Some flames will be very vituperative and scurrilous. This kind of behavior is discouraged. Some people will enter something like flame on to indicate that they are responding emotionally to a particular topic. Emotional responses are not discouraged, but attacks on people rather than ideas will in turn incur flames from others. These flame wars can be unpleasant or can turn from a misunderstanding into a new understanding shared by the group.
Flames can therefore be an interesting group process.
A network connection is the point at which a host computer is connected to a network. The point can be at an individual workstation or at a connection of one network with another network. Your nickname is the name that you choose when you connect to an IRC server. Many users choose descriptive nicknames like sleepy or top1. Simply, ping sends a specific message to a remote host on the network to see if the host will respond.