A Psycho By Any Other Name: The Rose DesRochers Experience

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So, it started out as a normal day on the internet, just like any other. Catch up on emails, check some rankings, see how AdSense is doing… nothing whatsoever to alert me to the fact that that day would be the day that I was destined to run into the Information Age’s version of Norman Bates’ sister.

I first interacted with Rose DesRochers on Mybloglog.com. She posted a comment on my profile on Sept. 8th, “Your poetry site is interesting.”, and I posted one on hers the same day, “Why thank you. 🙂 “. She replied on the 9th with, “My pleasure. 🙂 “. I don’t know about any of you, but personally I don’t see how I could possibly have detected any early warning signs from that exchange.

“I’m a homicidal maniac, they look just like everyone else.” -Wednesday Adams, explaining why she was wearing normal clothes for Halloween.

Next time I happen to encounter this peach of a woman is on Sphinn.com, where she submitted something her husband wrote about BlogCatalog not passing PageRank. Now, to be fair, as it turns out someone who knows how these things actually work (Sebastian) did an evaluation of the situation later, and it does look like those links might actually have a problem with them that could affect PageRank being passed. The problem is, it is not because of what either she or her husband were asserting. If you are going to get into an argument with a large portion of a technically oriented community, then it is probably a good idea to first know what the hell you are talking about. Neither of them appeared to really understand either the terminology nor the mechanics of what they were arguing, based on what they were saying.

In the lengthy and sprawled out discussion that ensues that day and the next, which happens to span several blogs, multiple submissions on Sphinn, and many comments, the dear sweet Rose decides to start getting a wee bit nasty. On of the comments she makes, on Andy Beards blog, has this as a postscript:

PS: Andy I don’t like you. Everyone else may think that you are all that and a bag of chips, but I think you are nothing more than a BC Guppy with a brown nose.

Rose and her husband are trying to prove their point using logic that is fallacious. They are trying to convince people that Google has said that if a regular HTML link has an onclick event attached to it then it will not pass PageRank. They link to a statement Matt Cutts made to back up this claim. The statement they link to doesn’t say this. To get rude in a conversation is one thing… to get emotional, upset, and rude in a discussion based on technical functionality when you don’t even understand what is being discussed, well… that’s the kind of thing that prompts people to suggest that Sphinn needs a Dumbass button.

Since merely disagreeing with Rose will get you slammed by her and banned from even viewing her blog (let alone commenting), the dumbass discussion of course sets her off. I make some comment in the thread about certain people having an underdeveloped sense of humor. Rose decides to email me at this point, asking if I minded if she quote me:

From: Rose DesRochers
To: {removed}
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 4:34 PM
Subject: Michael

Michael?

From: Michael VanDeMar [mailto:{removed}]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 4:30 PM
To: {removed}
Subject: Re: Michael

Yup. Not my main email though, this one (the reply-to in this email) is. 🙂
    Wassup?

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 4:41 PM
Subject: RE: Michael

I hope that you don’t mind my mentioning you in a post about Sphinn and Guppies. 🙂 I quoted you.

Not realizing I should have been watching my tread for eggshells from the get go, I decided that now, away from the commotion of the threads, might be a good time to politely point out to Rose that she was wrong:

From: Michael VanDeMar [mailto:{removed}]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:06 PM
To: {removed}
Subject: Re: Michael

I haven’t looked at it, but if you quoted me then it doesn’t matter if I mind or not. 🙂
    Actually, even if you didn’t quote me correctly it doesn’t matter, you are of course free to post whatever you like. I would like to mention something to you though… you happen to be in the wrong on this issue on several counts. The post Shawn wrote about the links not passing PageRank due to the fact that they have an onclick event in them is just plain incorrect. If need be I can demonstrate this to you, but since it was already fully discussed on Andy’s blog I’m not sure you would understand.
    When you replied on Andy’s blog, regardless of how you feel about him, you were replying out of emotion needlessly defending Shawn. Andy didn’t write “this Shawn dude is obviously ignorant and should be ignored”… no, he wrote a well thought out factually correct assessment of the situation. It doesn’t happen to matter if Andy is involved and has something to gain, or if there are other problems with Blogcatalog (now or in the past)… the truth is he posts facts, actual verifiable tidbits of things as they really are.
    Your response to those truthful facts were to call him “nothing more than a BC Guppy”. At this point it does not matter whether he is a “guppy” or not… your calling him that in response to him posting factual evidence makes you the wrong one, the one out of line, not him.
    Ok, said my piece. Off to read what you wrote about me now before you read this and decide to slant it to make me look bad (or worse, depending on what you already wrote). 🙂
    Peace.
    -Michael

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:20 PM
Subject: RE: Michael

I’m not wrong and I was not defending Shawn. I dislike Andy and I have said that before.

