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Canadian military brass slams ‘Rate My Sarge’ web site for nasty comments

An American-based rating site aimed at military personnel is drawing fire from the Canadian military. (Screengrab/Facebook)

The Internet is full of sites that let you rate everything from restaurant services to your university professors and even hospitals, and some have their merits.

But an American-based rating site aimed at military personnel is drawing fire from Canadian military brass.

An email sent to Canadian Armed Forces officers last month warns that soldiers could face punishment if they post anything on Rank My Sarge, the Ottawa Citizen reports.

“The site currently contains comments which vilify and demean a number of Canadian Armed Forces members, including currently serving members of the Canadian Army,” Brig.-Gen. Karl McQuillan, chief of staff of land operations at the army’s Ottawa headquarters, said in the Oct. 28 email forwarded to the Citizen.

“The posting of such inappropriate comment by our members contravenes various regulations and requirements."

Regulations bar "improper comments" in public that might discredit the Canadian Forces or its members, the Citizen said. Soldiers are also required to run any images or information destined for the web past their commanders.

McQuillan said officers should remind everyone under their command about the rules “and that violation of them can have serious consequences, including disciplinary procedures and administrative actions.”

[ Related: CBC Rate My Hospital site flooded with rankings ]

The offending web site, which the Citizen said is hosted anonymously on an American server, actually is no longer accessible. A link to the site on its month-old Facebook page is broken.

"Rank My Sarge was constructed in 2013 to fulfill a sorely neglected need of today's Armed Forces, the need to bitch," the Facebook page says. "Before RMS there was no online forum to vent about all the idiots and smart asses you work with.

"There was also nowhere to anonymously praise your co-workers for having very mature, and very doable daughters. We offer anonymous rankings of the soldiers you work with, the soldiers in the news, and even some celebrities who have served.

"While we encourage you to say whatever you want about whoever you want, we discourage uploading any sensitive content [the kind of stuff the damn Russians are after]."

The web site Milblogging.com found cached pages that hint at why the military leadership is warning its soldiers against it. A lot of the comments are vulgar insults, such as calling one NCO a "ball toucher." A master Corporal is described this way: "Maybe if he cracked open a book between cracking open beers he would be Chief by now."

[ Related: Big Apple Pizza’s Yelp review page turns into political battlefield after Obama visit

There's something to be said for sites like Rate My Professors, and CBC News' Rate My Hospital. They thrive on our growing impulse to document our lives and experiences online via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and review sites like Yelp.

Like consumer-product reviews, they can be helpful if you're researching what school to attend or what to expect if you're hospitalized or searching for a new Italian restaurant.

But like almost everything on the web they're vulnerable to abuse, from posts by people with personal grudges to the inevitable anonymous slags from the keyboards of an ever-present army of mouth-breathing Internet trolls.

With Rate My Sarge, the comments sound like the kind of grousing soldiers have done since before Julius Caesar's legionnaires complained about the weather in Britannia.

Ottawa lawyer Michel Drapeau, a retired army colonel, told the Citizen threats of punishment for posting on the site are empty unless the commenters can be identified.

“They could charge them if they could find them, but it would be unusually difficult as is most anything on the Internet,” said Drapeau.

“Technically if they were in Canada they could get a court order to get the service provider to provide computer addresses. But it’s not likely to take place if this is in the U.S.”