I have no problem with negative reviews, as long as they have substance.

By ‘substance’, I mean that if you dislike something, it should be explainable why you dislike it. There are those who disliked the changes to Feros because it took away the choice from Shepard’s hands. There are those who dislike Tali’s portrayal as weak or as too childish in the earlier parts of the story.

I’ve gotten some hella bad reviews on my Naruto stories, and those fans do not take shit from anyone. But they listed out exactly why they felt I was in the wrong (sometimes in PM using references to the manga or Shonen Jump magazine interviews) and I could do little but agree with their opinion as having validity, even if I disagreed.

Substance, not flame, makes a useful review.

There have been guest reviews who left very little but a negative comment or a pointless one, which usually doesn’t bother me. As a rule, I ignore guest reviews. You can’t respond to them except in an authors note, which I find tacky and space consuming. If they’re not taking 45 seconds to bother to register, then they’re either someone who’s paranoid of being tracked or don’t care enough to bother, and neither attitude really grabs me enough to give a shit of what they think.

But there are some, like the jackass who left me an invective laden rant about murdering canon, that get under my skin. I’ve just had another example of this sort of thing in a review on the STG Sara Shepard piece from a guest. I won’t bother printing it up or ranting about the sheer idiot nature of the review.

I will say that if you’re going to insult someone’s work without leaving a single useful piece of information, please have the goddamned decency not to put in bullshit like “don’t take it too harshly”.  Given the name he put in the review, it’s the same jackass who sent me the “canon defilement” review (or they use the EXACT same RandomReader tag). If it is the same person,  please go read the reviews for Chapter 73 of OSABC and go eat a can of shut the fuck up.