I recommend you read my other discussions with Andy.

I can not stomach the guy. I dislike him with a passion. 🙂

In my opinion he is a guppy. 🙂

His evidence is not factual. OMG- LMFAO!

I did not make you look bad at all, but uh thanks. Like- whatever!

To sum up what Andy was saying in his post: Just because an onclick event exists on a link does not mean it won’t pass PageRank. This is correct. Now, again, the links were doing more than what I initially thought… so I was in part wrong about how those links are behaving. This in no way makes Rose or her husband right, however.

From: Michael VanDeMar [mailto:{removed}]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:18 PM
To: {removed}
Subject: Re: Michael

    Rose, I am a programmer. I understand that the normal layperson may not see the difference between the BC onclick and the one discussed in the threads cited by you and Shawn, but it is a huge one. The ones that Matt and Brian were discussing take you to a different page than what the href attribute points to, and it is for that exact reason that they don’t pass PageRank. BC merely processes a JavaScript function first, but the link still behaves like a link.
    Trust me, you are wrong.
    -Michael

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:34 PM
Subject: RE: Michael

Michael so is Shawn. He is a certified computer technician, web developer and programmer. Your point?
You can argue this until your face turns Blue. I still state they do not. If Matt states they do then I will post a rebuttle until then my opinion sticks.

I didn’t know one way or the other at the time, but as I was researching background for this post, nothing that I came across happened to indicate that Shawn was in fact a programmer, by the way. I did, however, find references that either Rose or Shawn had made the claim that he was a Canadian Law Enforcement Officer during an episode where she appears to have been trying to bully people online. So Rose, how are your husbands law enforcing skills? If they’re anything like his programming ones then I myself would have a hard time trusting him to be in my local Neighborhood Watch. 😀

I decided to post a comment on her blog in the discussion where she had originally quoted me, pointing out how it was her insulting Andy in response to her being factually wrong that make the behavior worse. In return she edits out 2/3rds of my comment, removing the “why” bit. Now, while I am against censorship in general, I do understand it in certain circumstances, such as to preserve peace in a friendly environment, or to keep things “family-friendly”. However, when the sole reason for the censorship is that leaving the content in makes the person in question look bad, then of course I am against it. Just my personal view on the issue. This probably contributed to the conversation going downhill from there.

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:37 PM
Subject: RE: Michael

I edited your post. Please stay on topic.

From: Michael VanDeMar [mailto:michael@endlesspoetry.com]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:42 PM
To: admin@todays-woman.net
Subject: Re: Michael

It was on topic, my next comment explains why.
    Here is the bit I’d like you to re-include:
By the way, in the comment where you insulted him, you made this statement:
<blockquote>It is a discussion where Matt Cutts and Brian White both from Google mention that OnClick Java does not pass PageRank.</blockquote>
What Matt in fact said the reason that it won’t pass PageRank is this:
<blockquote>it may look like a clean link, but the fact is that the onclick behavior invokes a new page and different behavior from a typical hyperlink</blockquote>
The links that Shawn evaluated are not doing the same thing.
By the way, I don’t know crap about BlogCatalog… never cared enough to look into it. For all I know using its service is a worse offence than listing your daughter on marryourdaughter.org. Wouldn’t matter, you’d still be wrong, based solely on the facts that were posted.

