Flame wars can start any number of ways. There are as many opinions as there are a**holes, of course, and when two such opinions/a**holes come into conflict, there'll be a series of articles attempting to "resolve" the issue. Common causes of flame wars include

• A posting that falls outside a group charter, or outside what regular participants consider "acceptable behavior."
• A "troll," in which a poster gives an opinion almost certainly unpopular in the group, perhaps even hoping to be flamed as a result.
• A "spam," in which someone tries to sell something.
• A simple "flame," in which someone's opinion, spelling, signature, etc. are lambasted by someone else.

Usenet gurus typically cite renowned historical spammers (e.g. suspected robot Serdar Argic or sometime sci.engr participants Valery Fabrikant or Archimedes Plutonium) or common causes (e.g. "The Great Floating Homosexual Flame War") as examples. But here I'll look at a recent flame war in which participants *name themselves* as engineers. It starts with this posting (a spam) by Brian Teasley:

This computer aided "hands on" workshop is intended for engineers, technicians, managers, researchers, etc., who are interested in learning how to USE and APPLY Design of Experiments techniques and tools. The approach can be used for quality improvement efforts, general research, consumer research and other design and engineering endeavors. You will BECOME AN EXPERT in DOE if you attend this workshop.

Dates:
San Francisco: February 10-12...
New York City: February 24-26...
Miami: March 10-12, 2003

...and so on. Many newsgroups have policies against this sort of thing, mentioned in their charters. So the initial post might be thought of as a "spam," or a charter violation. On the other hand, sci.engr is NOT among those groups.

An article, "How to be a Good Citizen of the sci.engr Newsgroups," is found here: http://www.tcnj.edu/~rgraham/index-netizen.html ...and it states clearly that individuals may sell in the group under certain conditions, which most "good citizens" follow.

There is a brief discussion between Teasley and John Larkin, who says:

Actually, three days is plenty to become an expert in a subject that has very little content.

That may be. There's an article here ...you be the judge.

The troll starts here, with John Fields:

Brian, please...

Face it. Your original post was SPAM, pure and simple.

No one here asked anything about your course and yet, out of the blue, you appeared, extolling the virtues of your pecuniary scheme. While this newsgroup isn't moderated and doesn't seem to have a hard and fast rule about who advertises here, most of the kind of crap you're trying to peddle isn't looked on with favor by most of the folks here, AFAIK. Of course I can only speak for myself, but when I've never seen you post anything here but an ad, I kind of tend to think that you're bogus.

Not that your course content might not be valuable for some folks, but who cares? This isn't the right venue for what you have to offer. We like to talk about 555's and LED's and who's a fucking idiot and who isn't, (well me, anyway) and sometimes we even like to talk about what the outcome of a certain set of actions might be, and (guess what?) we can even figure it out ourselves without having to ask you about the way we should design our experiments. So, Brian, why don't you just go away? Not that you're not welcome, but if you don't have something to contribute why waste our time as well as yours?

Fields may think of himself as knowing what venue is right and what isn't for the ad above, but that's not the way he *posted*. He *posted* to groups in which he has made no appreciable contribution and set himself up as an expert, while having no knowledge of at least sci.engr's charter. His antagonistic approach ensures that the flame war will last another round, at least. Look at what he does:

• Sets himself up as the speaker for an entire group ("No one here...") though he says he can only speak for himself.
• Couches inflammatory language ("...you're bogus") in what might otherwise have the tone of a discussion among professionals. (This is what it should be, and all too often isn't.)
• Suggests that helpful information is all that the group is for ("...if you don't have something to contribute..."), but offers no helpful information.

In summary, flamers will not recognize themselves in describing the behavior they claim to abhor.

Larkin and Jim Thompson took the high road, requesting that Teasley show what he knows. A free sample. This is a correct approach and is cited in the "Good Citizen" article above -- a list of recommendations made by dozens of engineers over years of posting and reading.

