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Advanced Features

Once you have had some experience of chat you may find that some users are friendly and others are worthy of being ignored. While servers on the WebChat network try and remove abusive users as quickly as possible, you may wish to ignore them in the meantime. Thankfully WebChat provides you with tools to identify people who are your friends and to ignore people who aren't worth listening to.

You can right click any user in the user list and select 'Add to Friends List' or 'Ignore'. People added to your friends list are displayed in bold in the user list, with a smiley face on the left. People who are being ignored are displayed in grey with a crossed out face on the left. In the picture below, Aaron is marked as a friend and Alex is being ignored. Andrew is marked neither as a friend, nor a on ignore. You do not see messages sent by people who are being ignored.

. o O (Thinking)

Now that you are only chatting with the people you want to be chatting with you can start using more advanced chatting features.

The first advanced chatting feature is thinking. Normally when you type a message it appears as normal text - sometimes, however, you may want to make your thoughts known. To do this type your thought as normal, but click the 'Think' icon instead. Alternatively you can type /think and then your thought. [see Command Line Syntax].

Emoticons and Emotions

One of the drawbacks of chat is that people can't see your facial expressions - you may back a remark which is supposed to be funny, but it comes across to some people as insulting. Normally, people would know you weren't serious by a smile on your face - you can convey a smile or other facial expression in chat by entering certain characters. The table below shows which pictures are produced by which characters:

Characters	Picture
:)  - colon, close bracket	Happy Face
:(  - colon, open bracket	Sad Face
;)  - semi-colon, close bracket	Winking Happy Face
:D  - colon, capital D	Smiley Face
:p  - colon, small p	Smiley Face, sticking tongue out
:|  - colon, bar	Straight Face
:o  - colon, small o	'Oh'
:X  - colon, capital X	Kiss

That's the emoticons out of the way. Another thing which you can do with WebChat is express emotions or show actions. The 'Emotions' list contains a list of predefined emotions. You can, for example, show that you are applauding by double clicking 'applaud'. If you want to express an emotion at someone, select the emotion then right click the user and click the emotion.

The picture above shows the menu which appears when you right click a user. The screen shot below demonstrates the effect of sending a) a general emotion and b) a targeted emotion.

Whispering

Occasionally you may wish to send a message to a particular person without the rest of the room seeing it. One way of doing this is whispering. To whisper to someone you must first select their name from the user list. Then type your message as normal, but click the 'Whisper' icon instead. Alternatively you can type /whisper and then your message.

Private Messages

If you want to have a private conversation with a person (rather than just a one-off message), then double click that person's name. You will be presented with another window. You can use this window just like the main chat display. Your text appears in black, the other person's text appears in blue.

If someone sends a private message to you the same window appears. If you  wish to permanently ignore a person then click 'Ignore'. This is useful if one user keeps sending you private messages. 

Leaving Your Computer

Occasionally you may be called away from the computer. This isn't a problem as long as you let other users know that you are away from the keyboard. It seems like you are ignoring the room if you are involved in a conversation and just walk away. You can get around this by using the 'Away' menu. When you click 'Away' you will be presented with a list of predefined away messages. You can select one of these, or a custom one, and the use will be told that you are away. In addition, anyone who sends you a private message or a whispered message will reminded that you are away.

If you do not wish to see private messages at all you should set up a private message auto response. This option is on the 'Away' menu and sends the specified message to anyone who tries to send you a private message.

When you return to your computer you should select 'Back' to notify the room that you are back (this will happen automatically if you speak).

Away and Back messages look like the following: