What was your first exposure to an internet flame war?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What was your first exposure to flame wars, and what impact did it have on you?

Mine was on usenet, in the comp.lang.c newsgroup, which was dedicated to discussing one of the foremost computer programming languages at the time. I had just discovered the internet that week, and lost many hours reading other peoples’ opinions on stuff that didn’t matter much to me.

Before long, on comp.lang.c, someone by the name of Lennart Benshcop (who may or may not be the one who turns up in Google) posted a question asking for help on his C programming homework. He couldn’t get it to compile, and he suspected that he wasn’t properly using the source code his teacher provided.

This part is technical, but here goes: his teacher required that everyone use his header file, which (through the use of #define statements) changed enough of the C language to make it look like COBOL, a rather obsolete and obtuse programming language.

It’s an understatement to say that most computer programmers who are familiar with COBOL have a rather low opinion of it. COBOL was designed by a room full of U.S. Navy bureaucrats with the intention of making it human-readable. Readable, it was to a fault - instead of saying “x = 1 + 2”, one would be required to write it as “ADD 1 TO 2 GIVING X”. Forget accomplishing anything involving algebra in fewer than a dozen lines.

I was impressed with the responses to Lennart’s request. Within an hour, more than a hundred people weighed in, lambasting Lennart and his teacher, and then tearing into each other. If I remember correctly, much of the later messages was a furious discussion on whether Lennart was trolling, and whether name-calling was an appropriate response, and so on. It took me the better part of my lab time to finish reading the thread, but it was like watching a train wreck.

Afterward, just thinking about it gave me the giggles followed by the willies.

So that’s my first exposure to a flame war. What’s yours?

2

The newly released 3dfx cards, could be hooked to perform in pairs, and they had a $50 rebate per card. The rebates stated people had to wait up to six months for the rebate. Almost a year had gone by and nobody on Tom’s Hardware Forum could claim to have recieved them back. There was one main thread and two minor threads started. People were pissed and looking for money. An employee found the thread and identified herself as an employee. She said that she showed the thread to the top managers of the company. She made a very fatal mistake. She told people to be patient, it’s not the companies fault. Now the people went for blood. In the end thousands of people had stated they would not be buying from them again. the woman quit her job. The company saved it’s market by immediately expediating a solution and lowering the rebate reinbursement standards to , if you say you bought a card we’ll send you a rebate. That was how desperately they needed to correct the problem. I got my $100 back exactly one year aft6er purchase, and two weeks into the thread being started. I have never seen a larger flame war than that, and likely won’t.

3

Oh my god.

I think it was on alt.conspiracy in 1993 or '94. The topic was something like “Is your food spying on you?” The original poster, whose name I forget, presented the case that the government was putting teeny tiny cameras in the food supply to keep tabs on citizens.

It was hilarious. People were popping up left and right to explain why his theory was technically impossible, and to flame him for being an idiot. I guess they were worried he’d give the crackpot conspiracy theory community a bad name.

However, the part that frightened me was that people were posting in OP’s defense. With computers getting smaller all the time, how do you know there aren’t cameras in your food? Besides, doesn’t it sound just like something the government would do?

Later on, after the flame war had raged for a while, OP made a sly reference to the fact that he’d been messing with everyone, thus revealing the prank. Nobody was more disappointed than a guy from alt.fan.dave.barry who had been following the thread, apparently having found something humorous about it.

Interestingly enough, if I remember correctly, very few people saw through the joke and accused OP of trolling. I guess it was a more innocent time. Anyway, that was my first clue that the internet might not be such a good idea.

4

Mine was on GEnie; I spent a lot of time on the Science Fiction Round Table and there were plenty of flamewars in the private SFWA categories. As a matter of fact, they were much better any more entertaining than anything else: when you had writers like Jerry Pournelle, Daffyd ab Hugh, and Greg Feeley fighting each other and flaming you about things like SFWA requalification, anything else is pretty tame. These were all people who made their living with words, and when they flamed, they knew how to flame.

