Discussing Discussions

On lily, discussions are used for many things -- academic sites use them for working on homework, discussing local events or tv shows, or organizing study breaks; sites at workplaces can use them to discuss projects, as a "watercooler", or to help diagnose problems. Discussions can be one of the most powerful features of lily if you use them effectively (not that many people use them effectively... but that's ok too.)

You will look at the basics of discussions. How to find out what discussions exist and other random information about them, how to join them, talk in them, and leave them when you want. What you won't learn right now is how to create your own discussions. (Not that it's hard!... Just that there are a lot of things that are worth mentioning.)

Finding out what discussions exist

Before you can talk in a discussion, you need to know what discussions exist. Discussions may be created by users, and therefore may be destroyed, or may be "invulnerable" and supported by a particular site.

Existing discussions

Finding out what discussions exist is relatively easy. All you need to type is

/WHAT

to find out what discussions exist. lily should return a listing such as this:

  Name    Users  Idle Flag Title
  ----    -----  ---- ---- -----
* newuser     5       c    Question & Answer for New Users
  computer   35       c    Questions & Answers
 +j          12       c    today
  tv         10    3m c    Television: Whats on tonight?
  shhhh       5  2:16 cp   Secret project
  think       7  6:09 e    Think and grow rich!
(there are 5 inactive discussions)

This tells you many things: the name of the discussion, which is what you will refer to the discussion as, how many users are in the discussion, how long it has been since a message was sent to the discussion, and a more descriptive title for the discussions. The flags section and the characters to the left of the name provide additional information.

The discussions you are a member of are marked by the asterik (*), while other discussions have a "+" to the left of their name. This indicates that the discussion has additional information available. We'll talk about info files later.

The "Flag" column indicates some characteristics about the discussion:

c

The discussion uses "Connect Style" messaging.

e

The discussion uses "Emote Style" messaging.

p

The discussion is private -- only certain people are specifically permitted to the discussion. (You'll be able to find out who later.) If there is no "p" flag, then the discussion is public.

At the end of the list, you can see that there are some discussions that are even more idle than the ones here. It is possible for you to set how long a discussion must be idle to fall off the list, but we won't discuss that right now. To view the list of inactive discussions you can type

/WHAT INACTIVE

or to view all of the discussions, you can type

/WHAT ALL

Some sites will also destroy a discussion after a certain ammount of idleness.

When new discussions are created

When a new discussion is created, you're given the basic information about it including its name, title, and who created it. The notification message should look like this:

*** Discussion FLW, "LIFE is a FOUR letter WORD" has been created by Prisoner ***

Taking part in a discussion

Ok. You know what discussions are out there. Let's go talk in them and find out what people are saying.

Unlike private messages, lily requires you to be a member of a discussion before you can receive messages from the members in it, or send messages to everyone present.

• Tip: You can be a member of more than one discussion, if you wish, and can continue to carry on private conversations at the same time. Many people carry on more than one conversation at once.

Becoming a member of a discussion

To become a member, you join a discussion by typing

/JOIN discussion-name

where discussion-name is the name that was given in the first column from /WHAT. It may even be just a unique part of the name, just like in a sendlist. for example, if you wanted to be a member of the "computer" discussion, you could type

/JOIN COMP

(assuming, of course, that "computer" was the only discussion or user that has "comp" in its name.)

lily should respond

(you are now a member of computer)

Talking in a discussion

For almost everything having to do with messages, lily treats discussions just like it treats private messages. Everything you've learned about sendlists continues to apply -- just use the name of a discussion instead of the name of a person. You can even mix people and discussions in your sendlists.

Leaving a discussion

To leave a discussion, you quit it by typing

/QUIT discussion-name

where discussion-name is the same as above. lily should respond with a message such as

(you are no longer a member of discussion-name)

• NOTE: While lily will remove you from a discussion when you /QUIT, it will automatically join you to that discussion again (if it exists) when you log in.

