HTML-enabled means that each tag can do all the same things a webpage can do: host pictures, sounds, music, movies, drop down selection boxes, marquees, buttons, bulleted lists, etc. If a user knows how to create webpages straight from html code, the possibilities are only limited by the few rules and restrictions Walter himself imposed on the rooms.
Because there are numerous URLs (web addressess) that lead to the same two chatrooms, there are numerous ways to get there and a great amount of people in the chatrooms. The chatrooms are truly international, although most users speak English. Occasionally other languages are spoken. Most people find the chatrooms by typing random URLs out of boredom or by word of mouth from friends but a very few find them though links from other websites. The most common URLs people use to get into the two rooms are Smile.com and 99.com. There are no official names for the two rooms, but most commonly they are referred to as smile.com and sexy.com respectively. They are also referred to by their other URLs at times. Here are some of the URLs that lead into each of the rooms.
The rooms function and look the same no matter which URL is used to enter the room, except for the background color perhaps. An example is shown below.
When a user first enters through a URL to one of the rooms, the servers assign a random color and font style for the user. The user's name in the chatroom depends on which URL was used to enter the chatroom. If the URL advise.com was used to enter, the users name would be advise. If instead the user used the URL donkeydoofus.advise.com, which would lead to the same chatroom as advise.com, the user's name would be donkeydoofus. If the user entered through www.donkeydoofus.advise.com, the user would be labeled www.donkeydoofus. Usually simply typing a message and pressing enter will send a message into the room, but if that does not work, there is a message typing area and a send button in the top frame of the window. Messages appear in the frame below at the top of the frame, along with the user's name, in the font and color assigned to the user.
A user is not stuck with the name, font, and colors the server assigns to the user. The user can pull down the top frame where the typing area is to reveal various controls to personalize the user's messages and name tag.
Directly below the message typing area are three drop down boxes that allow the user to select which font family, size, and style are used to display messages from that user. Selecting the font from the drop down boxes will change the font immediately and the is no need to press the apply button or the enter button. Below the font selection boxes is a working example of what the user's name tag (tag for short) and messages will look like. Below that is the most important part of the controls: the html text box. It is here the user can insert pictures, messages, and other html elements that will appear in each message the user sends. At first the html text box will contian by default
<n> || <v>The <n> stands in for the server's default name for the user and <v> stands in for the value(s) input into the message typing area. is just html code for empty space, put there as a design consideration and to make the room less hard on the eyes. || functions to separate the tag from the message and put them in different areas. Of all these elements, only <v> should not be deleted. If it is, the messages the user types will not appear. Any changes to the html text box will only take effect after the apply html button to the right of the text box and will be reflected in the tag and message example. If the user desires the values in the html text box to return to the default values, the user can press the reset html button to do so. The ignored button probably produces a list of users the user has chosen to ignore. Last but not least is the color picker just below the send button. The colored box changes color as the mouse moves over it and the color mode selects what gets its color changed: the background or the foreground (the text).
The user in the example above made several changes to his tag to get it the way it looks. First, he replaced the <n> with a personal name for himself, not me. If the user did not delete the name element, the user's default name would have appeared besides his personal name. The user also included a picture in his tag. The html tag <img src="URL"> was not nescessary to post the picture, as the rules of the chatroom allow users to post pictures by only typing the picture's URL. The only pictures that can be posted are pictures already on the internet; users cannot post pictures from thier computers. The user also put in a marquee in the message part of the tag. The following is a marquee: Marquees usually need end tags in html, but since it is the last element in the textbox, the rules of the chatroom still allow the user's marquee to function. The html textbox is not the only place html elements will work. html can be typed in the message typing area and still work.
The two chatrooms have no moderator and users are free to do what they want. This allows unsavory conversations and pornographic pictures to be posted, but users have the option of ignoring other users. This can be done by simply clicking on a user's name tag and clicking yes on the message that pops up. After this, all messages from the ignored user will not appear on the computer screen of the user who ignored him/her. Walter Long has changed the rules of the chatrooms many times, but the ignore option seems to have always been present. In the future, no doubt, Walter will change the rules again out of boredom, and I will try to keep this page current. If you need any other questions answered, ask the users of the room. There is always at least one charitable person willing to help.
Other helpful sites
Cyberdude's home place stuff Layman's Encyclopedia of HTML