RuthMOO: Settling In

Welcome to RuthMOO , an online community hosted at Brandeis University. This page is intended to help you set up your new RuthMOO character, setting your gender, description and aliases, changing your name, password and email address, setting your messages and subscribing to mailing lists and reading your mail. If you have already done this or know how, you will probably want to move on to the RuthMOO: Building the Landscape page.

1. Creating Your Identity

The first task in establishing your online identity is to set your gender. If you wish your gender to be female, you would do this by typing:

@gender female

In addition to the standard genders of male and female, MOO offers several other interesting choices. To see a list of them type:

@genders

For more information about and help with genders while logged into RuthMOO use the help topic: gender.

The next task is to create your description. This is what other people will see when they look at you and is completely in your control. If you wanted to look like a college student wearing jeans and a tshirt." you could type:

@describe me as "You see a student wearing jeans and a tshirt."

For more help setting your description while you are logged onto RuthMOO use the help topic: @description.

2. Setting Important Information

There are a few other critical pieces of information you will need to know how to set. When you first request a character, RuthMOO generates a random password for you which you are free to reset when you log on. If your old password was 'ghONil' and you wanted to reset it to 'poopsie' you would type:

@password ghONil poopsie

Please note that 'poopsie' is probably not a good password to use. For more help setting your password while you are logged onto RuthMOO use the help topic: @password.

It is important to maintain a record of a valid email address for your RuthMOO character. This is needed in case the wizards need to get hold of you off the MOO for some reason. This could range from a possible security breach of your character, to a change in RuthMOO's address (we don't anticipate one, but it could happen), to a warning that your character is about to be recycled because it's been several months since you last connected. To reset your email address type:

@registerme as email@address.net

substituting your new email address. For more help in registering your email address while you are logged onto RuthMOO use the help topic: @registerme.

It is also possible for you to change your name or add nicknames to yourself. If you wished to rename yourself to "Clownface" with the aliases "Bozo" and "Clown" you could type:

@rename me to "Clownface",Bozo,Clown

Or if you don't want to have any aliases you can just type:

@rename me to Clownface

If you later decide that you would like the nickname "Bozo" you can type:

@add-alias Bozo to me

Keep in mind that names and aliases can only be used by one person at a time. If you try to set a name or alias for yourself that is already in use you will get an error message. Just pick another name or alias to use.

If you get tired of the alias "Bozo" you can simply:

@rmalias Bozo from me

For online help with names while you are logged onto RuthMOO use the following help topics: @rename, @add-alias, @rmalias.

3. Personalizing Your Character

In addition to your name and description, there are other things that you can do to personalize your RuthMOO character. These involve setting your messages. Messages are text strings shown to other players when you do various things. For a list of your current messages type:

@messages me

For example, your @page_echo message is what people see when they page you. If you wanted to set your @page_echo message to be "A gust of wind carries your message to %n." you would type:

@page_echo me is "A gust of wind carries your message to %n."

Then, if your name were fiasco, when someone paged you they would see:

A gust of wind carries your message to fiasco.

That funny little %n in the message is used for pronoun substitution. In this case, the %n gets replaced with the name of the person who is sending you the page. For more information about messages while you are logged onto RuthMOO use the help topic: messages. For more information on pronoun substitutions use the help topic: pronouns.

4. Using the Mail System

Because people aren't always logged in at the same time, and sometimes because some things are just best transmitted in static text, you can send and receive mail messages on the MOO, often commonly referred to as MOOmail to distiguish it from regular email. To see what mail you have saved (or waiting to be read type:

@mail on me

@mail

This will give you a list of your last 15 messages. To read a specific message, such as message 2 for example:

@read 2

To erase your second message you would type:

@rmm 2

The next thing you should know is that it's not just people who can receive mail. There are also objects that are mailing lists, most of which are publicly readable and writable. To see the mailing lists available on RuthMOO you could type:

@unsubscribed

This will show you a list of all of the mailing lists and a brief description for each. To subscribe to a mailing list, chatter for example, you would type:

@subscribe *chatter

To see the mail on the mailing list chatter you do much the same as you would to see the mail that you personally have:

@mail on *chatter

Reading mail on mailing lists works just the way you probably expect:

@read 2 on *chatter

Now that you know the bare basics of reading mail you probably want to know how to send it. The basic command to send MOOmail is pretty straightforward:

@send who

where who is the name of either a player or a mailing list. You will first be prompted for a one line subject. Enter your subject line and hit enter.

Now you are in the mail editor and it's past time to introduce you to the MOO editors, which are all fairly similar. MOO editors are, first of all, line editors. This means you get to enter one line at a time, although you can list your message at any time. Additionally it means you can only edit one line at a time. Many people hate MOO editors (not without reason) and there are indeed ways of composing your text (or code) offline and pasting it into the MOO if your client software supports it. However, how to do so is a topic for another time or place. In the meantime, it is possible to use the MOO editors without completly losing your mind if you learn a few relatively simple commands to help you edit.

Let's start with some very basic commands: Inserting a new line works by 'saying' the text, just as if you were speaking in a room. You can use either of the following:

say This is a line of text to insert.

"This is a line of text to insert.

To see the text of your current message type:

lis

This will show you the numbered lines of your message. If you need to delete a message, such as line 3, you would refer to it by line number:

del 3

There are many other editor commands and you can see while in the editor by typing:

look

This is also a quick way to verify that you are still in the editor - something which can get confusing at first. Anyhow, now that you have some text for your mail message you need to send it. This is done by typing alone on one line the word:

send

If all has gone well, you will see a message telling you that the message was actually sent, and to whom it was sent. If you decide that you don't want to send the message after all, type the following instead of send:

abort

This will discard your message and get you out of the mail editor cleanly.

One more quick word about editors in general. There are three editors on RuthMOO which all work similarly:

Mail Editor - Invoked with @send and session saved with send.
Note Editor - Generally invoked with @notedit item and session saved with save, exit editor with quit.
Verb Editor - Invoked with @edit object:verb, session is saved with compile, and session exited with quit.
You cannot use the verb editor until you are a programmer.

For more information on using the MOO mail system while you are logged onto RuthMOO use the help topic: mail which I strongly encourage you to do.

For information on what else you can do to affect the RuthMOO environment see RuthMOO: Building the Landscape.

Back to the RuthMOO home page.

This page maintained by S. J. Herdman.