If you received a decline notice that mentioned automated filtering, IP blocks, or security measures, this page is for you. We know how alarming it is to wonder whether a machine rejected your poetry, or whether you — or your entire country — have been blacklisted. The short answer is: no human poet is blacklisted, no country is permanently blocked, and if your poem spent any real time in our reading queue, it was read and declined by a human editor on its merits. The longer answer follows.

Why automated protection exists at all

Three Line Poetry has no submission fee. We believe poetry should be accessible to everyone, everywhere, and we have kept submissions free since 2011. Unfortunately, a free, open submission form on the internet is also a target.

We occasionally get bursts of fake submissions and brute-force attacks — sometimes thousands per second — from networks of IP addresses controlled by AI bots and scammers. These are not poets. They are automated scripts hammering the form with gibberish, spam, and credential-stuffing attempts.

If our editors had to wade through every fake submission by hand, the volume would bury the genuine poems and, frankly, it would bankrupt us. Automated protection during an attack is the only way we can keep submissions free for real poets. That trade is worth being transparent about, which is why this page exists.

How the protection works

The security mechanism is not always on. It turns on for a brief time when the site is being abused, and then turns back off when the attack is over. While it is on, it scales with the attack:

1. First, a single IP address — if abuse comes from one address, only that address is blocked.
2. Then, a larger IP block — if the attack continues from neighboring addresses, the block widens to cover the subnet responsible.
3. In extreme cases, a whole region or country — during a huge distributed attack, the block can scale all the way up to the country the abuse is coming from.

And then it drops off. When the attack ends, the blocks are lifted. There is no permanent blacklist of any country. We are an international journal and we welcome poets from anywhere in the world — the same country that is briefly blocked during an attack on a Tuesday is fully welcome again when the attack subsides.

What happens to submissions during an attack

During an attack, the system is supposed to reject fake submissions before the editors ever see them. This matters for telling an automated rejection apart from a real editorial decision:

The erroneous security note — what went wrong

Some poets received a decline notice that included a note about automated filtering or IP blocks even though their poem had been pending for a long time. Here is exactly what happened, because you deserve a straight answer:

• Your poem was submitted at a time when no attack was occurring. It entered the slush pile normally and waited for editorial review like every other poem.
• Later, when the actual editorial decision was made, an attack happened to be in progress and the temporary security blocks were active.
• Your IP address happened to fall inside the blocked range — not because you did anything wrong, but because the attack was coming from the same network neighborhood or region.
• The system then appended the security note to the decline, even though the decline itself was an ordinary human editorial decision that had nothing to do with security.

We would call that a bug, and we apologize for the confusion it caused. The note should only ever accompany genuinely automated rejections — the ones that happen within minutes of a submission during an active attack — and never an editorial decline of a poem that was submitted in peacetime and read by a person.

What this means for you

• You are not blacklisted. Neither is your country. Temporary blocks exist only while an attack is in progress, and they lift automatically.
• Security plays no part in editorial decisions. Every poem that reaches the editors is judged on its merits.
• A decline is not a security judgment. If your poem waited in the queue before being declined, a human read it. Our acceptance rate is very competitive, and a decline is not a reflection of your ability.
• You are welcome to submit again. Truly. The protection exists precisely so that real poets like you can keep submitting for free.

If anything about a notice you received still doesn't make sense, contact the editors and we will look at your specific submission. We would rather answer the same question a hundred times than have one genuine poet walk away thinking a machine turned them down.

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