The Newbie's Tutorial

Now that you have an account, here is a quick tutorial as to how things work.

First, on lily, there are two types of objects that you can communicate with: users and discussions. When you communicate with a user, you're sending messages directly to that user. When you communicate with a discussion, everyone who is in that discussion will see what you sent there.

To send messages, type out the name of the user/discussion, then a semicolon, and then the message. Hit enter, to send. So, to send to a user named "Foobar", type:

        foobar;this is a message

As the recipient, "Foobar" would see:

         >> (21:18) Private message from Sour Nomaded:
         - this is a message

That's the basic way to send a message to a user or a discussion. Like with anything that's made by techie people, there are exceptions to this rule. A user named "Sour Nomaded" and a discussion named "Foobar" will be used in the following examples.

1. Users and discussions can have spaces in their names. To send to a message to "Sour Nomaded", replace the space with a underscore, such as:

           sour_nomaded;this is a message
   

2. It's not necessary to type out all of the user's or the discussion's name in order to send them a message. Part of the name can be used, such as:

           nomad;this is a message
   

   The server will attempt to figure out what the recipient is. If it finds more than one user or discussion that matches the recipient, it'll return a message noting this. Receiving such a message means a more specific user/discussion name is needed (a couple more letters is generally enough), such as:

           sou;this is a message
   

   The server returns:

           (there was more than one match to "sou" including Soufy and Sour Nomaded)
   

3. While not strictly necessary when sending a message, lily uses the convention of appending a '-' at the beginning of the discussion's name, when it's being referred to. So, optionally, a message could be sent as:

           -foobar;this is a message
   

   and that would explicitly say that you're trying to send a message to a discussion which is named "foobar". This is equivalent to:

           foobar;this is a message
   

   When users are talking about a particular discussion, they'll generally refer to it as "-foobar".

While all of the above is true for most methods of connecting to the lily server, things may be a little different depending on which client you use and how you connect.

As for the content available on the server, there are many discussions, each with various topics of discussion. Some discussions are very general in content, such as -computer. Others can be more specific, like -windows. Pretty much, there's a discussion for any computer/tech related topic. And there's also a whole slew of non-tech discussions. A list of all the discussions can be generated with the /what command (use /help what to see what options/arguments are available). If you're looking for a discussion about a particular subject, try /what about <subject>.

Also, to find out more information about a discussion, use /what <discussion name> to get more general info about it. Most of the time discussions will have information associated with them describing the discussion (accessible with the /info <discussion name> command). A suggestion is to /join a discussion that seems interesting and hang out for a bit; lurk and read what is sent to that discussion to get a feel for how things work. If no one is around /what <discussion name> will display how idle the discussion has been.

Also, if you start talking or asking about something that the other users don't think is appropriate to the discussion or is considered more pertinant to another discussion, they'll generally point you there by saying /redirect <new discussion>. This is not an actual lily command, merely a way to suggest the alternate discussion. So /join that other discussion and ask/talk in there. In general, the community is helpful, but is rather adamant about where discussions takes place.
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