Having been around my share of forums and being currently active on more than a few I see some pretty funny stuff. The fact that I have more than one unpopular opinion that I'm not shy about sharing may help, because people knocking an unpopular opinion sometimes just flip out. I'm no troll by the way...I don't hate Steam just to get a rise out of people who like it and my four month crusade in support of a political candidate last year wasn't founded on thinking the opposition was supported by twits. But sometimes the 'attackers' are so hilariously funny that I can almost understand the attractions of trolling.

So I'm swapping opinions with this guy, who of course presents his opinions as fact based and says mine are absurd. The topic is pretty meaningless overall, so when he gets rude I find it funny and say so. Thread reaches a post limit and automatically gets locked...right after I posted some snappy but not terribly memorable comeback...and I wander off.

Apparently me getting 'the last word' by default is too much for the guy, because my next visit to that forum I find a 'friendly' PM to point out some error in what I had said and just to 'let me know privately that he won't hesitate to publicly correct such an error' in future. After I get done laughing about this I reply that I'm not concerned about being corrected (it does need to be done pretty often as I'm sure anyone here can attest).

Next thing the guy sends me a link to a screen cap image of the PM, glaringly titled 'timsup2nothing not concerned about being correct' with a threat to 'make [me] a laughingstock' and 'drive me off the forum'.

I pointed out that being correct and being corrected are entirely different things, and suggested he should photoshop the image.

Having been bouncing around forums since before he was born I figured it was only fair to coach him up a bit.

Got any funny flame out stories?

Honestly, it's nobody elses business and a thread like this imo can just create more flames. If you're confident in yourself, that's one thing and you should stick to your guns. However I always suggest that a person should go back and check their own facts, research, notes, whatever and rexamine what is being said and try to see the other point of view even if their own point of view seems to be correct by the references you back it up with. I would suggest it to the other guy as well.

We've all been in them, but the best thing to do is just let it be because the medals they don't give out at the Olympics for arguing over the internet.

The intent is to share funny stories, not create flames.