I believe I have thought of a suggestion which should definetly be put on here at the Café, I doubt I am the first to mention it, but I might be, and the longer it goes without being mentioned.

Currantly we have 4000 Mentalists on the Café I believe, and countless magicians. The secrets on here are important, and must protect them I believe.

We currantly have a system to stop swear words, for example if I use the F word, or the C word it will be replaced by ****. I wonder if it would be possible to do the same for certain key words here on the Café, for example we could have the word "swami" turned into "s***i" hopefully. I have seen systems like this before on other sites, and given the vast amount of infomation here we may need something like that.


Tom
xx

I have noticed that a lot of members already use asterisks so they are concious about not letting a secret out to laymen. Your suggestion is good though.

Ohh indeed, I always use asterisks myself, except in the above post (for obvious reasons).

We have a thread in an OPEN FORUM right now with the word "Impression Device" in its title! This is horrific to me

Eshla, thank you for the suggestion however, it is not practical. If words were marked to be changed, that would mean the change would occur in any forum. In other words, in your example of "impression device" if we were to change that to "*****************" it would mean that across the board, anytime someone used the word Impression, it would be changed to ***'s. Let's say I wanted to post
"the impression I got from reading about that effect was that it only works in certain situations" the change would result in my post saying "the **********" I got from....

Suppose we did implement such a change. In the title you referenced above, the title "impression device" would be changed to ****************. How would anyone know what the topic was about.

It would also mean that discussions concerning methods etc, in the secrets areas such as inner thoughts, would have words changed to ******.

I am no expert, but over at the TalkMagic forums if you write the F word for example it comes back as F***, it gives you only the first letter.

I guess this really should be for someone with technical knowledge, but I think its a good idea and worth considering

I didn't say it wouldn't be considered, just that there are drawbacks to implementing such a change. Our rules also state that letters and asterisks should not be used, so changing impression to I********n would violate those rules. Partially abbreviating with *** is tha same as typing the word.

Normal posts are visible to anyone via google I believe.

Is there a place in the Café not visible to google where registered users can go to share method and effects we may want to discuss or develop with other registered users interested in same? Or is that in general a taboo thing to try to do?

Or even share/give-away some effect we have already concocted ourselves?

PM as I understand it would fill the bill but it is just for one on one communication, right?

So, using PMs, may 2 users collaborate once they know and trust each other without having to be cagey with names of sleights, principles, or names of gimmicks?

Alex Moorehead

Once you reach 50 posts, you are granted access to "Secret Sessions." You still can't share methods of marketed effects, but there's more freedom to talk about effects than the public areas.

Since it's a limited area, I believe it's not indexed by the search engines.