House of Burgess

Sunday was supposed to be my day off.
I was really excited though because the candidate surveys that I had been working on for the last few weeks were finally coming out and I couldn't wait to see my project come together.
But the universe, and our Web site, had other ideas.
As I checked our Web site I saw that all five stories I had put together had made it onto the site. So far, so good. Then, like an idiot, I checked the Topix forum.
And this is where my day took a turn.
It seems that underneath the headline "2nd District candidates answer UDJ questions" a paragraph about supporting Measure B had replaced my byline.
What?
The story hadn't been up an hour, but already someone who decided to hide behind their internet avatar criticized me for inserting my own opinions into my stories. I immediately responded that I had no idea what they were talking about that they should use their real name like I do if they want to start calling my integrity into question.
I then raced down to the office to try to fix the problem. I looked at the original story on our server and it looked fine, no weird paragraph I didn't write replacing my byline. I then figured out that it was the last part of Jim Mulheren's answer to the first question we posed. I copied the entire story into a new file and tried to upload that to the site. I checked the story on our home page and it was still wrong.
I responded once again that it was not my doing, I had no idea how to fix it and that they should check the print edition if they didn't believe me.
I should have stopped checking the forum at this point. Another anonymous hater got on the Web site and put my job title in quotation marks during their response. Then the first one got on again and retreated to the last refuge of any message board troller, condescend to your opponent on their grammar, spelling and punctuation.
I then called Zack, who was working on Sunday and had originally uploaded the pages, if he would try to see if he could fix it as I had not had any luck. He once again copied the text into a new document just like I had done and uploaded the story with the same result. I decided to keep my blood pressure below a boiling point I should just forget about and try to have a good night, which I did.
Today when I came into work after my "day off" and asked Brittany, our online editor, if I she could figure out what was wrong.
And you know what the problem was?
My "By ROB BURGESS" byline at the top was missing so the Web site, and I had no idea it could do this, grabbed the first sentence in the story it could find that began with the word "by." So instead of "By ROB BURGESS" it said "By passing Measure B..."
I know that most readers were smart and understanding enough to figure out I didn't write the out of place paragraph (it doesn't even sound like me or necessarily reflect my opinion), but the problem with all this is, of course, is that reasonable people who enjoy reading our articles almost never tell us about it. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone. How many articles have I read that I enjoyed that I just thought to myself "huh, that was interesting" and then went on about my day?
I will often relate to the world through movies and this whole debacle made me think of a scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". For some reason I feel the haters on the interweb would have been members of the crowd were we in medieval England:

The Witch: I'm not a witch I'm not a witch!
Sir Bedevere: But you are dressed as one
The Witch: *They* dressed me up like this!
Crowd: We didn't! We didn't...
The Witch: And this isn't my nose. It's a false one.
Sir Bedevere: [lifts up her false nose] Well?
Peasant 1: Well, we did do the nose.
Sir Bedevere: The nose?
Peasant 1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
Crowd: Yeah! Burn her! Burn her!