Robert Morris wipes his record clean (?)

Looks like our friend Top Reviewer Robert Morris got rid of all critical comments under his reviews. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I couldn't see a single one of those posts that questioned his all-five-star ratings or at-least-a-book-a-day reading habit. All I could see was some quantity of joyous and laudatory Quality Comments(TM). A major delete-and-repost campaign, or am I seeing things?

Now that's weird: double negatives?

I was perusing some reviews there and encountered this comment under one of them:

La Maniatica says:
Ok, I appreciate the review. What I dont understand is that when you give bad reviews, why do you always have to review it twice to give it extra bad ratings then what is should get. Giving the book 2 2star ratings is not helping this review. I have noticed you doing this on quite a lot of books. I am going to buy this book despite your reviews. Just leave it at one review.

Then I looked at the book's two-star-reviews' page, and what do you know, indeed Deborah MacGillivray posted two negative reviews for this book. What's that about? Negative shilling ? Why keep several reviews of the same item to begin with, regardless of the rating?

Case in point: a bunch of small-time frauds

Someone mentioned 'misrareviews' recently here. While thumbing through the Slate-article-related thread on the Amazon "Discussion Board" a minute ago I noticed a post of hers (his?). This is a very good example of the crap that takes place on that 'Discussion Board' (the place is completely overrun by shills there, try to have a meaningful discussion and you'll see). Here goes:

It's puzzling that the article vaguely casts aspersions on [...] John Matlock, because there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with [him]. Matlock uses a staff of writers (from his own web site), so he can't be ranked. The article says that Matlock "took a holiday from Amazon", when he was actually harassed off of Amazon -to the detriment of customers. [...]

This post is a deliberate crude lie. It is a lie because John Matlock "Gunny" had operated as one of the Top Reviewers (No.6?) for years, as an individual, not a team. He was a classical example of an obnoxious fraud who posted multiple reviews daily, half a dozen, dozen, pick your number; all five stars, no exceptions. Go check his posting history and see for yourself.

Once his good works started to attract attention and people started posting comments under his reviews asking if it's possible that all of so many books are all five stars and whether a human can read that much to begin with, he tried to 'explain' (away) the mind-boggling size of his reviewing output by saying that, no, he doesn't read these books; he is a public face of a team of reviewers (17?) who post under his name. That happened only after he was pushed against the wall as it were and after years of posting as an individual and holding some high Top Reviewer status.

Whether one chooses to believe this 'explanation' or not is one's decision -- personally, I don't believe it (his thoroughly imbecile reviews were all written in a very consistent individual style and also, why would a bunch of people labour in obscurity and then post the results of their hard work under someone else's name?). But however you look at it, one thing is clear: he was engaged in fraud for years -- whether it's because he was 'fronting' a group of scribblers yet posed as a Top Reviewer (who, according to Amazon rules, must be individuals), or because he was working alone but kept reviewing books he didn't read -- couldn't have! too many --, doesn't really matter: either way it was wrong.

'misrareviews' was active on Amazon and the Board during all this time, including the time when Gunny finally got defrocked; lurid details of this wretched saga were discussed on the Board and elsewhere ad nauseam, and so 'misrareviews' knows what the real story is VERY DAMN WELL, and yet s/he spews lies in a desperate attempt to rearrange reality in a way that would make Gunny look like an innocent victim of a savage persecution. Corporate solidarity, no? What else could it be. These guys have no fucking shame; all they know is probably, today it's Gunny or HK, tomorrow who knows, maybe it'll be them, and so they close ranks no matter what.

As far as Gunny's being 'harrassed' off Amazon, well, I'd rather say chased away, but otherwise I agree with this. Except he should have been 'harrassed' off Amazon years earlier, and not by alert, suspicious customers, but by Amazon themselves. And of course, no one has literally the power to chase anyone away from Amazon, he simply appears to have stopped posting anything there -- though, as I would imagine, the commentary under his reviews and elsewhere (press articles and blogs) played its role in his decision. I think it was a wise decision on his part; one only wishes Harriet Klausner and some other similar 'reviewers' did the same.

As far as his departure's being to the detriment of customers, I think not: to the contrary: it was his shameless shilling that was to the detriment of customers -- he 'reviewed' thousands of pages' worth of printed matter daily; frequently scientific/technology books which would take even a trained, competent person months to read; in addition, his reviews were quite imbecile, which demonstrated that not only wasn't he reading these books: he coulnd't possibly understand them even if he tried to read them; and finally, again, all his reviews were five stars, all three and a half thousand of them. Detriment? A departure of a fraudulent asshole like that was a benefit to customers.

Calomniez, calomniez... (The Secret's Out)

Our friend Bibulous Frenchman has finally learnt the truth¹:

Mrs. Duh-laney is rumored to actually be Harriet Klausner,and she set up the whole "anti-Harriet" thing to attract extra attention and solidify her No. 1 standing.

Finally, the secret's out. But wait, more people claimed to be Harriet Klausner -- OK, I Admit It: I’m Harriet Klausner. Personally, I think it's L.E. Cantrell who is Harriet Klausner. Or maybe he's Elvis, I haven't decided yet...

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1. Reviewer Taylor X deleted/reposted the review where the quoted comment was posted; the comments are gone now. Here is a link to the cached page though (click on 'show post anyway' if it's hidden).