Fred Bloggs, using a fake e-mail address, threw out a long and impressive list of references, probably to refute Teasley's contention that there's not much about experiment design on the Web. There are still textbooks. :-)

Fields then violated another point of netiquette, by repeating the entire Bloggs list of textbooks (some newsreaders -- and e-mail programs -- copy the entire original message you follow-up to, and you have to delete sections you don't want to make them go away) just to add the following: "Very, very, nice. My hat's off to you, sir!-)"

And Fields added this challenge in a separate article:

You SPAM the group and now, in order to try to save face, you have to take the time to write a big post defending your position pretending like it was OK because you had other than pecuniary interests in mind, which you didn't. You're interested in making money and you thought that posting here would increase the likelihood of that happening. On the cheap, BTW, since it doesn't cost you one thin dime to advertise here.

Since you don't quite seem to have a grasp on how most newsgroups work, let me clue you in: Usually, someone who has a question/problem posts it to the group and then the members of the group thrash around and try to come up with an answer/solution for the OP. (Original Poster) Once in a while someone with an interesting free tidbit will post it for the others to enjoy but it's usually "Please help me." followed by "Here's how to do it..."

Once again, Fields sets himself up as a "newsgroup expert." A "newsgroup expert" would recognize that if a new poster makes an honest mistake, you handle it first privately. The most important aspect of this is that everyone starts out new -- and may therefore make a mistake easily -- and nearly everyone can achieve expertise easily, just by following well-documented and agreed-upon conventions.

Larkin agrees that Teasley spammed the group, creating an ersatz ASCII "ballot." When there is a ballot or straw poll, it's handled over e-mail, as is the case when new Usenet groups are created. A public ballot is biased from the outset and isn't worth the wasted postings.

Teasley tries to bring the group back to the high road with a discussion of when/when not to use DOE. Larkin plays nice. Fields won't let it go, once again showing who really is the spammer in this case:

So now you're being ingratiating: Establish common ground by divorcing yourself temporarily from your ultimate goal and lose the battle in order to win the war.

Will Dwinnell threw in his two cents:

As a long-time (and long-suffering) contributor to several other Usenet fora, I will agree that the original post was spam. Not the worst offense ever (hey, at least the guy stuck around to discuss the matter), but it was an advertisement.

BUT... an advertisement isn't automatically SPAM. The group has to decide that. In this case, the recorded opinions of hundreds of engineers was that it wasn't. The landscape of the Internet continually changes, though, and you have to ask again periodically, especially if someone is likely to explode like Fields.

And Dwinnell caught his own misspelling, (hopefully) dissuading the fifth-grade English teachers lurking in every newsgroup. :-) He correctly recognizes that no flame war is complete without *someone* being bashed for a spelling error.

Fields publicly posted an e-mail -- yet another violation of netiquette, not only in sci.engr but in all of Usenet. This would seem to deny his status as newsgroup expert. The e-mail was from ME. I wanted to handle his flaming and other excesses off-line.

Thompson violated netiquette by repeating the posted e-mail, somewhere around 100 lines of type, just to add that he was calling me "Dr. Dork." At least he included the honorific. It's hard-earned.

Spehro Pefhany threw in this:

Yeah, things are a little quieter in the newsgroups that Ron G. usually hangs out in (and which the thread was X-posted to).

Whether things are "quieter" or not is questionable. I have recorded a charter and some simple records of courtesy for sci.engr. I compiled and maintain the group FAQs. I run a mailing list. I can't control longtime trollers like Archimedes Plutonium or John Turmel. That takes a higher power.

John Woodgate threw in this:

The words 'First Amendment' spring to mind. Maybe the Good Doctor is a citizen of a state with different views on free speech.

That's funny. I complain about spam and I'm considered a threat to free speech. Fields does it and he's left alone. And that was Woodgate's first foray into the thread -- another violation of netiquette, because there's no charter-appropriate content.

Woodgate's article is followed up by a few trivial in-jokes. One of the things you have to recognize about flame wars is that the participants inevitably see themselves as witty. It's like an ASCII version of "Karaoke night." People get their chance for 15 minutes of fame -- something that one would hope would come from being helpful, courteous, and informative -- or at least from asking good questions.

But that's what you get from some 39 postings in this thread. A couple hundred decent lines and thousands of junk, mostly from people who think they know better, and think they are the arbiters of what's right and wrong in the newsgroups. People like that are why good article-writers spend less effort in the newsgroups and more in private mailing lists and message boards; why sci.engr becomes a playground for people like Plutonium and Turmel.

References

Templeton, B. "Ask Emily Postnews." http://www.templetons.com/brad/emily.html