On the Internet, I stumbled upon alt.conspiracy.jfk, which is a perpetual flamewar, that can be boiled down to “Oswald did it.” “No, he didn’t.” “Yes, he did.” “No, he didn’t.” “Yes, he did.” “No, he didn’t.” “Yes, he did.” “No, he didn’t.” “Yes, he did.” “No, he didn’t.” “Yes, he did.” “No, he didn’t.” “Yes, he did.” . . . .

5

Reading Carl Lydick on various usenet groups in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Every flamer since has been an amateur.

6

rec.music.beatles used to be an interesting place until around 2000, when some trolling schmuck (I’ve succeeded in forgetting his name) came into the group and caused shit to such an extent that the group ceased to be about The Beatles. It could have been renamed rec.beatles.flamewar. I don’t know if it ever recovered. I quit going there and haven’t been back.

7

Mine came much later than the examples given. It was on a parenting board, and the issue of letting your baby cry it out was raised. It got ugly and mean. Since then, I have realized that pregnant women and mothers can be very cruel to one another—breast vs. bottle, circumcision or not, AP vs. “you slackers whose babies are going to grow up to be axe murderers (and not very skilled ones at that)”.

8

I was once a devoted reader of comp.os.os2.advocacy, back when I was one of about seven people in the world who had shelled out the bucks for OS/2 Warp 4 and used it almost exclusively. (I still believe OS/2 is the best non-nix OS that’s ever been made or ever will be made, by a long stretch.) There was a huge fad on cooa based on arguing vigorously about all manner of things in the style of Dave Tholen, who riddled his arguments with specific one-or-two-word responses like “poppycock”, “balderdash”, “non sequitur”, “irrelevant”, “illogical” and “incorrect”. This post in this thread by Dr. Tholen himself is a classic example. Tholen came in every once in a while and really breathed fire; the man seemed genuinely pissed off by the fact that an entire USENET community clogged phone lines with endless threads of Tholenized arguments. But he secretly loved to jump in and throw “balderdash” and “poppycock” around as much as anyone in his fan club. He was a pro, man. Somebody else also made a Tholen emulator, programmed to, well, emulate Tholen. Every Tholenized thread was also crossposted to comp.sys.mac.advocacy.

Man, I used to love that stuff. I just found the Tholenized threads about me, too. (I’d point them out to you guys, but they contain my full name, and I’m not really comfortable with linking to that.)

9

Another Usenet (as opposed to actual Internet) oldtimer.

Way back when…

The groups had no hierarchy, no “dots”. I lurked a bit in groups called “music” and “movies.” Totally juvenile stuff even then. The term “flaming” itself was brand new. I was amazed and aghast. “These people get indignant about everything!”

Very different from the Arpanet mailing lists where people knew each other personally. Anonymity breeds bad manners.

10

I dunno, Subway Prophet, were you looking for examples of flame wars or trying to start one? Your comments regarding COBOL are just dumb. :smiley: Anyone is entitled to like or dislike any language they choose, but one should like or dislike it for legitmate reasons, not because one fails to understand the syntax and fails to understand the reasons underlying the syntax. (Hint: while your example of COBOL is one legitimate expression, there are other expressions, legitimate in COBOL, that accomplish the same thing in manners that look amazingly like a normal algebraic expression. It only takes multiple lines to set up an expression if one chooses to use multiple lines–and there are valid reasons to do that, although they do not make COBOL superior, just different.)

11

About 10 years ago I got into a debate as to whether or not the battle of King’s Mountain took place in North Carolina or South Carolina. We both kept the words civil but between the lines it was bitter.

As true with most flame wars neither of us conceded even though I had presented him with the phone number of the national park which I had called and received as far as I was concerned the definitive answer.

12

In a Yahoo romance advice group back in??? 97 or 98? I don’t remember. This one guy…SpankingTherapy was his screenname. He also belonged to another group about spanking. (no, not a parenting group :D).