Harriet reviews NONEXISTING book.

Check this out:

[...] I'm sure there are credible people out there sincerely writing some of the reviews seen on Amazon and the like, but how do you feel about it? Do you read them/write them/love them/hate them/ignore them/quote them? Is it a service to readers or a possible disservice to authors? Is there a line being crossed? And what about the Harriet Klausners who write 45 reviews a week? Is it even possible to read that many books and comprehend them? [...]

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From one of the comments under this article, I gotta quote, it's hilarious:

[...] As an example, after I agreed to write Bayou Bad Boys a few years ago, one of the writers got ill and had to drop out. Unfortunately, the story description she'd sent in to Brava got on the back of the ARC under the replacement author's name. (Fortunately it was changed before the actual book was published!) But HK reviewed all three novellas described. Even one that didn't exist. [...]

(From the comment by Joann Ross.)

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There are some cretinious entries too:

leeannewat commented: The only time I read a review on Amazon etc... Is if I am looking to find out what a book is about... And if I find that a person has given a Negative review I click the "No" U know where they ask u if this review has been Helpful or not... I'm not sure what this does but I hope it does some good for the Author... As I think everyone should be "Given a Fair Go"...

Deborah Macgillivray commented: [...] Yes, click NO helps! So keep clicking!! Also if you see a particularly bad review that is over the line, click REPORT THIS. [...] I am a top review there, as I am on the other versions, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca and Amazon.de. [...] This all so has nothing to do with reviewing. They are not posting reviews; they are posting their opinions. Big difference, though they don't seem to understand that [...]

Leah commented: [...] I do rely on reviews to tell me what's worth shelling out the dough. At Amazon, I look at the stars - not the actual reviews. If something has a number of reviews (say, more than 10) and they're all consistently 4 1/2 to 5 stars, I think that's meaningful [...]

Rivitting! We thought a review actually is the reviewer's opinion of the item reviewed, but then what do we know... maybe a review should be rewarmed liner notes: by looking at Amazon reviews one just can't tell.

We got email from Mark

Mark writes:

You know, I really wish you had open comments so I could post on your blog. Especially since you are discussing me. Twice. Yes, not only am I the blogger from markcarstairs.blogspot.com, but I also am the Mark you quote in today's post.

Mark, the message at the top on the left of our front page says that if you'd like to join us, send us your email. We can't allow unregistered comments because the next day the place will be spammed out of existence by the same people we're talking about. We were open for a while at first, and this precise thing happened. But anyone can ask for an invite to join as a named poster. Our asking for registration is simply a way to keep this blog clean of malicious interference: a named poster who becomes disruptive can, and will be banned. I sent you an invite to the address you emailed from.

First let me state, I have read every word on your blog. Heck, I link to it from my blog. I visit it most days to see what you are saying. And, as I said in my post which you quote (but seem to ignor), I have no use for Harriet either.

We didn't ignore this, but your beef with Harriet is based on a wrong thing, and I'll restate why: your problem is with the quality of her reviews; we believe she's evil because she reviews the books she didn't read and she reviews them all positively. The quality of her reviews is a very secondary issue; it is really a side effect of her modus operandi. By your logic, if she managed to post good reviews (if, say, her reviews were produced by a team of competent copywriters), you'd have no problem with her. We still would: she's a shill, regardless of the quality of her reviews. So, as you can see (and could see earlier, simply by reading our previous post), we did not ignore what you said.

I am not defending her, nor would I want to. I do believe she at least skims the books she reviews since I have read things in her reviews that are major spoilers and not on the dust jacket. However, those instances are few and far between and certainly don't defend her at all.

And obviously, I do need to apologize. While I investigated the blog you linked to that started my own diatribe, I couldn't figure out how many reviews the person posts every day. I jumped to a conclusion that it appears wasn't warrented. And for jumping to conclusions I do apologize.

Apology gratefully accepted.

However, let's get one thing straight. I post negative reviews. Your recent comment on the post that links to my blog inplies I don't. In fact, the second half of the post you quoted talks about some of the blowback I have gotten from a couple of my negative reviews.

And I am unattached to the book publishing business. I haven't even written so much as a short story that has been published, much less a book of any kind. And if you look at my reviews, you'll see I give a variety of ratings, more then normal recently. Yes, I tend toward the higher ratings, but mainly because I am picking what I consume and review, and that means I lean toward what I enjoy. If I don't like an author, I don't go back to them, for example.

You may post this on your blog, but please include my name and a link to my blog so people can judge for themselves if you do.

If you post negative reviews along with the positives, then it's obvious that what we said does not relate to you. We did include a link to your blog in the previous post, here's another one (is it the right blog though? :-)

Yeah, I know! Exactly!

Revisiting a recently posted link here. That was about reviewers who post positive reviews exclusively, where "Author Kerry Allen" feigned a major fit over our suggestion that an all-positive reviews record tends to hurt a reviewer's credibility. The faked fit was barely over when one of the commenters on that post, "Mark", let the truth out, unintendedly perhaps -- I quote:

> Mark | January 16, 2008 @ 8:47 pm
> Not to mention the blowback you can get when you
> post negative reviews. Trust me, I know.

Exactly! So what does this do to your credibility, genius?

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Here I bumped into an article we've been linking to for a long time, Dangerous reviews on Amazon: it's very well written and it deals with this very issue.