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:59 PM
Subject: RE: Michael

Then if you don’t know crap about them then why the hell are you commenting. The links do not pass Pagerank in my opinion. Case closed. Bye Bye. 🙂

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 6:15 PM
Subject: Michael VanDeMar

Michael VanDeMar, I have given you opportunity to post here regarding BlogCatalog.

http://rosedesrochers.todays-woman.net/2007/09/11/blog-catalog-does-not-pass-pagerank-from-blogcatalog/

Hell go here http://www.invision-graphics.com/ftopicp-135.html#135

and argue that I mischaracterized what Matt Cutts said. But none of that has a damn thing to do with the fact I think Andy is a Guppy.

If you continue going off topic on my post- I will have no choice but to ban you from commenting.

I would hate to have to do that.

Please stay on topic.

From: Michael VanDeMar [mailto:{removed}]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 6:17 PM
To: {removed}
Subject: Re: Michael VanDeMar

    If this were about BC then perhaps I would. It’s not, it’s about you. It’s all about you, Rose, and the fact that you had an inappropriate emotional response to something that you don’t even understand, me stating that, and you editing out the proof backing me up.
    It’s your blog, do what you will. If you feel the need to ban me from pointing out facts, then by all means, do just that Rose. Do whatever you like.
    -Michael

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 6:32 PM
Subject: RE: Michael VanDeMar

Again can you not comprehend?

You are commenting on the wrong post.

Seeing how you are on the subject why is it ok for people to call me a dumbass yet I can not call Andy a guppy for kissing BC butt?

It was not an emotional response. Maybe Andy is having his own emotional breakdown with his comment to Shawn. LMAO

Ps: It is not the first time I have told him he was a BC kiss ass in a discussion

PSS: I would love to chat but I have to get my daughter from work in a few hours.

I don’t know about anyone else, but for some reason the phrase, “No more wire hangers!” pops into my head at this one. I leave a comment on Sphinn:

“By the way, I wouldn’t bother commenting anything on her blog illustrating where Rose is wrong, she is quite the pro-censorship one. Which seems an odd position for someone in the blogging industry, but perhaps that’s just me. 🙂 “

Three hours later, long after I commented on her blog, she emails me again, informing me I am banned… not just from commenting (and remember, I haven’t commented on her blog in between, just on Sphinn), but from even viewing her blog apparently:

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 12:38 AM
Subject: RE: Michael VanDeMar

Please consider yourself now banned. I allowed you to have you say.

From: Michael VanDeMar [mailto:{removed}]
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 12:50 AM
To: {removed}
Subject: Re: Michael VanDeMar

Are you oblivious to the fact that you have the emotional maturity of a prepubescent girl?
    Your poor, poor daughter. Does she have anyone to act as an adult in her life? Or is that the function she performs for you?
    -Michael

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 1:10 AM
Subject: RE: Michael VanDeMar

Listen- leave my children out of this. Continue harassing me and I contact your ISp provider.

From: Michael VanDeMar [mailto:{removed}]
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 1:16 AM
To: {removed}
Subject: Re: Michael VanDeMar

    I wasn’t harassing you, I was replying to the emails you initiated. You contacted me, I replied with an honest assessment of the behavior you exhibited, both in this thread of emails and online elsewhere, towards myself and apparently pretty much everyone else that you interacted with today. I neither asked for nor desired that you contact me, you did that entirely on your own. If you wish to not continue this discussion, then by all means, don’t. That is your decision.
    Please do note, however, that none of the emails that I have exchanged with you are in any way, shape, or form private. I am in fact the named addressee, and will do with them as I please.
    Good day.
    -Michael

From: Rose DesRochers
To: ‘Michael VanDeMar’
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 1:30 AM
Subject: RE: Michael VanDeMar

Please respect my copyright or I will have no choice but contact hostgator. Emails are copyrighted.

I have now blocked your email.

Which she did in fact do. She also, by the way, removed me from her Mybloglog friends list and deleted my comments from her profile there as well, including the one where I said simply “Thank you”, in typical young girl tantrum fashion. I almost didn’t blog about this, since I realized as I was doing the background on it exactly how much it would take to make the post complete enough to be meaningful, but the fact that this appears to be a longstanding pattern with Rose, and since she hassled Danny Sullivan (I mean, my God, who doesn’t like Danny?) when he needed to curb her behavior, and since she has threatened me on two online fronts in an attempt to keep me from speaking badly about her, I decided I probably should just on principle alone.

