Chat room How-to's
Chat room help
Basic chatting
This is what you see at the bottom of the window when you enter chat:
Type your message in the Message: text box, then click the Send button, or press Enter on your keyboard. The message will appear in the main pane of the chat room, and be visible to everyone.
Sending a private message
If you want to send a message that is only visible to one other user of the chat room, select that user from the drop down box to the right of the Message area.
Your private message will appear in red in the main pane of the chat room, and will only be visible to you and the selected recipient
Remember to select All from the drop down box if you want to return to chatting to everyone in the chat room!
Options: Personal description
Clicking the Options icon to the left of the message area gives you access to two more options.
One option is to add a personal description which will appear next to your login. Any text you type in the personal description box will appear, in italics, to the right of your username for every message you send to the chat room. This will continue until you change or remove your personal description.
Options: changing how often the page refreshes
Another option is to change the rate at which the chat room reloads its messages. The chat room page automatically refreshes at a specific interval, which by default is 10 seconds. Every time the page refreshes, the messages are updated. To change the rate, select a different rate from the Reload interval is: drop-down box. A 5-second rate makes the chat room faster, a 60-second rate slows it down, making it easier to scroll back to read something you missed
Clicking the Refresh button on your browser will not refresh the chat room page, it will spontaneously eject you from the chat room, leaving you at the chat room entrance, so is not recommended. Unless this is what you want.
Clicking the Members icon on the far left will restore the default view, with a list of all the current chatters on the left hand side.
Common abbreviations translated
- BBIAB
- Be back in a bit
- BOTH
- Bottom of the hour
- BRB
- Be right back
- BTW
- By the way
- CUL8R
- See you later
- DH/DS/DD etc
- Dear husband/dear son/dear daughter, etc. Sometimes the D stands for something else ;-) A number after the abbreviation indicates the person's age, e.g. DD15 is my dear 15 year old daughter
- FIL/SIL/DIL etc
- Father-in-law/Sister-in-law/Daughter-in-law, etc
- FWIW
- For what it's worth
- HTH
- Hope this helps
- IMO/IMHO
- In my opinion/In my humble opinion
- LOL
- Laughing out loud
- ROTFLMBO
- Rolling on the floor laughing my butt off
- TOTH
- Top of the hour
- TTYL
- Talk to you later
How to make text smileys
Quitting the chat room
The simplest way is to simply close the browser window by clicking the Close button in the top right corner. Clicking the Exit button to the immediate left of the message area will return you to the message board. Quitting the chat room ends that "session" for you.
If you quit the chat room, and then re-enter, the messages from your previous session will not be visible to you, although they are visible to chat room users who are still on the same session.
Clicking a link and staying in the chat room
Right click the link and select Open in New Window. If you left click it, you will exit the chat room.
Error 101 message
This problem with the chat room has been reported by people who use Norton's firewall. Since I don't have this software, I can only direct you to the Network 54 advice