chat room help

Chat rooms allow you to view messages, submit them, reply to them, and post online polls. Messages, polls, and boxes do not expire.

Chat room options vary according to your user privileges:

Anonymous Web surfers can see chat rooms but cannot view any messages within them.
Regular logged-in users can contribute to chat rooms.
Blog-worthy users can contribute to and customize chat rooms.

For help on signing up for an account and becoming blog-worthy, refer to the main page help.

Contributing to chat rooms

When you log in, your main page only shows the chat rooms that you have access to (for example, public chat rooms such as the Support Forum). To view messages within a chat room, simply click the chat room name.

By default, a maximum of 6 old and 20 new messages can display in the chat room before the oldest messages start disappearing into the history. You can customize this setting by clicking Your settings from the main page.

To submit a message, select either Start New Thread or the message that you want to respond to. Then type your message and click the Submit button. All new messages appear in yellow, and an "updated" tack appears next to the chat room on the main page.

To vote on a poll, select your choice and click the Submit button. The voting rules are:

You must log in to vote.
You can only vote once.
You cannot take back a vote.
All votes are anonymous.

In a chat room, all logged-in users have the following options:

Take back (left arrow): Removes your current message, and lets you re-edit it. You can only take back messages that no one has replied to yet. Also, the "take back" option expires in one year (default).
Main Page: Returns to your subscription page.
History: Searches through past messages from the current chat room. In the history search results, you can add new messages and respond to old messages.
Invite user: Appends an "active invitation" to the user's subscription page. If they click your invitation, then the chat room appears as a new link on their subscription list.
Subscribe/Unsubscribe: Adds/removes the current chat room from your subscription list.
Help: Displays online help for blog.flup.org as WIKI entries (which everyone can edit). If you log in to WIKI using the UserPreferences link, then you can click EditText to revise the online.
Logout: Logs you out, and returns your privileges to that of an anonymous Web surfer.

Customizing chat rooms

Blog-worthy users can make use of the following additional chat room option:

New Poll: Posts a new poll in the right margin of any chat room that you have access to. Whenever you add a new poll, your user name appears on it and an "updated" tack appears next to the chat room on the main page. You can click D to delete your poll. If you de-select Allow users to vote anonymously?, then a "Non-anonymous!" warning appears within the poll. This means that later, any logged-in user can click V to view exactly how the participants voted.

From the main page, blog-worthy users can click Create new chat room to create and own their own chat rooms. The required fields are:

Short name: Identifies the new directory to store your chat room in (appears after http://blog.flup.org/chat/ in the URL).
Long name: Identifies the name of the chat room. This name appears in the chat room box on the main page.
Description: Summarizes the reason for the chat room. This description appears under the Long name in the main page.

After you create the chat room, enter it and click Access Control to determine which logged-in users can access it. When you add a user to the access control list, then that user can see the new chat room from their main page.

If you own a chat room, you can make use of the following additional chat room options:

New box: Posts a new box in the right margin of your chat room. You can edit, delete, and vertically re-position any of your boxes. If you select Mark chat room as updated when you submit a new box, then an "updated" tack appears next to your chat room on the main page.
Edit Header: Posts an introduction at the top of your chat room. If you select Full width header? when you submit a new header, then your introduction spans across the entire page rather than just over the chat entries.
Access Control: Restricts the users that can see your chat room. If you leave this list blank, then any logged in user can contribute to your chat room; also, any anonymous Web surfer can see your chat room but cannot view any messages within it.
Destroy: Deletes your chat room.