Civility in the Comment Box

I am quite a fan of the Huffington Post. It feeds in a lot of news and editorials from other sources, and a lot of them are well written. Of course, there are comment boxes at the end of almost every piece and, as I might have mentioned, I'm a sucker for a good debate.

Problem is, they're not always good debates, or even debates for that matter. I often find that as soon as someone has argued themselves into a corner, instead of either conceding the point (ha, in my dreams) or just shutting up, they have to start flinging insults. At this point I usually take great delight in pointing out this chink in their armo(u)r or just bowing out.

This morning I woke up to read a response to a comment from me, which could have gone either way. The written word is a fairly useless communication tool sometimes, being unable to share inflection and emphasis in a sentence. Thus, a question I had posed as a genuine question rather than a hands-on-hips,
"rhetorical" jab, could easily have been mis-interpreted.

Instead however, I read this - 

What I can say is that you have given me a broader view of this subject via your personal perspective and I could not ask for anything more from normally useless conversation on a chat forum.