The fact that there are no flames on this site is a reflection of the topics and the people - I don't think there's an individual I've met here in this little virtual world with whom I couldn't share some pleasant time, picking, talking, or just staring into space.
But I'd better drop a little edit into Wikipedia. "Flaming" started way before Usenet or any of these public groups. University computers and private networks in the 70s were jealously guarded by the resident geeks, who raised hot objections to apparent incompetence, waste of scarce CPU cycles and incredibly rare disk space. At one point in my life, in 1977, I was trying to write programs in a (now-dormant) language called APL ("A Programming Language" - I was using a paper terminal in an office in Victoria BC , tied to 2 Amdahl V6 mainframes in Toronto. I wrote a piece of code that didn't work, put the computer into an endless loop, and burnt 6 months computing budget in about 5 seconds before I hit <<Break>>. When I asked for help from those on the system more knowledgeable than me (that was just about everyone else), I got flamed, big-time. "Get your ignorant fingers off my system - what are you doing wasting our computers with your bullsh*t imitation code - who let you in here anyway - you'll never be able to write code in APL, go back to Basic where you obviously came from - get off my machine", etc. etc. More than trivial insults, these were heartfelt shouts, angry cries, screams of indignation from people whose domain had been invaded by an ignoramus. Flames indeed. Burnt my poor little self-esteem to a crisp. Deserved it too.
But Don's place here is as different from most forums as the night the day. Comfortable, informative, welcoming. No wonder we're getting 5K hits a day. Thanks, Don.
Quite a little site you've started here Don. How in the world do you know if something is spam or solicitation of some type?