Is absolutewrite.com Safe?

This site is toxic. Avoid at all costs! If you use your real name, they will find you and send you hate mail and defame your novel. They ban people merely for disagreeing. The admin insults people right before locking threads so they can't respond. People are not given warnings to shape up before being banned - it is a straight ban hammer, no questions asked.

After being treated to a full dose of Absolute Write's mods and owners, I can't help but agree with those who see the forums as a type of scam. You are baited in with promises of wisdom and congeniality that ultimately don't hold water. It's sort of safe for kids but the tabloid-like adverts that run on nearly every page are very trashy. Overall, I would not anchor in this harbor, even in a storm.

I've been on the website, Absolute Write, for nearly two years. I hung out on the fiction forums and got what I imagined was good advice, but it turned out to be terrible advice that set me back months in my writing. The site promotes itself all over the web as being the best place online for new writers to get advice, and they claim publishing pros hang out there. I never met one. I only met anonymous people as desperate for publication as I am. We are all just fumbling around and guessing. The moderators are useless or absent, and then I found myself in a forum where the mods were ripping on a literary agent who actually has a solid background of sales. That was it for me.

The website is a good site, and the moderators keep it clean for kids that might stumble onto it. However, there used to be a lot of ads for questionable services for writers on the webpages (no pop-ups). This seems to have changed since I've been here last though.