I'm not quite sure where else to post this, but hopefully it'll encourage some fun conversation in any case!

So I saw Killers of the Flower Moon is on offer on Kobo. And just out of interest I scrolled down to the review section, to be met with some very confusing posts.

The Bloom review almost sounds like a response to something. It sounds like some kind of treasure hunt? What's going on with all that weird code?

The Sorry review has a similar feel to it, with the l33t speak stuff going on. I feel like I've wandered in to some kind of alternate reality game from the early 2000s. Or something from Hypnospace Outlaw.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what the hell is going on here?

It sounds to me like the first one is using the review site as some sort of “personal”.

No idea, but seeing that we live in a deadish internet now, my guess would be that those are bot accounts with AI agents hallucinating incoherent stuff

Seems mildly interesting. Do you have a link? I don't see these reviews but there are many versions of the book.

This one https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/killers-of-the-flower-moon

(maybe because I'm on the UK version of the site)

I think you might be right. It looks like if you post a review on a Kobo device, you can use bold/italic or whatever and it displays correctly - but when that review then gets posted on the website, it's in plaintext and shows the HTML tags. That could explain some of the weird characters. And for whatever reason, a group of random people (probably kids?) are using Kobo reviews like social media, including cryptic hints as to where they're going to post next.

Why they'd post it to a book like this one though, I have no idea!

Ad bots. Any website which isn't properly managed gets them. They're always put there, roaming the wild web, spamming their shit wherever they can.

Maybe to do it without anyone seeing? Like are they hiding it from a spouse or a parent?

And is the book how they know to talk to each other anonymously?

Reply on the first book on Kobo Store if you type «S»unney«a»tl«n»notji«d».gjdj
Hint: « »

If you take the letters between « and », you get "Sand". Typing that into the search field on the site and taking the first result leads to this one: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/sand-10?sId=cc51142f-b5e7-4ba0-91d2-1055fe04382b and it's comments section has more of the weird comments.

Kinda interesting, I would look more into it if the site weren't being super slow right now for some reason.

Oh damn, good work! I completely missed what the post was trying to say (I thought the « marks were just some HTML issue).

How bizarre. Yeah it's like some kind of treasure hunt

The site seemed to fix itself.

Seems some kids are using the reviews as a chat platform and the "Was this helpful to you?" feature as a sort of upvote system. Clever and funny xD

The "glitches" they're talking about are probably just using html for fancy styling ("Can any please teach me glowing text?") or maybe even display images ("Picture Glitch") if the site/app isn't escaping user input properly. Makes me a little worried about the security of the website tho... I wouldn't put my personal details into there.

But really, there are way worse things kids could be doing on the internet than exploiting a bookstore website/app to chat with friends. Some might find an interesting book every once in a while or maybe even get interested in how to make actual websites with their "glitches"

Hahah I actually have respect for what they're doing here, using a platform in a creative way for which it was never intended. I could see myself doing the same as a kid.

In some respects, the way it skews book reviews is bit annoying but then again I don't think many people really use the Kobo review section.

(Oh and I decided to purchase Killers of the Flower Moon. It seems interesting!)

Yeah, me too. It would have been the coolest thing ever as a kid to have some "secret" chat room with code names and all that.

Kinda disappointed tho that there wasn't some grand ARG or internet mystery to discover xD

It kinda brings me back to the forums and chatrooms I used to visit when I was younger; small populations of users that you'd get to know (not like reddit etc where everything feels very anonymous). Having this little hidden space that feels like your own.

Good job sleuthing!

If you look up some of the names with "" you can find other reviews too. Here's another one where one is showing the "glowing" glitch I guess. Maybe it only works on a kobo. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-ghost-in-the-glitch-volume1

Thanks, I think I was on the US site but not sure why it wasn't displaying the same reviews.

Seems charming, but it's just a little too recent and consistent in its weirdness for my taste. I would still put money on these being AI agents.

Ah, the classic old marquee element. That takes me back to the old internet. I wonder if any of them figured out <blink> yet.

And yeah, the website seems to escape everything properly but maybe in the app or in the eReader device it doesn't and the HTML renders.

Blinking text is a thing?? I'm kinda sad I never got to use Netscape now

Well, actually I don't think the <blink> tag works in any modern browser anymore. Just like <marquee>, it was never part of any standard, it was overused back in the day to the point where it became super annoying, not to mention the accessibility nightmare it was. So no, blinking text on websites is not something we should bring back.

And regardless, nowadays HTML should only be used to describe the structure of a page, not how it looks or behaves, and that's why many of the old tags are deprecated and support slowly dropped. Nowadays different "languages" are used to set how the page should look and operate. Using those it's ofc possible to make text (or any element on the page) blink, there just isn't a single HTML tag for it anymore.

Found my kid had been doing this with Spotify playlists to chat with other people in a similar way to get around some site blocks on our network. Seems like the same kind of "find workarounds to every form of adult control" we all did as kids.

I'll bet this is exactly it, seen the same thing in Spotify playlists.

Aww, they're learning HTML to do things like I did back on Myspace! I love it!

Of course you wouldn't want it for anything serious. But going through random old internet pages with text moving all over the place must have been pretty fun at times.