Welcome to the Hyperchat Chatbox Tutorial!

This tutorial is geared towards newcomers to Hyperchat and people who have general questions about how the interface works.

The first thing you will see when you enter into any Hyperchat realm is the chatbox. This is your main control panel and the main way you can interact with others on the hyperchat site.

Here is the chat box!

I will be going through each number and explaining what each thing does.

1.) These are where your main controls are:

Mail- Goes to your mailroom. If you're not a citizen it goes to the generic "free" mailroom so you can MSG (Message) citizens.

Controls- As a non-citizen, this will take you to the Visa Validation page. If a citizen has issued you a visa, you will type in the name that the citizen issued a visa to. This allows you to enter rooms that non-citizens normally cannot enter. A visa is active for 28 hours.

SSL- Secure Socket Layer. This feature is for citizens so they can browse the web anonymously. It blocks cookies from being picked up or people seeing where you are browsing.

SeeAll- This feature allows you to see all the recent posts in the realm where you are. If you enter from SOI (State of Insanity) and click this, you will see all posts from all realms and sub-realms. If you enter from sister site (Like BWR (Beware), GOR (Gorean), WAW (Witches and Wizards), it will only show you posts from that particular sister site and not all of Hyperchat.

Hot- This shows you the Hotlist. Instead of showing recent posts, it shows all active rooms in the Hyperchat site with a list of all the players in each room. Each room will have a tail (@bwr, @soi, @gor, @waw) so you know which realm the rooms belong too. Many rooms also have a description telling you what the room is about and which RPG (Roleplaying Game) they belong to. You can click on the room name (beware@bwr) and it will take you there.

Help- This brings you to the help page of that particular realm in which you are in.

Travel- This brings up a list of rooms of the realm you are in, seperated by catagory. This is not a full listing however. The room creators choose whether or not their room shows up on this list.

Local Controls- This allows you to change different features of the room you are in. As a non-citizen, you can only change the colors of the room (background, text color) of the room. Citizens can use this to also lock their account. This feature is useful when they are on a different computer than their own. It forces the next login to ask for a password.

2.) Talk/Listen

You use this button to refresh the room or after writing your post/chat into the chat box (8.) and post it into the room. Posts go from most recent at the top, to the least recent at the bottom. Room creators are able to change what this says, so it may not always say talk/listen. The function is always the same.

3.) Checkbox

Click the checkbox to disable the text which appears below the chatbox (16.)

4.) Reset

Click this button to restart your post in the chatbox (8.)

5.) Undo

This deletes your last post from the room. Don't hit this by accident! There is no way to undo...the undo button, unless you hit back on your browser to where you originally wrote the post in the chatbox. Hopefully, it is still there.

6.) Auto

This automatically refreshes the room every 25 seconds. Hit Stop Auto to come back to the chatbox.

7.) Old

This allows you to search the room by date. This button is in different places depending on what kind of room you are in (Room, Corkboard, etc). How far back you can search is stated at the top of the search page.

8.) The Chatbox

This is where you enter your post for the room. The chatbox supports practically all HTML tags, so you can make your text a different color, post links, embed pictures and whatnot. After writing your post, you click on the Talk/Listen (2.) button to post it to the room.

9.) From:

This is where YOUR nickname goes. It is usually the same name you used to log in as. Citizens can register up to 6 different nicknames. To change your name, you would simply change the name found here in the From box.

10.) To:

This is to WHOM you are posting/talking. You can either type their name here or use the pull down menu (11.) to select one of the active names in the room. This makes it easier for people to know who you are talking to. If you wish to address the whole room, some pul ALL in this box, or simply leave it blank.

11.) Pulldown name list

This makes posting to active people in the room easier. All active users names are in this list. This automatically fills in the To (10.) box for you with that person's name.

12.) Show

This command tells the room how many posts to display for you. The default is 20, but you can enter up to 999 to get the maximum number of posts displayed.

13.) Room title and shortname

This shows you the title and shortname of the room you are in. Shortnames are the names that you enter into the Find Box (15.) to travel to that room. These are not always located in the same spot, depending on the HTML the room creator has entered into the Top Level of the room. Citizens can also add these short names to a "Favorite Room List" which they access through their control panel. This favorite room list appears above the main controls (1.).

14.) Time, Spirit List, and Sidebar

Shown here, we can only see the time. Room creators can choose whether or not to have a "Spirit List". If there are active people in the room, this bar would look like this instead:

This shows how many active people there are in the room at the time you entered or refreshed. People are timed out after 10 min in a room and they are removed from this spirit list and the pull down menu.

15.) QRef and Find Box

If a realm has a QRef, the link will show here above the Find Box. If not, there will be no link to the QRef. The Find box is where you enter the short names of rooms you want to travel to. To move from one sit to the other (soi to bwr/bwr to soi), you must enter the tail as well. For example, if you are in BWR and want to travel to the State of Insanity (soi) room, you would need to enter soi@soi into this box. Vice versa, if you were in soi@soi, you would need to enter beware@bwr to get back to the Castle Proper room in Beware.

16.) Text under chatbox

This is the text that you can turn off by checking the checkbox (3.). The information housed here varies from room to room. Here, we have links to other rooms that the castle proper is linked to.

This concludes the Hyperchat Chatbox tutorial! There are more tutorials to come!!

Compiled by ~T@nis~Loray@bwr