With anonymity ruling both the everyday as well as the darkest reaches of the web it's no surprise that its power is frequently abused. When you have no reputation to uphold and no real identity online you can essentially be the very worst person you always wished you could become in real life, save for the consequences.
It is because of this that what might have started as a simple back and forth on a message board or forum, escalated into an all out flame war, if you want to survive this potentially damning encounter you'll have to keep a cool head but not be afraid to get dirty at the same time. Below is the abbreviated version of the tongue-in-cheek article Wired.com posted recently.
Get caught up in semantics, but use misdirection and a twist or two of the truth to provide a good counter without opening yourself up to further attack.
Have at it with the insults, attacking someone on a personal level, usually regarding intelligence or spelling ability is a good place to start. It will win you a small personal victory with each witty retort as you slowly whittle down their patience and destroy their cool, futher exposing their weaknesses.
Use forth grade anti-bully advice for yourself though, if you ignore the flamer, that is if they insult you and it seems to bounce off then you've already made them madder or more likely to give up or even better, start making mistakes you can pounce on.
Thanks to anonymity you can make any terrible, crushing assumption you like. Any attempt as refuting this will likely only serve to make them look all the most suspect of your initial claims.
In conclusion there are a lot of disgruntled 16-year-olds out there with a lot of time on their hands, they're good at what they do but with a calm, collected and occasional cruel approach you can enter the fray of flame and exit the victor.
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