File this under "lovely, just lovely:"
All of our articles have a "feedback" link that let you send a comment about the articles to our editors. The form has a radio button asking if we can post the comments in one of our forums. Over the years, its worked quite nicely as a way to start (or supplement) discussions on key issues.
Yesterday, we got a flurry of feedback forms on James Gaskin's comparsion of NAS devices from Linksys and Snap, all with the "yes, we can post" button selected. So I set up a a forum to discuss the article.
Turns out at least some of the comments were cut and pasted from Usenet or other sources without the knowledge of the original authors, apparently by somebody with a grudge against Linksys (which I found out when I got puzzled e-mail from a couple of the authors, wondering how in the world we'd gotten hold of their e-mail to Linksys).
In six years with forums, this is the first time this has happened. But I guess it's now time for Plan B: If we plan to post a feedback form, we need to first write the apparent author, asking if he or she really did write the note. Grrr...
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