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If you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time (and you’re a writer), you notice certain trends. Newbies who encounter the wealth of jokes they’ve never read before, and their joy at sharing these gems with everyone they know. Innocents who become paralyzed by manuscript formatting to the point they can’t sleep or eat (our advice: stop worrying — formatting is the least of your problems). Trusting souls who in turn share their lack of judgment in the form of viruses sent to their entire acquaintance.

Oh, and scams. We could write volumes on Internet scams and the people who fall for them. One that comes up every six months or so (the other fascinating thing about writers on the Internet is the cyclical nature of certain topics) is the Wide World of Poetry Scams. As we don’t have poetry in our soul, we leave it to others to explain the intricacies of the world o’ verse, hence Foetry.com. Devoted to debunking the myths and scams, the site is a resource for poets from sonnets to free verse (we’re sorry we can’t do better — we’re not that familiar with the latest in the poetry world).

But wait, say others. You are clueless geeks. You don’t understand. Yes, those are the voices of Foetry foes. We have obviously paraphrased in the interest of space. This is exactly the sort of scandal that starts a Monday morning off right — we recommend both the Boston Globe article and visit to Foetry. Now if only we could do something about the endless jokes…

• Poetry world shocker! A muckraking website aims to blow the lid off the cozy practices of contemporary poetry.
• Foetry.com