Shadowlands Forum Features

Shadowlands forum was built based on the comments made by members of the Shadowlands community.

Appearance and Uses: Shadowlands Forum can be used as a place for your community to hang out:

     FORUM: away: at 09:21:
      AWAY:    jeremy: a bit more sleep ;-)
     FORUM: death has arrived, from localhost at 10:11.
     FORUM: jeremy has returned at 10:34.
    jeremy: ugh.  mondaymorning.
            hi death
            i feel much more normal today.
            sigh
     FORUM: dracofav has returned at 10:35.
  dracofav: morning everyone
    jeremy: hi!

And as a place to coordinate:

     FORUM: phoenix has returned at 12:33.
   demaria: Hey Dan, where is our test?
   phoenix: newhouse
   demaria: wow.  I'd never of found it.
   phoenix: newhouse 1 a2
   demaria: Which room?
            a2?
   phoenix: <nod>
   demaria: where is the heck is a2?
   phoenix: by coffee machines?
   demaria: it sounds like a quake level name.
   phoenix: damn
            hiccups
            leave now or soon?
     death: it's downstairs from the coffee machine
   demaria: soon
            ready to go?
   phoenix: shoes

Commands: A full set of commands is available. Everything was made as modular as possible, with easy to use controls.

Quick Logins! This should be mentioned first; if you telnet to the Forum from localhost, it will automatically recognize who you are, and let you in without needing to enter your name and password again. Quick and easy!

For the Users, there are many helpful commands, a gentle and clean-looking interface, and support for common line-editing control keys (see below.) And of course you can turn off ("ignore") types of messages you don't want to hear.

Large Command Set
Shadowlands forum also comes with a versatile set of commands that are available to all users. Of these commands, a "!set" command allows preferences to be set to each user's tastes:

Currently, !set has 5 options:

     FORUM: Current settings:
     FORUM:     command    !    Current command-prefix char
     FORUM:     hereidle   15   Max idle time for !here listing
     FORUM:     autowho    5    Min idle when away before auto-!who on return
     FORUM:     trueidle   No   Idle time based on last keypress
     FORUM:     local      No   Telnet local echo (for screwy telnets)
Macros save you time:

!macro lets you create, edit (replace) and delete simple macros. What are these good for? They let you type lots of text or commands with a total of 2 keystrokes. This lets you quickly (for example) set your away message to "brb, coworker question" if you're interrupted at work.

When you create a macro, it records your keystrokes until you type a blank line; when you later execute the macro, it's as if you're manually typing exactly what you typed when you created it. (Hit Ctrl-E, then the key you assigned to your macro, to execute a macro.)

Macros can be multiple lines long. They can run Forum commands; just type the command line into the macro as you would to normally run the command. They can execute other macros; just type Ctrl-E and then the key assigned to the macro you're executing. (You can't have two macros call each other in a loop, though.) Because anything typed by executing a macro is handled just as if you'd typed it by hand, macros can't be used to flood text. Macros are saved and restored with your other preferences.

Plus fun features have been built in:

!roll rolls imaginary dice for fun.

    matted> !roll 6
     FORUM: matted rolls 6 dice: 2 6 5 2 2 5 = 22

!spam randomly selects an ascii-art banner file and pastes it into the room. (This command can be disabled.)

   jeremy> !spam
   jeremy:     ____
              (.   \
                \  |
                 \ |___(\--/)
               __/    (  . . )
              "'._.    '-.O.'
                   '-.  \ "|\
                      '.,,/'.,,mrf

Control Keys
The following shortcut and control keys are supported:
Ctrl-U Erase line, can't get it back
Ctrl-K "Kut" line to clipboard
Ctrl-Y Paste ("yank") line from clipboard
Ctrl-E Expand macro
Ctrl-W Erase word
Ctrl-L Clear screen (think "form-feed")
Ctrl-O Turn command character on/off (good for pasting in text which may contain the command character at the start of a line.)
Ctrl-D
Ctrl-D
Log Out (needs to be hit twice)
Ctrl-N Paste last public line
Ctrl-P Paste last line you sent
Tab Complete word (username or command)

For the Sysadmin, the preferences header file (slfprefs.h) easily allows the following to be set according to the needs of your chatroom:

Configurable Guest Privileges!
Although the program is intended for account holders of a server, provisions have been made to allow guests the ability to chat. Guests currently need to be accepted by someone currently in the chatroom before they may enter.
* The program makes it easy to disallow guests from logging in at all.
* There is an optional "how-to" message to tell guests how to log in
* Guest can be given the ability to roll dice, use banners, and set topics and/or sessions

Configurable Room Preferences
* Default Prefix for commands (default is !)
* Amount of time before someone is idling before they are no longer considered "here"
* Room Topics on/off
* Spam command on/off
* Roll using Star Wars RPG rules, or standard 6-sided-dice

Tunable Program Preferences
* Max chat users (up to 32)
* Maximum number of consecutive blank lines
* Maximum number of dice you can roll
* Maximum consecutive topics kept in memory
* Max lines/sec
* Max lines in one second
* Max lines for second avg
* Location of "banners" directory used by the !spam command
* Topic reset interval


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