As I was checking my email today, I was confused by a few emails that looked like this:
I couldn’t remember ever hearing of a blog or website called BlogInterviewer, but it looked like the type of email you receive when you have subscribed to a blog post’s comments (often after or as a result of adding a comment). With a bit of a bad feeling, I visited the blog in question.
BlogInterviewer is an interesting site. With a tagline of “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Web’s Best Bloggers,” BlogInterviewer presents interviews with a variety of bloggers. They describe themselves this way on their About Us page:
BlogInterviewer.com is a website devoted to discovering the most interesting bloggers on the Internet and their reasons for sharing their thoughts with the world. You as a user have the opportunity to vote for your favorites and bury the blogs you don’t like.
The post I visited (referenced by the emails I was receiving) is here. You’ll notice that there are currently three comments, but when I visited there were seven. The strange part was that three of those seven comments appeared to have been made by me. Here are the comments that were purportedly from me:
My name in the second and third comment was linked to this blog. Obviously, the person who submitted the comments used my email address (that’s why I started receiving emails about additional comments). But I didn’t submit any of those three comments.
It disturbs me that someone would be using my name, my blog, and my email address falsely in comments made on another blog. But what concerns me even more is the confrontational and condescending attitude I perceive in the last comment. The attitude reflected in that comment does not reflect my personality (at least I don’t think it does!). And I feel it reflects badly on the Christian faith. I wonder what the motivation of the person submitting the comments was. Was it to put the Christian faith in a bad light or was there some other reason?
I quickly left a comment saying that I was not the author of those comments and asking the blog owner to remove them. I also sent an email to the blog owner bringing the problem to their attention. I was happy to receive an email very soon after from Mike Thomas of BlogInterviewer.com saying he had removed the offending comments. I was especially gratified by the speed with which the issue was addressed by Mike. Kudos and thanks to him!
Now a question for the readers of this blog: has anything like this ever happened to you? How did you respond?
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
