4.1  FLAME, BLATHER AND SPEW
 

Something about online communications seems to make some people 
particularly irritable.  Perhaps it's the immediacy and semi-anonymity of 
it all.  Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon 
think seem to exist to make you miserable. 

Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a 
letter received on paper, it's just so easy to hit your R or F key and 
tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them.  Even 
otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into raving 
lunatics.  When this happens, flames erupt.  

A flame is a particularly nasty, personal attack on somebody for 
something he or she has written.  Periodically, an exchange of flames 
erupts into a flame war that begin to take up all the space in a given 
newsgroup (and sometimes several; flamers like cross-posting to let the 
world know how they feel).  These can go on for weeks (sometimes they go 
on for years, in which case they become "holy wars," usually on such 
topics as the relative merits of Macintoshes and IBMs).  Often, just when 
they're dying down, somebody new to the flame war reads all the messages, 
gets upset and issues an urgent plea that the flame war be taken to e-
mail so everybody else can get back to whatever the newsgroup's business 
is.  All this usually does, though, is start a brand new flame war, in 
which this poor person comes under attack for daring to question the 
First Amendment, prompting others to jump on the attackers for impugning 
this poor soul...  You get the idea. 

Every so often, a discussion gets so out of hand that somebody predicts 
that either the government will catch on and shut the whole thing down or 
somebody will sue to close down the network, or maybe even the wrath of 
God will smote everybody involved.  This brings what has become an 
inevitable rejoinder from others who realize that the network is, in 
fact, a resilient creature that will not die easily: "Imminent death of 
Usenet predicted. Film at 11.'' 

Flame wars can be tremendously fun to watch at first.  They quickly grow 
boring, though.  And wait until the first time you're attacked! 

Flamers are not the only net.characters to watch out for.  

Spewers assume that whatever they are particularly concerned about either 
really is of universal interest or should be rammed down the throats of 
people who don't seem to care -- as frequently as possible. You can 
usually tell a spewer's work by the number of articles he posts in a day 
on the same subject and the number of newsgroups to which he then sends 
these articles -- both can reach well into double digits. Often, these 
messages relate to various ethnic conflicts around the world. Frequently, 
there is no conceivable connection between the issue at hand and most of 
the newsgroups to which he posts.  No matter.  If you try to point this 
out in a response to one of these messages, you will be inundated with 
angry messages that either accuse you of being an insensitive 
racist/American/whatever or ignore your point entirely to bring up 
several hundred more lines of commentary on the perfidy of whoever it is 
the spewer thinks is out to destroy his people. 

Closely related to these folks are the Holocaust revisionists, who 
periodically inundate certain groups (such as soc.history) with long 
rants about how the Holocaust never really happened.  Some people attempt 
to refute these people with facts, but others realize this only 
encourages them. 

Blatherers tend to be more benign.  Their problem is that they just can't 
get to the point -- they can wring three or four screenfuls out of a 
thought that others might sum up in a sentence or two.  A related 
condition is excessive quoting.  People afflicted with this will include 
an entire message in their reply rather than excising the portions not 
relevant to whatever point they're trying to make.  The worst quote a 
long message and then add a single line: 
 
     "I agree!"
 
or some such, often followed by a monster .signature (see section 4.7)
      
There are a number of other Usenet denizens you'll soon come to 
recognize.  Among them: 
     
     Net.weenies.  These are the kind of people who enjoy LOWER 
CASEDinsulting others, the kind of people who post nasty messages in a 
sewing newsgroup just for the hell of it. 
     Net.geeks.  People to whom the Net is Life, who worry about what 
happens when they graduate and they lose their free, 24-hour access. 
     Net.gods.  The old-timers; the true titans of the Net and the 
keepers of its collective history. They were around when the Net 
consisted of a couple of computers tied together with baling wire.
     Lurkers.  Actually, you can't tell these people are there, but 
they are.  They're the folks who read a newsgroup but never post or 
respond. 
     Wizards.  People who know a particular Net-related topic inside 
and out.  Unix wizards can perform amazing tricks with that operating 
system, for example. 
     Net.saints.  Always willing to help a newcomer, eager to share 
their knowledge with those not born with an innate ability to navigate 
the Net, they are not as rare as you might think.  Post a question 
about something and you'll often be surprised how many responses you 
get.
     
The last group brings us back to the Net's oral tradition.  With few 
written guides, people had traditionally learned their way around the Net 
by asking somebody, whether at the terminal next to them or on the Net 
itself.  That tradition continues: if you have a question, ask. 

Today, one of the places you can look for help is in the 
news.newusers.questions newsgroup, which, as its name suggests, is a 
place to learn more about Usenet.  But be careful what you post.  Some of 
the Usenet wizards there get cranky sometimes when they have to answer 
the same question over and over again. Oh, they'll eventually answer your 
question, but not before they tell you should have asked your host system 
administrator first or looked at the postings in news.announce.newusers.