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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.

On a lighter and definitely less creepy note, I found this really cool guy on Flickr who makes the funniest comments on photos that he takes of random people.  He goes by “Plump Chump”.

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Plump Chump’s comment:  “Suzie didn’t alert anyone to the angry wasp stuck in her mom’s hair because she wanted retribution for the spanking she received earlier in the day.”

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Plump Chump’s title is: “The practical jokes reached a new low when Nikki gave her colorblind room mate a dazzling new pair of shorts”.  I’d definitely check out this guy’s photo stream if you’re looking for some weird, bizarre and laugh out loud comments.  I think he’s hysterical!

I received a really funny comment on one of my articles lately which I hope the writer doesn’t mind me sharing.  It totally had me laughing and laughing.  I even told my husband about it when he got home from work.  Super funny and cute.  Anyways, it was on the article about funny mustaches I wrote a few days ago.  Here’s part of Jo Bingham’s comments:  “My grandma made her son’s rub garlic on the upper lips (I hear it burned like heck – I imagine it didn’t smell that great either…lol). Now they both have full mustaches and she swears it is attributed to the garlic (her poor grandsons, always trying to ring them in to the garlic lips cult. Lol) and refuses to believe it was just genetics. Too funny, this article reminded me of her and I could just picture a mini-granma to the side of each pic wielding a nasty garlic glove!”.  Garlic?  What?  Totally hysterical!  I loved it and added her as a friend right away.

Lost in Arizona directed me to one of her articles that got a lot, I mean A LOT of weird comments.  The title is Five Mad Scientists Who Went Too Far in The Name of Science.  This article has received, so far, 72 comments. The article details some “scientists” who did extremely cruel and unnatural things to dead animals and humans while not really receiving any knowledge that would lead to advances in science.  I won’t give too much away, but I’d definitely recommend reading it.  It’s a good one.  One commenter, named only as user, says this:  “I bet that in the 21st century we will be able to bring someone back to life. This stuff isn’t scary. It’s beautiful. BTW There’s a possibility that the guy who was connected to the electricity felt it. Luckily we don’t have to be on his place That’s the reason why I want to be cremated after death.”.  Wow, I’m not even sure how to comment on that comment.  Here’s another comment by Tim: “How about hundreds of scientists every day who kill human embryos in the name of stem cell research?”.  Another commenter, Karrie, comes back with: “Tim, what about the millions of braincells you kill every day?”.

I’ve had some of this back and forth between commenters on one of my articles lately.  The article is about Ted Bundy’s childhood.  It doesn’t really saying anything bad about him except for of course, the fact that he raped and murdered at least 30 women.  The article is more a list of weird circumstances surrounding his youth than a controversial why’d he do it sort of piece.  I know that you’re bound to get odd comments writing about serial killers but this one has gone a little too far.  The first really weird one was from Jesse: “i think ted was a wonderful man…he was loving, caring, and respectful…….he just LOVED girls a little to much!!!!!! stop hattin on the Bundy”.  This was so clearly stupid and juvenile that I just ignored it.  Later I got this from a Dr. Jordan Kastein MD (note that you cannot find anything anywhere about this supposed Dr. — not on Triond or even on Google):  “In my studies at Harvard Medical School, I found out that Mr. Bundy was just a man with an obtuse addiction to the female gender. I want you all to know that Theodore had a rough childhood so he is not at fault. Females across the United States were Theodore’s icons. Don’t judge a man with needs. “Jesse” had a very imaculate point, although I have done the research and personally met Theodore in person. He is a pretty nice guy and we played cards together. He is very good at blackjack!”.

Weird, right.  I don’t know why I replied but I did: “Wow, this is really getting some comments. Um, to say that he LOVED girls a little too much is nearly as crazy as Mr. Bundy himself was. He killed at least 30 women. Killed, not loved. And to the “Dr.” on the last post…Ted Bundy has been dead for nearly 20 years so to say that “he IS a pretty nice guy” is a little strange. People with rough childhoods turn out fine all the time. People are responsible for their behaviour and actions. You can’t blame a life of killing women on your mom.”.  Anyways, it just gets worse from there.  The “Dr” gets seriously PO’ed and tells me I’ve never been to Harvard or met Ted Bundy.  These are both true facts but how does he know?  Has been hanging out with Review Stream?

Another commenter called the Dr. “crazy”, pointed out the obvious and told him to have fun playing cards with serial killers.  The “Dr.” gets even madder.  I deleted both these comments as they were a bit over the line for me, personally.  Now there’s a comment from someone claiming to be Mr. Bundy’s cousin that claims that the he never raped anyone and that the women clearly “wanted” it.  I must admit that at this point, I went off a little bit.  Okay, maybe more than a little bit.  I’ve never written a comment so nasty in my life!  I don’t know how all these loons are finding me.  I don’t think I’ll write about serial killers for a while at least.  Yikes!

Then there are some comments that are just incredibly sad.  I wrote an article on talking with my teen and got this as a comment: “it doesn’t matter what i say, my mom still goes uh huh thats nice…..i tell her i wanna join a club….ok sounds nice, how much? ok………it drives me nuts! cause she just says that i do things for attention, but she still don’t pay attention to me!! so whats it matter if i tell her something or not?!
i wish my mom would ask me what i did at school today or if i had a good day or if i did good on a test, rather then me having to tell her myself and she doesn’t even listen!”.  This girl’s words broke my heart a little that day.  I’m always trying to drag information out of my teen.  I can’t imagine not listening to what he tries to tell me, although I’m sure it’s happened, no one’s perfect.

And a great Triond writer, S Hayes wrote this to me in response for my request for weird comments:  “I did get one very strange comment once – however, it freaked me out so I deleted it.  It was random & bore no relevance to the article.  It described and named members of his family who had repeatedly sexually and physically abused him and nobody believed him, they then poisoned him – and he had himself been put in prison for pedophilia.  I don’t know if it was a hoax, a joke or a cry for help.”.  It really makes you wonder what happened and why he chose her article as a means of communicating that request.

Just because there is an area there to make a comment doesn’t mean that you have to.  I discovered a great article entitled How to Add Value to Your Comments by Richie Montalbo.  He details various ways that your comments can be used to help both the article’s writer and yourself.  It’s a definite must read, imo.  Another great article about comments is by Liane Schmidt.  It’s entitled Why Deleting Comments Does a Writer Good.  I have definitely taken Liane’s words to heart on more than one occasion and hit that delete comment box.

Opinions are like butts, everyone has one.  The comment section on an article is a great way to share yours — good, bad or weird!