Wow this is both encouraging and scary. Encouraging to know even those great people were once rejected. Scary to think I 'm also likely to be one of these editors, thinking I know the field fairly well and dismissing true gems.

Are these real? How did the author of this post get them?

It's a very well written post -- it would just be remarkable if they're, you know, actual reviews. I didn't think peer-review had such explicit 'votes'.

You guessed right. On March 2006 Computer magazine the author's letter was posted stating it was a fake.

<quote> The reviews, I will state outright, are fiction, but with a twist: Most of the observations and attitudes they convey came from actual reviews (either of my own papers or of papers by my colleagues) that I found to be of unacceptably low quality. </quote>

When I've been asked to review papers, I've been explicitly asked for a vote of "publish", "reject", or "this might be worth publishing if improvements are made".