What is a haiku?

According to the definition found at dictionary.com, a haiku is:

1. A Japanese lyric verse form having three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables, traditionally invoking an aspect of nature or the seasons.
2. A poem written in this form.

What is a "porno" haiku?

Well, isn't that obvious? In terms of this web site, a porno haiku is supposed to be a FUNNY haiku that is about something sexual. Actually, the sexual part is pretty much optional. The guy who wrote this website was envisioning a mix of haikus where most of them would be something funny related to sex, but others would meet the "porno" criteria by virtue of adult language, not necessarily adult situations. As long as you remember that it's supposed to be funny, the rest usually falls into place.

Is anything considered off-limits or too offensive when posting?

Yeah, sort of. Child porn. Don't mess around with haikus about that. It's almost impossible to write one that isn't offensive to about 99.99% of the population. Flat-out racist haikus fit into the same category. Also, let me refer you to the haiku posting guidelines. Everytime you write a new haiku, this link is there to help people who may be confused. In general, we try not to pass our own judgement of what is offensive. Since this site has been up, only a few haikus have been deleted by a moderator for being too offensive, and they all received complaint. We're looking for light-hearted, humorous content here. If your goal is to write something simply to offend people, go elsewhere please. Take it to a message board somewhere. We believe in freedom of speech, but we also have a vision for what this community should strive for, and frankly there are limits.

What is this site all about?

It's meant to be funny. Not everybody has the same sense of humor, but for those people with a somewhat stranger sense of humor, this site might be to your liking. The problem is, there's a million sites out there with funny jokes and poems. The goal of this site was to provide motivation for people to contribute and come back. That's why voting is such a central part of this site. If everyone votes (fairly and anonymously) then we can use those votes to filter out the garbage. That's why you can click on "Highest Rated" or "Today's Best" when you're reading haikus and get to the good stuff really quickly. Furthermore, putting up the score board on the main page causes quite a lot of competition. Let's face it, not everyone can be a professional comedian, but maybe... just maybe your average guy off the street can come up with a funny haiku. They're so simple... so short. Anybody can write one. That's an important fact because it means we can rely on new and fresh content from almost anybody.

Why is voting important?

Because it's FUN! Because it's literary darwinism. Express your support or disdain for other people's work by voting. This also helps to keep this site full of high quality content. The bad haikus tend not to be read by anybody after a while, whereas the newest and best haikus will always be highly accessible to people. Basically, it's the users of this site that can make it great by contributing their two cents. Just don't cheat!

Do people ever cheat?

Oh hell yes. We've had lots of cheaters. We try so hard to make haikus as anonymous as possible, but still people cheat. A cheater is someone who uses another account to vote overly high on their own (or their friends) haikus while voting overly low on everyone else's haikus (or sometimes just on the haikus that belong to certain people). Even before this site really had much "public" traffic (i.e. when it was mostly just people who knew each other... like in alpha testing stage) we had cheaters. As a result, most of the back-end and administrative programming that was written for this web site is for detecting and dealing with cheaters. We've found a handful, but there's still room for improvement. In case you haven't noticed, you don't see the author's name or score until after you have voted. Also, clicking on an author's name to view his/her haikus will only show you the ones you have already voted on. These additions have helped to reduce fraudulant voting by leaps and bounds.

How do you deal with cheaters?

Lots of different ways. Each situation is handled individually. Actions are never taken automatically (at least, not at this point). If the case is severe and obvious, the offending account(s) are banned, all votes made by those accounts are deleted, and in some cases the IP address of the offending user is blocked. In less severe cases, sometimes the account is left active, but certain votes are deleted. Sometimes we warn the user, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we flag accounts that are suspect and pay special attention to their voting patterns. If you can't tell by now, we strongly believe that this site cannot be successful if we have cheaters, and we're also pretty good at statistics and data mining. If we ever get to the point of having 100+ votes per haiku on average, then cheater's will have a much more difficult time manipulating the system, but considering the early stage this web site is in, we have to watch these things closely.

Who made this website and why?

Hi. My name is Jason, and I write stupid-ass web sites for fun. I'm currently 26 and I live in Indiana. (What would YOU do if you lived here?) The idea for this web site first came to me while I was riding in a car in the summer of 2000. I was in college at Purdue University at the time. I had read a haiku on the web that had been stuck in my head for weeks. It was THAT funny to me. I still remember it... I dare you to ask me what it was. If this site ever accomplishes any level of fame, I'll probably shoot an e-mail to the author thanking her. Anyway, I just thought it would be cool to make a site where you write these stupid things and people can vote on them. I maintain a high level of interest in human psychology, which is why this idea only appealed to me if I could add the voting. I'm also a big fan of talking about theories of evolution and natural selection. I like to think of this site as a psychological experiment in literary darwinism.

Is he a pervert?

I dunno... maybe? Read my haikus and make your own decision. I tend to think that I'm not so much of a pervert as I am a totally fuckin' awesome Cartesian evil genius, controlling the weather and soon, your thoughts. Usually I tend to keep a low and modest profile, so the jury's still out on that one as well.

Do you make money off of this site?

Nope. At least, not yet. I want to keep this site free for everyone. I'd also like to avoid banner ads and pop-ups. Those don't make much money anyway. However, if traffic keeps getting higher, and my hosting costs go up, I'll probably try to make some cash selling official Porno Haiku t-shirts and bumper stickers. I've been coming up with some ideas for merchandising, but I have no idea if those ideas will become a reality at this point. Feel free to share your thoughts with me on this subject.

How can I contact the people that run this web site?

Send e-mail to me! Just send it to support@pornohaiku.com. I never get email from people about this site, so chances are if you write to me, you'll hear back from me within a few hours.

I want to know more about...

If you still have questions / comments, PLEASE e-mail support@pornohaiku.com and let me know what's on your mind. I never get any feedback from people, and I'd actually like to get some once in a while.