How the chatrooms work

Basics

If you're familiar with the Diana the Valkyrie chatroom, then you have a head start here, because there's a lot of similarities.

There's actually one chatroom for each performer, and another one for the Windmill (username guest, password guest), which is just for fun, and testing. And the Windmill is free.

Billing starts as soon as you access a premium chatroom. If you log on twice to the same room (which might happen if you accidentally click the Logoff button), then you aren't double-billed. If you log on to two different chatrooms at once, then you'll be billed for both of them.

The basics of the chatroom are pretty obvious. You type what you want to say at the bottom, then press your keyboard "Enter" key. That's really all you need to know to use it. But there's also some cool stuff, just like there is in the Diana the Valkyrie chatroom.

There's the /me command. So, if you're logged in as Jim Beam, and you type
/me starts to sing a song
Then the chatroom will say "Jim Beam starts to sing a song".

You choose a colour when you log in - if you don't, your colour is black. But you can change your colour once you're chatting. /colour green will move you to green. There's actually millions of colours available, you can do /colour #2f9956, for example. Look here for a colour chart. People often pick a colour, and then use it every day. And if someone is already using a colour, it's customary not to use the same one. You'll find that the colours make it easier to see who said what.

Want to change your name? Use the /nick command
/nick Happy Jim Beam
will change your chatroom name to "Happy Jim Beam". You can do this as often as you like; people often change their nick to tell other folks what mood they're in, or that they're only in for a minute, or that they've just popped out for a moment "Jim Beam AFK" (short for "Away From Keyboard"). You can also tell everyone your email address with a command like
/email valkyrie@thevalkyrie.comThere's emoticons, like :-) (meaning happy) and lol (meaning, "laughing out loud"). They get shown as little faces. Grr, wink, kiss, eek and some others. There's a few other things that get translated into little graphics; you'll soon find out what they are :-) You can applaud the performer with the /clap command, although tipping is a more useful form of applause.

You can use the snapshot camera to take as many pictures as you want, and you can copy and share those with other people, but you must leave our logo on the picture.

Tipping

In this chatroom, you can tip the performer. That means, you're giving her some money. Tipping is completely optional, of course, and you can choose how much. The easy way to tip, is to use the tip links, over on the left. If you accidentally click on one of those links, don't worry. You have to also click on the "Yes" button that pops up, to confirm that you want to tip. If you click "No", then the tip isn't done.

You can also use the /tip command, which works in dollars. So, /tip 5 will tip the performer $5, equal to 500 tokens. Clepsy announces the tip. Once you've tipped, you can't take it back. You can tip as much as you like (up to a maximum of $20 per tip), as often as you like.

Advanced stuff

You can't use HTML here. But you can post links. You just type:
http://www.thevalkyrie.com
or whatever your link is, and the chatroom turns it into a clickable link.

Sometimes, you want to say "Hi" to everyone when you enter the chatroom. You could do this with a dozen posts, but it's much neater to type "hi /everyone" and let Clepsy do the rest.

You can upload files, using the "upload" link. They'll be announced in the chatroom by Clepsy.

You might want to summon the Valkyrie, because something has gone wrong. For that, you can use the ValkSignal, which is a bit like the Batsignal, except it isn't in Gotham. "/valksignal on" will switch on the signal; "/valksignal off" will switch it off again.

"/roll" will ask Clepsy to roll the dice for you, you'll get a number beteen 1 and 100. There's some chatroom games based on that.

"/slap Jim Beam" will slap Jim Beam around a bit with a kipper. This is generally considered to be hilarious.

And there's other stuff. You'll recognise most of it from the Diana the Valkyrie chatroom, or maybe other chatters will tell you about it.

Clepsydra

Clepsydra (or Clepsy, as most people call her) is the chatroom clock. Sometimes she gets mistaken for a human being, and she doesn't like that. She's a clock, and proud of it. She'll tell you the time, if you ask her with the /time request; she's a British clock, so she'll give you the time in London. She'll tell you a joke if you ask her nicely. Don't tell her this, but they aren't very good jokes.

She'll greet you when you log in to the chatroom, and she'll say goodbye when you leave. If anyone uploads a file, then she'll tell the room about it. If you want to upload a file, click on the link that says "Upload". And she does other stuff; you'll find out as you go along.

Not everyone has English as their native language. So there's a /whatis request. If you type /whatis porridge, then Clepsy will look it up in a dictionary for you, and give you the link to read.

Speaking of links - if you give a web site address (starting with http), then Clepsy will turn that into a clickable link, so that people can follow it. If you want to show something to people, that's the way to do it.

The bells, the bells

It's a long story, in which Gilbert and Sullivan's opera HMS Pinafore, and the good Captain Corcoran plays a major part.

The short story is that Clepsy is a ship's clock. So, rather than ringing chimes like, for example, Big Ben, she divides the day into "watches" of four hours each, and each watch is divided into eight bells. The watches are Graveyard, Morning, Forenoon, Afternoon, Dog and First. Actually, the Dog watch is divided into First Dog and Last Dog, two hours each (the US Navy calls Last Dog, the Second Dog).

This is the way that navies do it. There's a particular wrinkle in the Dog watch, there's no 5, 6 or 7 bells. In 1797, five bells of the Last Dog Watch (1830 hours) was to be the signal for the mutiny at the Nore. Since that time, the Admiralty decreed that the five bells (half an hour after the start of the Last Dog Watch) should never again be struck on British vessels.

The reason why the bells are useful to you, is so that you don't get so involved in the chat, that you forget what time it is. One of Clepsydra's duties is to remind you, every half hour.

Rules

Actually, there aren't many chatroom rules.