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Alt.Talkers FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) v1.11 ================================================== Last Updated: 5th October 2004 Introduction ============ This FAQ aims to explain a few things about the alt.talkers newsgroup, and any newsgroups formed under it. The primary reason for writing the FAQ is that there seem to be a lot of misguided individuals who think alt.talkers is for a purpose other than that for which it was intended. There is also some material about the talkers this newsgroup *is* about. It is expected that this information will quickly become dominant in this FAQ. Contents ======== NB: a '*' means the section is new to the FAQ in this update. a '!' means the section was updated in this version of the FAQ. [The updates in this version are mostly correcting typos, plus removing] [stale URLs. Some additional client URLs would be appreciated. ] 1.0 The Newsgroup Alt.Talkers 1.1 What Is The Newsgroup Alt.Talkers Meant For? 1.2 What Is Alt.Talkers *NOT* Meant For? 2.0 Information About Talkers 2.1 Ok, I'm Not Supposed To Chat Here, How DO I Use One Of These Talkers? 2.2 Right, I've Located A Telnet Program I Can Use. Where Do I Telnet To? 2.3 Eeek! I've Connected To A Talker. What Now? 3.0 Basic Information For Types of Talker 3.1 EW-Too 3.2 OOT/JOOT ! 3.3 NUTS 3.4 iFORMS 3.5 Ncohafmuta 3.6 Amnuts 3.7 CheesePlant's House 4.0 Other Resources 4.1 A Few Talker Addresses 4.2 WWW Talker Lists 4.3 Some _link_s For Getting MUD/Talker Client Programs 4.4 Talker hosting services *************************************************************************** 1.0 The Newsgroup Alt.Talkers 1.1 What Is The Newsgroup Alt.Talkers Meant For? ============================================ Alt.talkers was created to give peole who USE talkers a place to exchange information. This might be announcements of new talkers, the reason(s) for any downtime of a particular talker, or any of a whole range of other valid reasons. There _is_ a seperate group 'alt.talkers.programming' for discussion of the programming of Talkers. If you do not have access to this group on your news server complain to your news administrator. If there is demand for a more complex hierarchy of groups I'm sure we can sort that out. For the time being alt.talkers is a fairly quiet group, so there is no need to fragment discussion into seperate groups. 1.2 What Is Alt.Talkers *NOT* Meant For? ==================================== Alt.talkers is *not* meant to be a place for people to just talk. That is what the actual talkers are for after all. If you feel the need to talk on usenet check out the talk.* hierarchy of newsgroups. If you just want to chat then check out some of the talkers that this newsgroup is supposed to be about. Alt.talkers is ALSO not meant for *ANY* advertising of any form other than that _directly_ related to talkers, i.e. a new talker, talker moving site, new talker _base_code, new talker client, talker site hosting, etc. NB: It is a given that the rules for Alt.talkers ALSO apply to all other groups within the hierarchy, until such time as it is explicitly stated otherwise. *************************************************************************** 2.0 Information About Talkers 2.1 Ok, I'm Not Supposed To Chat Here, How DO I Use One Of These Talkers? ===================================================================== Basically you need a 'telnet' program. Any users of 'unix' like machines can just do something like: telnet somemachine.somewhere 1234 Although you'd be better off trying to use a better client program than telnet for this. I have been informed that under Windows 95 you should be able to: Go to 'Start'. Go to 'Run'. Type in the talker address (as above for unix telnet). If you use windows or a mac, or other 'graphical' system then you should hopefully have an icon labelled 'telnet' or similar in with the other icons for internet applications (mail, news, and the like). The one thing to be careful of with these is that not all of them will allow you to specify a port number other than the default '23'. Most talkers run on a port above 1023, due to the design of unix-like operating systems that most talkers run on. 2.2 Right, I've Located A Telnet Program I Can Use. Where Do I Telnet To? ===================================================================== The _style_ of talkers this newsgroup was first set up to discuss is those _base_d on the 'EW-Too' code by Simon Marsh (aka Burble on Foothills). There are a few derivatives of this code now, such as summink, SensiSummink and Playground 96, and now PlayGround Plus. There are are also other types of talker, notably 'NUTS' _base_d, as well as a few 'custom' built ones that are unique. The remainder of this FAQ will concentrate on the EW-Too type talkers, because that is what the author is used to (anyone used to the others feel free to contribute a section to this FAQ). All of these talkers will have an address consisting of TWO parts. The first is the name of the machine it runs on, the second is the port number it runs on, to distinguish it from other services on that same machine. An example is: surfers.org 4242 ^ ^ | |
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