Olan Smith

Yeah, I read that too and it had me concerned but that applies, according to Gavan Wilson only to sites with no content are being purged. If you have content the site will still be open. My good friend, Strongheart, has been off the sight for over a decade and her poetry is still there. I think only empty sites, just fake sites, are being purged, sort of cleaning house of fakes. Lisaner, Lisa Allen-Cole, died in 2016 and all her poetry is still standing. I don't think, therefore, that all our poetry has a 5-year fuse. I back up all my work on my hard drive and my children are aware of that, knock-on-wood. However, printing your collection is always an option, they will stick around for at least a century before the acid in the pulp turns them to ashes. I would recommend you use acid-free paper for book printing. Lpf, Olan.

Read through it and it seems like our poetry here will only last five years after we are gone. I will have to try and publish some of my better pieces in a book. Or just leave my family a hand written versions. 

@newpoet Geez, that is a strong drop on your side, and this just started happening, less than a week ago for me. Hopefully, people are not dropping out of Wattpad and it is a glitch. I expected a drop after they removed the private messaging, but it did drop then, why now? I know some accounts were just using the messaging system for nefarious reasons, and the accounts were a sham, but surely not that large of a percentage of my followers were shell accounts. Whatever it is I hope to get down to the bottom of our loss of followers.

@gailrunschke P.S. I see where you have refollowed me, good for you. Some may never notice they no longer follow me. Unless they remember to check.

@gailrunschke The count keeps dropping on my followers, and as of today, I've lost over 2000 followers. It seems to be happening across the board for poets on the site. I've sent in a "ticket" to Wattpad to see what is happening, any explanation would be better than none.
            
            I was married to a tippler wife who afterward accumulated a total of 3 DUI convictions, however, I didn't find the poem offensive; it is a poem.

@CottonJones Hi Olan, thank you for helping to straighten out the problem with the drop in our counts. Your letter was obviously effective.
            I finally published a new poem yesterday, my DEARIE : TEMPOEM. I needed
            Tony's help to copy the picture. The poem is certainly cynical and not my usual style so I hope not to offend any of my followers.  Cheers!  ~ Gail

@newpoet Perhaps it is a deadweight cleanup, but many of those are honored poets with great poems who should be honored in perpetuity. You are correct about poets, but most use pen names or delete excess accounts from the same IP addresses for spouses using the same computer. I know most of my follower are either dead or have left the site and only use their accounts as a cloud to preserve their work, some even compose online and that is their only copy, to hard drive backups.

@CottonJones Honestly same. I've had my follower count not move for 10 years and suddenly lost over 400 followers or more

@Fox-Trot-9 Me either, my friend, Strongheart, hasn't been active for over a decade and she is still at 6K. It is not a reduction due to inactivity, it is something else targeting poets. Perhaps, an AI is siphoning off readers, like a virus on the site. I will check tomorrow and see if more are gone and if so I will report it. I've had several users report to me they were no longer following me, and then they followed me again. This has happened here and there for many years, and I assumed they pushed the unfollow button by mistake. I do realize that many of my followers are inactive, but perhaps many are leaving the site and taking their work with them, and closing out their accounts. Who knows but it is strange behavior.

@CottonJones This is the first time I'm hearing about anything like this. I've seen a gradual pealing off of followers, because I haven't been active on this site for a while now, but I've never seen a drop off like that before.