I just had a recent, rather unpleasant experience. I do a Q&A for raw diets on another site. 1 person recently asked me about her health-problems and mentioned what foods she was eating. I'd suggested removing the raw dairy and raw veggie-juice as they are the no1 and no2 foods, respectively, which cause RVAFers the biggest health-problems. She then did a follow-up question which had no questions in it but which was basically a commentary stating that she actually did fine with raw dairy and raw veggie-juice, which was fair enough. I naturally assumed that , like some other posters in the past, she hadn't realised how to leave comments(re thanking and rating the volunteer), and had mistakenly used the follow-up-question option to leave that comment. Since she had not actually asked a question in that follow-up and had not been interested in taking my advice re raw dairy/veggie-juice and had seemed to have made a mistake, I naturally didn't see what else I could add, so I naturally clicked the "you're welcome" option (which says something like thanks for your comments or some such, used mostly for when people wrongly give comments in follow-ups, a quite common occurrence at times).
The trouble is the woman became completely paranoid and absolutely ballistic and falsely assumed that I had merely clicked the "you're welcome" option to avoid her subsequent comment appearing on the eventual Q&A to be published on allexperts.com. She then found out how to actually make a real commentary on my answer and said some paranoid rubbish about me trying to avoid her follow-up comment being published. The trouble is that the policy of the website is that readers' comments can only be wiped out if the reader in question asks for them to be removed, the volunteer has little say. I have no way of contacting the questioner and telling her what really happened as the e-mail-address is, of course, hidden, and , given her appalling behaviour,I doubt she'd see reason.
I volunteer for a few subjects on that site(not just diet) and enjoy answering questions on diverse subjects.I have, at times, come across people who've disagreed with me on a number of issues.They have all been polite(I remember 1 fervent pro-cooked-advocate using words like "respectfully" and so on) - if, at times, I didn't find the right answer or only provided half of the answer, they would often leave a polite comment which stated that I couldn't help them or went into more detail. I never had a problem with that. The big problem is those people who you want to give an honest answer to but who don't want to read what you have to say, due to their own inbuilt biases. The site recommends, in such cases, to just use the option "explain why you can't answer this question", so that you can give an honest answer without fear of being given an unfairly low rating by someone who expected to be given an entirely different answer. The trouble is one can't always be sure, from looking at the questions, which of those questioners are lacking in integrity.
My options are limited if I can't get that site to delete that false comment. I can , of course, just decide not to be rated in future. I think that would wipe out all previous ratings/comments and prevent people from writing anything in future(well, except in the reader feedback section of the Q&A archive, I suppose. That wouldn't be a bad thing as I at least have control over the reader feedback section re deletion etc. But it means that, just because 1 really lousy questioner has reacted in an absolutely paranoid way, all other questioners are prevented from adding their 2 cents re my answers, whether it is in the form of correcting something I said or just adding some helpful info or commentary to add to my answer or whatever.
And, if she had been remotely competent and not paranoid, she could at least have simply left a comment stating that my advice to give up raw dairy and raw veggie-juice was incorrect as she did fine on those 2 foods.
More to the point, I have made it clear re Q&As in the past that I am not a Primal Diet-fan so I do wonder if she was just some Primal-Diet-fanatic just itching to leave a bad comment on the site.Does seem odd.
