A newbie is someone who is to new to chatting. If people call you that, it's not a bad thing! We were all newbies once. We try to be helpful and understanding to newbies, all we ask is that you please listen to us and follow our rules. You're starting off on the right foot by reading this FAQ!

Honestly, no. You don't really have to. Most of these questions are common sense questions that most people already know the answers too. However, the ops all got together and assembled a list of questions we really do get asked all the time. Every one of these has been asked many times.

What I do expect (or what I would like) is for people to skim the questions and see which ones they'd like to know more about and read those. Don't worry, there won't be a test. You won't get docked points because you skipped questions 27. We're not that strict in the room. We just want to make sure we have every basis covered!

Actually, we have less than a dozen rules and we are far from strict. Most of the rules most chatters never need to know and never come up in the room. Probably 50% of our "rules" are federal or network regulations. Network regulations are regulations the chat network (Webnet) made up and we have to enforce them in our room. Webnet is nice enough to give us a free chat server to play on, we don't want to upset them! Their rules are mainly to keep from hacking the chat or your computer and generally ruining chatting for everyone. Federal regulations are laws and we're not going to violate them. I know, some chats let you do this and that...so what? I put the safety of the chatters ahead of anything else (especially since we have kids who chat here). Every network rule and federal law has a good reason for being in place. We're not going to ignore them. I don't care if the other chats ignore them or not.

This FAQ isn't all rules! It's honest to goodness frequently asked questions about the people, the room, the rules, everything. Yes, there are some rules explained here, however most of the FAQs don't have anything to do with the rules.

It is a monkees chat in the sense that we are all monkee fans. But, most of us have been chatting for months, and we've exhausted most of the monkees topics. We often are talking about something completely different. Please don't whine "I want to talk about the monkees." If you want to talk about the guys, suggest a topic, or ask a question and most of the time we will gladly talk for hours about them.

NO! The monkees do not chat in #Monkeeschat. When the monkees do attend any chat they announce it well in advance and it is a planned moderated chat. They are way to busy to come to chat all the time. Sorry.

Don't feel left out! Just observe conversation for a while, find out what we're talking about, and then jump right in! We like to welcome new people to the room, so don't be afraid to talk to us.

The @ symbol means someone is a channel operator, or "op" for short. Their purpose is to make chatting a nice experience for everyone who follows the channel rules. They are the ones who make sure no one in the room disobeys any of the rules. The only ones who can kick or ban are the ops.

Again, those "dots" signify channel operators. Those are actually spiders (in reference to "webnet", the server that the chat is hosted on).

Kicking is when someone is forced to leave the channel by an op. This is a temporary situation. A kick is like a strong warning. If you get kicked too many times, you will be banned. That means you can't get back into the chat, no matter what you try. Changing nicks won't help you.

Being an op is a big responsibility. It's not just kicking and banning. You have to be in the room enough to know what's going on, be level headed, able to answer questions about chatting and chat software, knowledgeable of the server commands, and trustworthy. Asking to be an op won't get you to be one. All new ops are nominated and approved by the present ops, and "begging" for ops is against the channel rules.

If you ask someone "how can I be an op?", it's proof you don't care enough about the room to read the FAQs (which you do or you wouldn't be here! Good job!) and proof you aren't op material. We can pick the ops ourselves!

If you've had no reason or no warning, more than likely you're not actually being kicked! The webchat has a flaw. Often, the java overloads a user's machine and times out for no reason. We refer to it as being peered (because the message is "connection reset by peer"). To a newbie, this can be like getting kicked. All of the sudden the action stops and you're out of the room. Don't worry! We weren't being mean to you, your computer was. Yell at it, not us! Just join the room again and you'll be chatting in no time! If you are kicked for real, you'll get a message "You have been kicked from #monkeeschat by [op] [reason you were kicked]"

I do not know how to fix this besides you downloading mirc or pIRCh. It's not something we set in the script to be mean or evil. It doesn't happen to everyone (normally only to people with slow ISPs or CPUs).

mIRC is separate software made especially for chatting. There are many other chat clients like pIRCh, and IRCle. I recommend mIRC. It has many more features than the java chat and it's free. Some people get confused by the extra features and like the simplicity of the java chat.If you do want to try mIRC you can download it. #monkeeschat is found on the server irc.blitzed.org

Some browsers are java disabled. There is nothing you can do but download better software. You have two choices, you can download mIRC (see above) or you can download a newer version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape.

