Sliding Scale of War Viciousness
0: The forum is as civil as it can get, and they keep it that way year-round.
1: One person on the board gets angry over an issue of some sort, but no swears are spoken and the offending post is quickly deleted/ignored.
2: A handful of people begin throwing mild swears at each other over an ambiguous plot point, but everyone else is wise enough to keep their distance.
3: Roughly 8-10 posters start badmouthing each other, prompting moderators to lock the thread before it swells out of control.
4: 5 whole pages worth of expletives and death threats become so disparaging that not only do site mods lock the thread, but ban any discussion on the subject in general ever again.
5: The sheer anger becomes so widespread that even the website staff can't help but join the fun and turn into browser-lurking, chaos-flavored warheads. As a result, the lava of frustration begins pouring into every other open forum on the whole site.
6: Knowledge of the domain-encroaching blitz grows to the extent that it infects discussions on other sites, as if to convince people that such impulses are compulsory to the net experience.
7: Flame warriors become so corrupted by the frenzy that they begin sending emails to unaware individuals, either to satiate their rage or drag the recipients into fighting on their side.
8: At this point, the Hot Tamale bickering has siphoned into typically well-mannered databases (schools, libraries, military, government), implying that the very existence of the flame war transforms internet-users into biased, uninhibited brutes.
9: Every single internet user at this point has either contributed in some way to the war or has witnessed a form of its brutality in action. Only those unable to afford high-end tech are safe from its reach.
10: Humanity has long died off, but the flame war's effects still last; they are the direct cause of computer technology gaining sentience and the ability to slaughter their users. The repercussion of such a heritage is that the computers only know hatred, thus leading to a gradually worsening planet-wide environment via their destructiveness.
- Viracochaxevious