He had a thing about fat girls. And I don’t mean he liked them. He was over the top batshit insane that they had the GALL to be fat in his world. And I don’t mean just his little corner of the world, I mean the earth itself. There were a few chubby girls in our group, well adjusted happily married or dating chubby girls.

This guy would come on and just almost instantly go into troll mode. He was a one trick pony from hell. It wasn’t a matter of “I prefer slim girls and I’ll leave it at that”. His reason for existing was eradicating fat girls from existance, or failing that, shaming them into never ever appearing in public again.

It was not funny for the heavy girls, he was truly nasty, and while crazier than a bedbug, he could be absolutely genious at excrutiatingly hateful barbs.

His favorite line (which those of us who liked toying with the trolls used to make fun of him) was “the VAAAAaAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast majority of men prefer slim women”.

There were two of us in the group who enjoyed taking him apart line by line, sort of that group’s version of CITE? Unfortunately, he scared off or hurt too many newbies, and the owners eventually banned him.

Damn but it was fun watching him go from cutting and sly to foaming at the mouth furious with just a few pointed posts. We always referred to it as “toying with the mouse” (the way cats do).

We’d so gotten under his skin that for a few years he kept trying to join the splinter group that me and my fellow mouse-killer are now moderators of. He’d write some nasty “intro” about how “are you still defenders of the fatties”. We’d just ignore him and refuse entry to the group.

Man but that guy was entertaining. Especially the “zero to insane in 60 seconds part” when we toyed with the mouse errr troll.

:smiley:

13

AP?

14

Au pair, I think.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a board-wide flame war but I had a one-on-one with some American kid when I was 11 or 12. He was a Christian fundie teenager who made a website about how Pokemon was invented by Satan, which I was introduced to by a Pokemon forum I belonged to back then (stop giggling!) Anyway, I emailed him and called him a poopyhead and he emailed back and quoted scripture at me and we went back and forth for a while with insults escalating until his dad wrote to say he’d discovered our correspondence while checking his son’s email and blocked me. I felt really guilty at the time but now I think it’s pretty funny :smiley: Not that I’d do it again.

15

I was thinking it might mean “attachment parenting.”

-FrL-

16

Yes, it does. And I realized that putting it that way could cause a flame war itself. Let’s just say that there are some boards where people are very rigid about what constitutes attachment parenting and very vocal about their judgment of anything they feel falls short.

17

Well, it wasn’t so much a war, but my first exposure to flames/trolling was in a chatroom. I was about ten or eleven when a friend invited me to this anime chat on AIM.

O.K. cool, I thought, I like anime. 'Cept in the chat, if you did actually mention an anime or manga you liked, you’d immediately get told how inferior it was and insulted by this one guy who was ALWAYS there.

I think his username was EliteZed, or something similar. No one ever talked to him and we all hoped he’d go away, though he never did. I seem to remember him boasting about how he had some really posh job at a computer company too, which we found odd as he never left the chat.

Wow, I used to spend hours in that place.

sniff I’m getting all nostalgic now-- I was so innocent way back then.

18

You cur. If you had yadda yadda [/flame] :wink:

Yeah, I saw the infix notation in the Wikipedia article, but I swear that wasn’t part of COBOL back in, what, about 1994 or so. It certainly wasn’t part of the language in 1989 when I was first exposed to it by a mainframe buddy of mine.

I could be mistaken, but in the immortal words of Mayor Quimby:

19

I’m a little surprised that no one has mentioned an SDMB thread yet. :wink:

Would you recognize his name if you saw it again? If so, does Ed short-last-name-that-starts-with-an “I” look familiar?

20

Actually, I’ve remembered it since last night. It was Marek. He was on a one-moron campaign to wreck that group, and over a period of a year or so, he managed to do it. I can’t imagine what drives a person like that. He was truly obsessed with being as much of an asshole as was humanly possible, only because nobody could reach over and smack him.