Well, if this is your idea of having fun, count me out. Perhaps Ive just picked a bad time to read these posts,
Mike - I've transplanted my response to your comment in the F for A thread so as to avoid interrupting that thread.
Cyber communities are notoriously prone to personality clashes from time to time. There're actually very good reasons for this, both psychologically and sociologically. When we deal with other people in the real world, we take with us an armoury of signalling mechanisms and deciphering skills that allow us to determine what other people are really saying and why they're saying it. In any cyber community, however, we're deprived of most of the mechanisms and cues that allow us either to express ourselves unambiguously, or to comprehend people's motives when they write. We're left with trying to make sense of what people are saying purely from the page - and that presents all sorts of problems.
It also strikes at the very root of our need for recognition and approval. Most of all, we all want what we say to be appreciated and valued and most of us want to be held in at least normal esteem. However, when you're dealing with only a written medium, it's very easy to get the wrong of the stick, and to do so rather easily and it's equally easy for someone to misunderstand what you've written. Some people, for instance, come over incredibly badly in writing or emailing, but are actually rather decent folk when you meet them. I think we all have to make allowances - and it's not easy, I grant. But if anything surprises me, it's that we don't have more of such confrontational issues.