Finding out who else is in a discussion

Sometimes, you might want to know who is in a discussion before you join it. (Let's face it, sometimes there are people that you just don't want to get into a debate with.) There are several ways to do this but the simplest way is to type

/WHO discussion-name

where discussion-name exactly what you think it is.

lily should respond with a list of people (and some other information) that are members of the discussion. You'll learn more about /WHO shortly. For example, if you typed

/WHO COMP

You'll get a list of people in the "computer" discussion, which may look like this:

  Name                                   On Since  Idle  State  Status
  ----                                   --------  ----  -----  ------
  clue [>>          <<]                  16:40:29   38m   here 
  Prisoner [sigh - ODUnot]               15:49:50    3m   here 
  Pioneer [Interactive TV on AOL 2nite]  10:21:50   47m   away 
 +Sundance [Here Comes the Flood]        07:36:11  9:42 detach 
  Deven                                  05:27:40 11:51 detach 
 +Garance [@home-again]                    Nov 12   53m   away 
  Shiva [COLD!] [very!]                    Nov 11 1d22h detach 

If you're confused about the difference between /WHO and /WHAT, you can try to remember that /WHAT lists what discussions exist on lily, and /WHO lists who is a member of a dicussion or of lily.

What else is there to know about a discussion?

lily will provide you with additional information about a discussion. Some of these are going to be meaningless to you right now, but some will at least be moderately interesting. (At the very least, you can use them to show off to someone who never read this far in the manual.)

Info about info files

Some discussion moderators will have a file, no longer than 48 lines, that can give some information about what the discussion is about, some information that is the specific topic of conversation, or just to impart basic information about the discussion.

There are two ways to find out if a discussion has an info file. The first is a "+" next to the discussion name in the /WHAT list. The second is when lily notifies you that an info file has been created or updated. These messages look like

*** Discussion discussion-name now has a new info ***

when an info file is new or changed and

*** discussion-name no longer has an info ***

when the moderator removes the info file.

To actually read an info file, you use a command like

/INFO discussion-name

and the info file should print out. Simple!

Reviewing what was previously talked about

If you enter a discussion that is already in progress, it may be confusing if you don't exactly know what is being talked about. lily allows you to look at the past 150 or so messages, entries, and exits from the discussion. To review this information you must be a member of the discussion and type

/REVIEW discussion-name

Getting more details

You already know you can use the /WHAT command by itself to get a list of all the discussions, along with some basic information about them. You can also use the /WHAT command with just one discussion to find out even more details about a discussion.

/WHAT discussion-name

will give you extra information about discussion-name. So if you typed

/WHAT LILY-DEV

you might get the response

Name: lily-dev    Title: "A Red Hot Lily Pepper"                               
Users: 28   Created: Apr  6      Idle: 40m  
Creator: Christian [->breakfast->shopping]        State: Public Inv Connect
Moderators: Christian, bp
Permitted: Christian
Depermitted: seinfeld, Samurai Cat

We already know what the "Name", "Title", "Users", and "Idle" fields contain. The "State" field gives similar information to the "Flag" column, but also specifically tells us if the discussion is public or private, and will tell us if the discussion is "Invulnerable".

The "Created" and "Creator" field tell us what user created the discussion, and the date they did so. The "Moderators" are people who can perform special actions on the discussion, such as allow or disallow people into the discussion, set new info files, etc -- they are the ones in charge.

Some discussions may have people specifically "Permitted" or "Depermitted" to be members of the discussion. People who are depermitted are not allowed into the discussion and, in fact, do not even get to know the discussion exists. Private discussions more frequently have people that are permitted, and all others are not allowed to do anything.

Summary

You should now be able to do basic stuff with discussions, including how to find out what discussions exist, how become a member by joining the discussion and how to quit a discussion. You can get information about a discussion, including who is also a member of the discussion, the discussion moderator, anything the discussion moderator has written about the discussion, and any conversation that has already taken place.

We will not be discussing creating your own discussions in this manual, but it will probably be the subject of its own.

You'll be using some of what you've learned in this section to apply it to people in the next few sections. We'll also take a look at the myserious "here" and "away", as well as blurbs and how to find out about people.
to top