On Sat, 26 Jun 2010 11:01:22 -0700, Dudley Henriques wrote:

Lord, you'll NEVER know how I absolutely HATE to chime in on this thread
again. 235 postings back and forth, everybody shouting at everybody else
with the same old tired song. Man, I mean you guys might actually be
going for a Usenet record here :-))))))))))))))))

If so, we have a loooong way to go.

Here's one of the middling-length *ahem* "discussions" I've seen on
Usenet:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....browse_thread/
thread/ce27f65ea7256d97

"Messages 1 - 25 of 5277" should be your first hint of how far we still
have to go here. :-)

If you browse that thread, you'll see it all: flames of all kinds, from
horrible sex-related accusations to the usual assortment of epithets
("idiot", "retard", "nutcase", etc.) and swear words; star ratings on
Google Groups that show clear signs of heavy voting by multiple
participants on each side (e.g. 3-star ratings with 9 or 10 voters --
nobody actually votes three stars and hardly anyone votes anything but
one or five); the same points being reiterated hundreds of times.

It's a vi/emacs editor war of course, via topic drift about thirty posts
in. Abortion and gun control can't hold a candle to which editor is best
when measured by how much passionate debate they can generate in a single
usenet thread. The twist, if you'll pardon the pun, is that there's a
third side in this editor war advocating Windows GUI editors over both
traditional Unix editors, for some reason unfathomable to the computer
geek mind.

Me? I use vi. And I mostly stay out of editor war threads, though
sometimes I lurk in them. This one bored me by about the 300th post, but
eventually I got mildly interested again when I kept seeing it bumped to
the top of my newsreader even after much of a whole year had passed.

It actually has MORE than the listed 5277 posts: by mutual agreement the
participants stopped cluttering up cljp with this crap and moved the
discussion over to alt.offtopic. Google's archive for that group is
*dominated* by the results, another several thousand posts spread among a
couple of dozen threads mostly titled "Lies, damn lies and statistics".
Subsequently, it seems to have petered out gradually, terminating this
January.

Yes, that makes it a single editor war that lasted almost two and a half
full years and consists of around 8000 individual posts, some of them
quite long.

(For those that are curious, the last words were "I wouldn't know. I've
never tried it. Why the wild tangent? Picking up some more bad habits
from Bent?" posted by someone calling himself "Handkea fumosa", which
Google tells me is some kind of puffball fungus that grows in California.
It was a comeback in response to "How does it feel sticking your head
into the sand?" posted by a vi advocate that was there from the very
start in August 2007. But the insult exchange that ended the debate
apparently arose from discussion not of vi but of emacs.)

So to beat that, we'd have to debate the relative merits of Microsoft
Flight Simulator vs. *real* aeronautical training until Mayan doomsday
(literally) and destroy several whole newsgroups.

And I've seen *worse*, elsewhere on Usenet. More than once. The most
recent actually-worse one was in alt.conspiracy and involved 9/11
"truthers" vs. their debunkers. It exceeded 10,000 posts. Rumors exist of
flamewars exceeding 20,000 posts, however.