During the flame war, and after it abated, AGM worked to heal itself. During this period there was a general feeling of togetherness, of AGMers banding together to protect their newsgroup. The healing process worked on a few levels simultaneously:

1. Discussions on COLD.
2. Newsgroup posts.
3. A mailing list.

COLD is a talker frequented by AGMers. COLD talk cannot be logged, and therefore I do not have electronic copies of any discussions that took place there. My personal recollection is of the flame war being brought up almost everytime I stopped by the talker. Morten also mentioned a similar feeling:

"I got the impression that AGMers felt a need to communicate more through email and talkers during the flames period." (Personal communication via E-mail)

Fred seemed to feel the same:
"As the hate posts intensified the invasion became the number one discussion topic on the talkers." (Personal communication via E-mail).

COLD was used for people to vent their feelings and also to coordinate efforts and discuss possible reactions. In my opinion a big part of this was simply discussing how it felt to read the flames, and hearing similar feelings from other people. One aspect of newsgroups is that you read them alone. If it's only you reading the posts, and there's nobody to discuss it with, you're never sure if what you're feeling is normal, and it's hard to tell how others are feeling. Simply hearing other people mirroring your feelings, legitimizes them, and that in itself begins the healing process. Once AGMers realized that they were not alone, and their feelings were shared by friends, they started feeling better. COLD was especially useful because of the real time communication. simply having someone type: "I feel the same", had a huge beneficial contribution.

Another venue of self healing was the newsgroup itself where the flame war originated. The flame war consisted of hateful posts, posted to AGM. The healing process utilized the same exact tool - AGM posts. Some people decided to post more often: "I and others posted neutral and/or positive posts just to make sure the good/bad ratio was high:)." (Morten, personal communication via E-mail).

This was one way of using the newsgroup to self heal. Simply increasing the volume of posts was a way of combating the flamers. First of all a newsgroup is alive when people post to it. If people stopped posting because of the flamers, the newsgroup would effectively be dead. Second of all, by maximizing postings, AGMers made sure that the people reading AGM would see messages from true AGMers and not only flamers, who tended to post quite a lot of posts. Maximizing posts made sure that ratio of flame posts to real AGM posts was never very imbalanced in favor of flamers. Phil wrote a brick, titled: "I pledge to maximize!", saying precisely that:

From: Phil Plasma
Newsgroups: alt.good.morning
Subject: I pledge to maximize!

	In the face of the current storm, I
	pledge to maximize my postings, the
	world of AGM will be a witness to a
	non-trivial increase of Plasmaposts
	and I hope you are prepared, as the
	words which will appear here will I
	make green with happiness at having
	been released from their awful fish

---== Phil Plasma ==---

My understanding of the brick is as following, although interpreting Phil's bricks is a tricky process since sometimes even Phil doesn't understand them. In his brick, Phil promises to maximize his posting, due to the flame war which he refers to as the "current storm". He also refers to words green with happiness, released from their awful fish. This might have dual meaning: words that are typed and sent out to the world of AGM are thus released from Phil's mind, and come into existence, they are thus released from their awful fish, and become green with happiness. Another meaning might be more general. The awful fish could be a reference to the bad feeling created in AGM due to the flames. The words made green with happiness are the rest of the AGMers, and the rest of the posts which aren't flames, that will feel better because of Phil adding many of his posts to the group.

Besides mere volume of posts, specific AGM threads created a good feeling in AGM, and served to recreate the feeling of warmth and friendship particular to AGM. Two such threads were one started by Paula, titled: "Novice shape maker", and another originated by Phil, titled: "Dangerously inclined to Eggplant".

The "Dangerously inclined to Eggplant" thread, was specifically written to encourage people to respond to it. Responses were humorous and in the original AGM "style". The original author of this post, Phil, ended his entry with the words: "add a phrase or two to this post,". By specifically requesting people to add a phrase to his post, and by ending it with a comma instead of a period, Phil encouraged others to follow his suit and add to his list of happy and silly things. Most of those who added to this thread continued to end their entry with a comma, thus creating a continuous post, created by a group effort. In addition, the topic of this thread was joyous, filled with fun things which made the reader smile. The two factors - the group effort, together with the silly topic, created a bright spot, and helped further the healing process.

The "Novice shape maker" was a picture thread, a thread which created a picture using various "shapes", unique to AGM. (Shapes are paragraphs where the letters and sentences create a shape or an outline of an object. I have not seen such an art form anywhere except in AGM, and it seems to be unique to this newsgroup.) Paula started by creating a house "shape", i.e. a paragraph regarding a house with the letters creating the actual shape of a house. Fred added a dog "shape", Morten a bird, and Alex a person at the gate, a sun and a tree. Johnny added mountains, and Jule a cloud, together creating a beautiful picture....

This thread was a bit different from usual ones. Most threads, which are created when people add on to previous posts, are created in a linear fashion- a person adds her/his words before or after the words of the original author. The contributions of each poster can be differentiated due to the usual function of a reply to an E-mail/post. The mailing program usually adds a symbol to the beginning of the line such as: ">", "-" or "*", marking the quoted text. In addition the E-mail address is usually automatically quoted in a form similar to:

"On 3 Feb 1997, Sam Jones wrote:"

In this thread, there is no such linear form, and no differentiation of authors. The different replies are intermingled so that once they are put together you cannot diferentiate between the authors. This merging was purposely created by the repliers who eliminated the automatic markings of a reply in order to create this special post. The resulting picture was a group effort, which was fun to read, and helped further the self heal process of AGM, after the flame war.

The two threads discussed above, were not neccessarily conscious efforts to promote a warm atmosphere in AGM. They were regular posts, posted to AGM, during this period. (Phil might have meant his post to create involvement, but it's hard to tell if that was because of the flame war, or for no other reason besides him feeling like doing so.) Despite that fact both of these threads had the same result of causing people pleasure when reading them and promoting participation of AGM oldies. Both of these goals helped fight the bad feelings created by the flame posts, and helped promote the self heal process.

In addition to COLD and AGM discussions, AGMers had a third way of dealing with the flame war. A mass mailing list, comprising of known AGMers was created, and the flame war was discussed via E-mail. This gave AGMers an additional sense of unity, and a place to discuss their feeling about the war, and to gather strength from the mutual effort. A more extensive discussion of this mailing list is brought elsewhere.