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I can't believe her mother allows her to communicate with ANYONE on the web...let alone get on a website & just start chatting/posting!!!

Hmm, what about your mother, Maegan?

I've always suspected that a high percentage of the letters in Dear Abby are fakes. Probably not faked by Dear Abby herself, but by the folks who send them in.

I read that. Did seem a bit fake to me.

Ha! Of course they are! Trying to fool Abby into printing a hoax or urban legend is practically a sport among geeky people! You guys haven't heard of this?

Check this out:

http://www.snopes.com/humor/mediagoofs/dearabby.asp

They've been doing it for years. It looks like this latest is a case of someone fooling Abby, Inc. but good. The letter is calculated for maximum effect, to set off an adult's (especially an uptight one's) child-protecting warning bells to their highest volume.

Funny. (Well, as long as you take it for a joke and don't dwell on the real cases of children being pimped out over the Web...)

After much thought, and trying to turn the parental alarm bells off, I've decided to agree that this letter is probably a hoax. There are precocious children, of course, but I think the letter is written entirely too well for a 10-yr old, no matter how intelligent. The hormones don't *really* kick in till about 12 or so. If this was an honest letter, I feel Dear Abby Inc.'s response was very appropriate, but I believe they've been "had" this time.

Stork, hormones or otherwise, I know several people who did plenty of lying on the internet--as young as 10. In my early internet days (say, 5 years ago?) I met one of them. She did lots of lying. I believed her, not necessarily because she was a good liar, but because I was kind of an idiot back then. I assume you could say the same for a lot of 14 and 15 year old boys hanging out on the 'net. After I stopped believing her, the truth came out and we are still friends. She actually works for me now. Also, a 10 year old who is smart enough to find a believable picture of a 'pretty blonde' and cover the tracks of her lies is certainly smart enough to write a letter with no major grammatical mistakes. Just because most bona-fide adults can't do it doesn't mean a kid can't.

I don't see any reason why this would be a hoax from the letter itself. I would think if I were going to hoax Dear Abby, I would come up with a more exciting dilemma than something rather commonplace in internet chat rooms.

as long as they dont say tubgirl is them, its all good

I read Dear Abby every day, and this is probably one of the more boring letters she prints. Some other ones are more dramatic, more likely to be made up than this one. Hell, if the internet were around when I was ten, I'd probably be doing the same thing. I was reading at tenth grade level when I was ten, so it's not unlikely this girl is too. Writing a letter, especially one this short, is nothing for a fifth grader if you're one of the "gifted" students.

Anyway, I've only seen Abby catch one urban legend in the past six months or so. Especially now that the original Dear Abby has passed the honors on to her daughter, more urban legends and spoofs seem to be getting printed

Also, Dear Abby edits the letters she receives. I know this for a fact, as one of my letters was printed in a response column (I was responding to a previously written letter), and not only was my letter "trimmed" for length and a comma removed (therefore making it NOT grammatically correct), she even misspelled my name! (It was printed with no H.) So even if there were mistakes, grammatical or otherwise, it would have been edited before printing.

Okay, James D - You win! Your posted comment is convincing, and I had a hunch when I was writing my post, that there would be 'someone' out there who could educate me further, -Thanks! Sarah, sorry, but although Dear Abby, Inc. does edit the printed letters from recipients for unprintable language, confusing grammer, syntax, etc., I believe the editing problems you are most familiar with are coming from the production staff of your own daily newspaper. At the end of your last post, you are giving too much credit to the competance of your local 2AM printing crew. You should see how a couple of my 'Letters to the Editor' to our local newspaper turned out a couple years, ago, when printed. Bottom line - I don't write to them anymore.

Stork--I don't have a subscription to the newspaper. I read Dear Abby every day at dearabby.com.

Why would 14-15 year old boys spend their time on sites for pet lovers?

I know what I was doing on the net 10 years ago when I was 14, and looking at sites for pet lovers it definately wasn't.

"Hmm, what about your mother, Maegan?"
-My mother gave me free reign. I would go into dirty chatrooms & ask if anyone wanted pics & when I got a reply (okay, like a hundred replies) I would send a virus. My dad (met him once, he lives in another part of the country) was a computer wiz & gave me the virus to send. He had fixed it up so that it looked normal & when they opened "Maggie's Home Video" .exe, they got a worm. I got in a lot of trouble when I got caught. My mom watched as I deleted every line of code from my website, destroyed the disks holding the virus progs...deleted names from my BuddyList. Too bad she didn't know I had it all backed up! I got in trouble the 2nd time too. The second time she got rid of the internet access. But by then I was working at a library. (Internet access on the library computer.) Now I'm older, wiser, & have forgotten all of the HTML I ever knew except for this.

Bet that taught them their lesson.

David: because there are girls there.

I must admit, when I saw 'website for pet lovers' I did a major double-take. I guess the nature of the Internet led me to misunderstant what was meant...

somebody is so full of poo-poo, I'm not going to mention any names, but it sounds a lot like pagan. :D

forgetting the e: priceless.

Craig? Did you have anything to back that up? Or is my being full of poo a spontaneous sort of thing??