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The Chatterbox nodelet is the box at the side of the screen where much of the communication between members of the site occurs. It includes both private message facilities and a public talk area.
Private Messages
Your latest 10 private messages appear at the top of the box, with a checkbox and a link marked 'r' or 'reply'. To reply to a message, click the link. This should insert the text /msg (username) into the Talk box. Type your message after /msg username and then hit the Talk button to reply to whoever is talking to you. You can similarly send messages to users by typing /msg yourself, followed by their username (replacing any spaces in it with underscores) and then entering your message. To delete a message, tick the box next to it and click Talk.
You can also use the 'Send private message' box on any user's home node. You can get to a user's home node by clicking their username, or searching for it.
Yet another way to send messages is to use the text box at the top of any writeup to send the author a message about the writeup in question; enter text in the box and press Return, or click the box marked 'blab!' or 'vote' at the bottom of the node*. In these cases, there is a checkbox marked 'CC' next to the text box, which you can use to send a copy of your message to yourself.
To see all your private messages go to the Message Inbox, which shows ALL your private messages, without showing the public chatter (below). You can get there by clicking the number in the Chatterbox telling you how many messages you have, if any.
Public Chat
By entering text into the Chatterbox without prefixing it with /msg and then hitting the Talk button, you can talk to the Everything2 population at large. Conversations in the Chatterbox tend to be wide-ranging, less than serious and prone to quick changes of topic. It can be a good place to ask for help with the site or whatever, but be prepared: not all of the responses will be helpful or correct. You can talk about anything there really, we just ask that people try to be polite. Occasionally the Everything Death Borg will step in when things get badly out of hand.
Typing /me at the beginning of a line of text in Chatterbox indicates that what you're saying is in the third person, so it's like someone is talking about you: If I typed /me is talking about himself, that would show as Virgil is talking about himself.
There are a few other ways of interacting with the public Chatterbox area, in case you want to refer to past discussions or keep up with talk faster than the nodelet allows:
- E2 Chatterbox Archive
A more-or-less complete, searchable archive of the conversation in the Chatterbox is stored online at http://ascorbic.net/catbox/ ('Catbox' is a nickname for the Chatterbox).
- Chatterlight/Ajax Chatterlight
These pages are designed for general chatting; they are essentially just fast, lightweight versions of the Chatterbox nodelet, without most of the other stuff that makes up a normal Everything2 page.
- Java Chatterbox
This allows you to follow the talk in real-time, but bear in mind that it's not bug-free. You'll need to have Java installed.
- Chat clients
A couple of dedicated software clients have been created to communicate with the Chatterbox: Refer to Frogbox and Mattbox for details; the E2 Link and Logger Client also includes this facility, along with various other tools and toys. The "Cbriver" system allows use of the chatterbox via IRC.
Note that if you are not interested in chatting, you can turn off the Chatterbox by typing /chatteroff in the Chatterbox nodelet. You can also remove the nodelet entirely in your Nodelet Settings, which will replace it with a simple link to your Message Inbox so that you can still deal with private messages.
Finally, there are a number of different 'rooms' in which people can chat. The default public area is 'Outside', which you can get to by entering 'go outside' in the Search box or choosing it from the drop-down menu in the Other Users nodelet. Political Asylum is a permanent feature, designed for debate and argument, while other rooms come and go; any user above Level 5 can create them at will, but they disappear after a while if nobody is using them. Available Rooms lists those currently extant, and Everything Finger will tell you if anyone is currently in any of them.
*If you don't see a text box at the top of writeups, you can turn it on in Writeup Settings, under 'Show writeup blab boxes'.
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