Editing Internet forum (section)

===Flame wars===
{{Main|Flaming (Internet)}}
When a thread—or in some cases, an entire forum—becomes unstable, the result is usually uncontrolled spam in the form of one-line complaints, [[image macro]]s, or abuse of the report system. When the discussion becomes heated and sides do nothing more than complain and not accept each other's differences in point of view, the discussion degenerates into what is called a ''flame war''. To ''flame'' someone means to go off-topic and attack the person rather than their opinion. Likely candidates for flame wars are usually religion and socio-political topics, or topics that discuss pre-existing rivalries outside the forum (e.g., rivalry between games, console systems, car manufacturers, nationalities, etc.).

When a topic that has degenerated into a flame war is considered akin to that of the forum (be it a section or the entire board), spam and flames have a chance of spreading outside the topic and causing trouble, usually in the form of vandalism. Some forums (commonly game forums) have suffered from forum-wide flame wars almost immediately after their conception, because of a pre-existing ''[[flame war]] element'' in the [[online community]]. Many forums have created devoted areas strictly for discussion of potential flame war topics that are moderated like normal.