We do use a lot of abbreviations here! Most of them are generally used on all chat lines. Here are some common ones an their definitions:

• LOL; Laugh Out Loud-used when you would normally laugh in real life
  
• ROFLMAO;Rolling on the Floor Laughing My @ss Off-this is a variation of LOL, it's used when something is really funny
  
• <g>; Grins-used when you are saying something sarcastically, or when you would normally grin in real life
  
• <eg>; Evil Grin-A variation on {g}, this normally means there is some underlying meaning to a comment.
  
• <veg>; Very Evil Grin-sometimes {veggies} or some kind vegetable (i.e {pickles}) is used. This is like {eg} but even more evil.
  
• BTW; By The Way
  
• BRB; Be right back
  
• WB; Welcome Back
  
• BBL; Be Back Later
  
• BBIAB; Be Back in a Bit
  
• IRL; In real life-which is not chat, contrary to some beliefs
  

Flooding is filling the chat room with useless garbage. This can be by repeating characters or letters, or using garbage text. Examples:

<vixen>i love davy
<vixen>i love davy
<vixen>i love davy
<webby>aslkjdfh sakljdfhg dsfjkhgn lskdfjnr lksdfnj lksdfnb sdkfbv dkfjh dklfgjh dlkfgjh
skdfh1 sdkfjhg kdsjfgh kjdsfh kdjsfh kdsjf dsjkf jdsfkhg kdsjfhv gdkjsfhg djkfhg dkjfh
<Kretch>k
<Kretch>r
<Kretch>e
<Kretch>t
<Kretch>c
<Kretch>h

Caps are considered rude in the world of chat. It's like yelling. It's very hard to read and it's very distracting! ONLY use caps if you want to emphasize something, and even then use them sparsely. U and R and 2 abbreviations are what we call "newbie speak." There is no reason to abbreviate two and three letter words. If you ever want to be accepted seriously in the chat,you should break the habit of using them. We don't kick for U and R (we do for caps, because it causes severe headaches :-) but expect to get teased for your typing skills!

A/S/L is checking for age/sex/location of chatters. It is not allowed in the room, we cannot condone giving out personal information on the web because it could be dangerous if you give such information to the wrong person. It can also be illegal to ask a child for such information (check out the Child Online Privacy Protection Act for more info) and, as mentioned several times, many #mcers are children. Don't think you're safe because it's a Monkees room. We've had a few "nice chatters" who turned out to be real perverts.

Advertising your chat room or webpage in the room is against our rules. The reason is because it's rude to just flash your room in the middle of a conversation and leave. If you think someone would be interested in visiting your room that come to #monkeeschat, then e-mail me the details of the room, and I will link it here. You can also privately send them the URL on the chat.

Coming into the room and saying "Visit my Webpage" or "Come to my chat" is advertising. It's annoying. If you would like to get more exposure for your webpage, send it to me and I'll add it to the links section and you can even post your new URL to the #monkeeschat list! If someone asks "How is your webpage coming along?" or "What was the address of your site?", by all means, tell them! I don't mind you sharing your site or your room with interested people.

This is against network rules (not ours). You can't just PM everyone who comes into a room! However, if you have a friend in the room who wants to play monkees tea and you know of a good room for that, you can PM her. Just beware, if you PM a bunch of people and they complain, we have no choice but to ban you. That's why you should only PM those you know :-)

Cloning is have more than one connection to the chat room at one time. It basically means that you are in the room twice. The only people who ever need to be in a room twice are hackers who want to takeover. We will therefore ban and kick you if you are in the room twice. The network has rules against cloning. You're better off kicked by us than banned by them (and they have banned people for cloning before).

We knew you were going to ask that. Seriously, we are not psychic. All chatters have a "mask" that tells everyone who they are, what internet provider they are using, and if they come from java or not. A mask look like this:
*** Monkeefan (java@203-174-93.ipt.aol.com) has joined #monkeeschat
No two users have the same masks so don't try to lie your way out of something you did.

Only users of the software like mIRC and pIRCh or the newer version of the java chat can see or use colors. The colors show up as jibberish to some java users. That is why we do not allow them. This same rule applies to underline and bold characters.

Nickserv is the nick name registration enforcer. If you are using a nick that have been registered by someone else, Nickserv will ask you to change it. We have no control over Nickserv. You better do what it says :-)

Sure! All you have to do is pick a nick you like and type /msg nickserv register {password} youremail@somewhere.com
Password should be any word of your choice, don't forget it!

You can complain about being kicked to vixen. If your complaint seems to be valid and I think it was an honest mistake, then I will let you back in the room.If you do send a complaint, please include details like when you were kicked, by whom, and for what if you know. Don't expect me to know why everyone has been kicked or banned. I'm not the only op. But, I am happy to help anyone who really wants to chat with other fans.

You can send all question to vixen. I answer every question evetually.I may not be able to answer it the same day you send it, but I do eventually get to all of my mail.