Strange Comments From the Weird World of Online Writing

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I asked around to some of my favorite online writers here on Triond to see if they too have experienced weird and bizarre comments.  Many had.  I poked around online some and found some more weird comments.  These comments can take many forms -- funny, x-rated, juvenile, rude, bizarre or under the category of too much information! Online writing seems to scream out for comments for some reason.

Don't get me wrong, I love love love getting comments on my work.  But sometimes they just seem so pointless.  On a recent article I wrote about personal ads, someone went out of their way to write on it not once, but twice that it was boring, zzzz.  Unfortunately, I erased the comments as I found them juvenile, rude  and annoying.  This particular article has been my most viewed so far with over 18,000 views!  I checked the commenter's own page and found only one article.  A poem about lost love.  Maybe he was just a tad bit bitter and the personal ads really touched a nerve.  I don't know.  Maybe he'll see this and write something childish here, who knows?

That juvenile commenter has nothing on the one I found on flickr.

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The comment reads: "Hi, Someone at RAMCON said you sell nude images of chicken on flickr (loldee, etc.) and I was just wondering (if this is true) then how much to you charge and what payment methods do you accept? Thanks."

Gross and bizarre, right?  And maybe a teeny bit funny.  I just don't understand the point.  Is the "Add your comment" box just too tempting for people to resist?  I think that this comment was a result of comment fraud which until recently, was an issue here on Triond.  Luckily, they jumped on that problem right away.  I wrote an article about the issue and they had a solution before it was even published!  Those Triond guys are really great.

Which is very unlike another company I've been writing with lately.  I wrote an article about Review Stream, a company that solicits, publishes and pays for reviews that are later read by people looking for information about a particular product or service before using it.  The article details my experiences and frustrations with this company in a still ongoing struggle to reach pay out.  I stopped receiving email confirmations of the reviews I was sending in to them and wrote them to complain about it.  Not only were they not helpful, they were downright rude and unprofessional.  Their emails are also very hard to understand as the writer clearly doesn't have a firm command of the English language which you think would be important for a person who is checking reviews for value.  Anyways, the next day, I noticed a new comment on my article from, you guessed it, the review stream website themselves.  Here's what they wrote on the comments section:

"reviewstream.com/reviews/?p=50948

This is one of the reviews written by Paula Mitchell Bentley.
Who wants to buy it for $2 ?

thestickman - do you want ?

Ancient Aspie - probably you want ?

Just inform us and we'll be more than happy to sell it to you for $2.

We think, that the reviews written by Paula Mitchell Bentley are mostly low quality, written with the $$$ in mind only, little helpful for the readers.
Paula Mitchell Bentley was informed before the submission, that low quality review could be paid at a bulk rate and AGREED with that ! Why did she agree if she believed her review value more ?

And yes, we're on the readers side. We care about the useful information, not about the persons with $$$ in mind only."

Wow, way to prove me wrong!  The review that they direct you to is indeed written by me.  Go figure that I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing something that will only earn me a maximum of $2.  I am just trying to get to the $50 payout level so I can stop dealing with these people.  At this point, I have $44.80 in my account with them.  I'm still submitting reviews and hoping for the best.  The weird part is that they bothered to look me up and comment on my review of them.  The creepy part is that they didn't know my name so I am not sure how they even found the article and related it to my account with them which is under a user name of "emmysmum" only.  So now I'm being cyber stalked by them -- they're probably outside right now waiting for me to go get the mail.  I probably shouldn't be writing this and making them even more PO'ed.  I'm surely not going to get paid out now.  I'll keep you posted.  I am nothing if not extremely stubborn.