Anyone interested in checking out bits and pieces of Rose’s past trail of unpleasantness (if you’re not into chaos and drama, don’t bother) and cyber-bullying, which span back a few years, can do so through these links:

http://www.virushead.net/vhrandom/2005/07/16/drama-at-the-poetry-forum/
http://cyberstalkers.blogspot.com/2007/06/nature-of-rose.html
http://forums.writersweekly.com/viewtopic.php?t=4120
http://jameslandrith.com/content/view/2755/79/
http://poopersscoops.typepad.com/poopers_scoops/2007/08/unprofessional-.html

The email conversation that I cited above came from 3 specific emails, and the entire body of each can be found here, here, and here. Aside from removing the signatures, rearranging the order of the text to make top-down sense, and adding in the To:, From:, and Subject: on a couple, they represent the entire verbatim joint conversation between Rose and myself to date that was conducted through email, to the best of my knowledge.

Update: as I suspected she would do, Rose is now abusing the DMCA and claiming that the conversation between us is her property. None of the correspondences represent stand alone literary works on their own, and instead represent elements of a joint authorship. The Copyright Act states very clearly, in 17 U.S.C. § 201(a):
“Initial Ownership. – Copyright in a work protected under this title vests
initially in the author or authors of the work. The authors of a joint work
are coowner of copyright in the work.”
One of the requirements for a DMCA is that it be filed on behalf of an owner that holds “exclusive rights” to the material in question. She does not hold such. I am indeed filing counter-notification, and hope to have the content back up as soon as the required time has passed.

Update #2: I have given it more time than what my host asked me to, and as I figured, nothing came of the notice. Just another example of someone abusing the DMCA in order to impose censorhip. The content has now been restored to it’s original state.

Link drops: here and here.

20 thoughts on “A Psycho By Any Other Name: The Rose DesRochers Experience”

  1. Pingback: WBW (Worldwide Blog Wrestling) Presents… » Update: The Rose DesRochers Post Has Been Restored
  3. Pingback: Newbs, ‘Science’ Spinning, ‘Teesway One Nine Nine’, And A Saturday Meme | Smackdown!

  4. Self-control and maturity are in short supply sometimes. Most people can only hope to improve from whatever level they’re already at.

  8. Rose is in fact a whack job, there is no denying that. But I hate to tell you this… the poem being referred to can be found in literature going back over 80 years ago, at least.

    There was a periodical named “The Railroad Trainman”, printed by The Library of the Princeton University. Volume 39, which was printed in Jan 1922, contains that poem on page 96. It was written by H. L. Stevens, the President of Lodge 590 at that time. Google has scanned that publication, and you can see the poem for yourself on the page it was printed on here, with the first line highlighted:

    http://books.google.com/books?id=ARooAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA96&dq=%22When+things+go+wrong,+as+they+sometimes+will%22

    He put the poem in quotes, so you can tell even he was not the original author. If you want a hardcopy of the poem in a book printed 68 years ago, it was included in “Poems That Touch The Heart”, compiled by A. L. Alexander, which was originally printed in 1941:

    Poems That Touch the Heart

    Sorry man, I know you feel very strongly about this, but honestly, the poem was written a very long time ago.

  10. Rose DesRochers is a psycho, lol. I hooked you up with a dofollow link to this article directly with her name as the anchor text. Fucking hillarious.

  12. Rose is a 24 carat nutter. She uses the ’email is copyright’ everytime she embarks on a bullying campaign.

  13. If you’re talking about the Rose Rose DesRochers from Belleville ON Canada I had just as bad. I can’t remember where she started hounding me, but I think it was the Canada Kicks Ass forum. She invited me to join a website she had going called Woman On Top, which was also a name she used on line. When I posted something completely innocent on it she banned me, then she followed me about the internet, mis-reading and ridiculing everything I said for months. Funny, but my pet name for her wasn’t much different than yours. I call her The Psycho Bitch From Hell. I thought she spelled her last mane Desrochiers though. At that time her husband was calling himself White Wolf or something like that. I think he was a web designer or something. I haven’t heard of them in a few years, thank God. The woman is totally crazy.

