the same "Casa del Java" as yours, etc.

Submit a listing that's already here.

This one's easy — it will never be published. Add a comment to the existing night instead, if you have something to say about it.

Forget to mention the day(s) of the week

More often than seems sensible, I get submissions listed only as "weekly". I'll email and ask for clarification, and about 1/3 of the time I never hear back. Use your real email address, please, for both our sakes.

Include 10 pages of all-caps, unpunctuated, whitespace-deprived description.

I need to clean this up, at least a little, to keep the site from looking overly insane. Takes much more time than clicking "Publish", and gets deferred.

Forward a 3rd-person email with vague details about an open mike

Now I get to deduce what state Someplacetown might be in; find the address; hopefully find a phone number; try and guess if that's just one Friday, every Friday, the third Friday of the month... There's a form. Please, please use it. Thanks.

And finally, while emailing to see what's up with your listing may prompt me to check the backlog (generally 5-10 submissions per day), it won't necessarily move you to the top of the list. But politeness helps. And rudeness really, really hurts.