wherein Liz receives a series of peculiar reviews

[edenfalling]

In the past two days, I have gotten five anonymous reviews on ff.net for my story Little Sister. Normally this would simply be flattering -- hey, people like my story! -- but these are not normal reviews. They are clearly written by the same person (or bot) despite attributing themselves to three or four different "people," and they seem to be working their way toward being an advertisement for upcoming Narnia movies. Or something like that.

This is what they look like:

jadis 1300, 2011-09-15

wonderful brilliant this had to va in the film The Magician's Nephew

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jadis 1300, 2011-09-15

wonderful brilliant this story had to va in the film The Magician's Nephew Little Sister, a chronicles of narnia fanfic - FanFiction.Net

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charn 123, 2011-09-16

This wonderful story has to be with the film The Magician's Nephew as a set up for the film The Silver Chair, which comes years after

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[no attribution], 2011-09-16

wonderful has to be with the film The Magician's Nephew which comes 2014 as a set up for the film The Silver Chair, which comes 2015

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Lily.w, 2011-09-16

This wonderful story has to be with the film The Magician's Nephew which comes 2014 as a set up for the film The Silver Chair, which comes 2015


What I am wondering is if these are some kind of spam that is intended to make the page more searchable to bots (or test whether ads will be deleted), and if so, whether I should get rid of them. Thoughts, anyone?

Comments

[branchandroot]

*gives the comments a very dry look* Yeah, that's commercial spam all right. The only thing that could make it spammier is a link to a movie promo page. It's not really about bot searching, I don't think; it's about using your story as an anchor to advertise to your readers (any who read the comments). I'd suggest getting rid of them and, if possible, reporting them as spam so the IP address can be blacklisted.

[edenfalling]

FF.net doesn't seem to allow me to report anonymous reviews (by which I mean reviews not attached to an ff.net profile) to their abuse team, though as the writer of the story in question, I AM allowed to delete them. Which I am going to do.

[askerian]

Huh. There's something to the formulation of the sentences that reads as really bot-ish to me. The grammar is just off enough that it feels like it was pieced together by a program instead of a person. If I were you I'd delete; they're useless for anything but boosting your review count. ... okay no, having a higher review count is sometimes good, but since it's more or less the same review x 4 it's a bit like cheating, isn't it XD

[edenfalling]

Yeah, they do not read right. They're not even reviews, either -- they are neither a response to me nor a source of useful information to anyone curious about the story. Anyway, I deleted them. :-)

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

I read this last night and think I dreamed about it. This is really, really weird. Most fundamentally, I'm having a hard time understanding why and how a marketing agency or production house would PAY someone to do something like this for a film that is not even in production yet and do this "word of mouth" campaign by planting bad, fake illiterate reviews in a single story (or maybe others) on a fanfiction site? While I should never assume the craven lows to which media and marketing can fall, I can't believe anyone hearing this pitch would think it was worth a dime, especially given the timing. I wonder if other stories got similar hits? I'm very curious to find out out the reach of this weirdness.

[edenfalling]

I don't know WHAT it was about, but the general consensus is that the situation is fishy at best and they were useless as reviews, so I deleted all five of them.

[chibirisuchan.livejournal.com]

Kill it with fire. They're "fishing" for places where they can artificially inflate their post count as methods of earning cash from related-link clicking, and the linguistic weirdness is to provide a uniquely searchable phrase to see where their "fishing" stuck. >.

[edenfalling]

:-( I thought it might be something like that.

[rahirah]

I get rid of all spambot comments on principle. :P

[edenfalling]

A wise policy. :-)

[autumnia]

Looks like spam to me. If it were me, I'd just delete them.

[edenfalling]

I have done so. :-)

[lynati-1.livejournal.com]

I second the "kill it with fire" motion, for all the reasons previously listed. Plus, if I had people reading the reviews of one of my stories, those would be in no way helpful to them. When I come across poorly-written anything (whether by bots or by people) it makes me wince; I find these the mental equivalent of stepping barefoot on a holly leaf.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, they don't really make the story look good, do they? Normally if that were my only reaction, I'd leave them alone (I am not in charge of the literary aesthetics of the universe, after all), but since they're fishy as well as badly written... away they go!

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

If they have accounts, respond with a thank you and wait a day. If no response, then delete it. If its annoyomous, I'd delete it. Because, even if it is a real person...well....when have you ever gone and checked to see if your response was still there?

[edenfalling]

Oh, these are anonymous, not connected to any accounts. If they had identifiable people on the other end, I would already have contacted them, if only to ask a polite version of "WTF???"

[redwolf]

Definitely a spambot. Report it to ff.net (they'll ignore it because they're useless) then kill it.

[edenfalling]

Duly deleted. :-)