  14. Hey Larry.. yeah well you know in terms of credibility I wouldn’t give Rose much only becasue she changes the content of comments people email her.. she adds curse words and makes herself out to always be a victim of some abuse. Sheesh I don’t know I just feel that something is devoid in her life I mean after all who else on our huge planet has spent so much time refuting the author of an anonymous poem? ‘Don’t Quit’. I hope she becomes the person God wishes her to be. That’s all we all really need anyway.

    Take care,

    Gerard Haughey

  15. I don’t give her any. I was surprised to find her name alone popping up on Google when I was just looking for someone else with a similar name. She badgered me for weeks until I accepted her as a friend (I actually thought she was coming on to me.) Then started rejecting everything I said or did and hounded me for months, if not years. She came back to the Canada Kicks Ass forums and caused trouble under a few different aliases, then finally left us alone. No; she has absolutely no credibility, and if the world were fair there would be a way to warn her potential victims, for that is what I feel I was. Cheers.

  16. What the heck is going on with Rose Desrochers? My statcounter (which is installed as invisible) has gone off the charts with Automatic Data Processing – Employer Services listed. And they got to me via this. My cyberstalkers blogspot (What Lies Beneath) was hit 68 times in two days from ADP Employer Services. All links that I gave in my blogs were also checked out. Then, my Thoughts and Considerations blog was hit according to Statcounter 18 times and all links there were also clicked.

    I contacted others that I knew had written about her, and they said that ADP had also showed up on their statcounter.

    I emailed Rose about 5 months ago that I was going to remove all my blogs concerning her, and I did remove a few. I just wanted to clear myself of past problems with people. But, others encouraged me not to remove all the blogs as the information was important, and I took that into consideration. Actually time to remove all the blogs was a concern.

    Anyone know what is going on? Kind of weird. Thanks SMACKDOWN for this. LOL

  17. Katie, I am not sure what it is you are seeing, but I can tell you that this month there were only 10 legitimate visitors to this particular post (including yours), and 100 bots visits, many of them with fake referrers. It’s a (very ineffective) technique called “referrer spamming” that tries to leverage public stats packages, and it does the spamming even if the site it is hitting does not have any visible stats (like this one). I have no idea if that is what is going on with your traffic, but you should have gotten very few real people coming to your site from this post so far this month.

  18. Really? My statcounter does me well. I do agree that there is a lot of spam going on via the Internet. I use to write blogs on that. My statcounter reports come from the link you gave in your blog concerning this situation of Rose where you gave the link of http://cyberstalkers.blogspot.com/2007/06/nature-of-rose.html

    I did not get anything from the statcounter except that once they got to my site (and others as well due to external links) that started from SmackDown. If you google Rose Desrochers of 44,000, SmackDown comes in third of the list. It does not surprise me that they found me via your rating of place on Google. I did not get anyone of real people, but just ADP Employer Services. That is fine with me. I was just curious if you or others knew what was going on with this. All your other links to prove your point were also visited in the statcounter (as communication on my part was asked if they had hits via their websites)

    Maybe this explains it better. Arcadia, California, United States
    Automatic Data Processing – Employer Services (170.146.227.4) [Label IP Address]
    cyberstalkers.blogspot.com/2007/06/nature-of-rose.html
    cyberstalkers.blogspot.com/2006/10/8-trolls-are-making-their-mark-on.html
    smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2007/09/16/a-psycho-by-any-other-name-the-rose-desrochers-experience/

    Number of Entries:68
    Entry Page Time:Multiple visits spread over more than one day 2nd December 2010 14:22:20

    This is not a real concern of mine, I was just curious on this. You should be proud that you fall in the top of google on this. We have spoken before Michael, and I helped you with the links to point out your situation. It has been a long time, but am hurt that you do not remember me. LOL Katie

  20. I love these spam protection math problems. Evidently, spam users are really not up to date on math. Anyway, it has been an intresting travel on this, and I was just curious on this. Not sure how other computers work with key words, but with my search on key of Rose Desrochers bring this up http://www.google.com/search?q=Rose+desrochers&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&rlz=1I7PCTC_en

    I think enough is said on this. You have my email addres if you want to contact me. Lets just leave it at that. Hope things are going well for you. Katie

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