CHATTING AND MESSAGE BOARDS

CHATTING
For person-to-person chatting and seeing the members that are online and available for contact, we are recommending that Summerlands Members use the following FREE software:  ICQ.

We have a permanent chat room on the StarLink IRC Network at StarlinkIRC:US,MI,Rochester:6667. Point your IRC software to that address and come to the room named #summerlands. Persons without IRC Chat software can also visit the #summerlands room using our chat page. It's simple, quick and easy to use.   Just login, point, click, and you're there!  This site allows ActiveX compatible browsers to conduct IRC Chat sessions.  We are working to be able to provide you with WebX onsite chatting, which will be more user friendly than either ActiveX or Java.  Stay tuned for further developments in this area.

Even though we have our our own chat room on site that can be accessed using either ActiveX or Java (depending on which room you use), we *Highly Recommend* getting one of the IRC (internet relay chat) softwares below.  The onsite connections are generally just there so you can access us in the #summerlands room and we can help you get set up with the IRC software if you are having problems.  We recommend either pIRCh or mIRC for the PCs and IRCle for the Macs.
http://tucows.alpha1.net/adnload/dlpirch.html
http://www.geocities.com/~mirc/

http://www.ircle.com

A complete schedule for Chat and other Summerlands activities can be found on the Summerlands Calendar. We will open the room on additional times and nights as different classes become available or different chat groups are added.

MESSAGE BOARDS
Each site has it's own automatically threading message board. Plus there is also a message board out on the Bruidhean for non-members/guests to use. Using our message boards is a pretty straight forward process. Just follow the directions on the buttons and you can post a message, reply to a message, read messages, and do a search for certain words, dates, people or topics. There is also a navbar on the bottom of the Message Board pages that allows members to "zip" from board to board, site to site, or library to library.  We recommend using the 'subscribe' function on the control bar at the top of the message boards to subscribe to a particular board that you like.  This will forward every message that is posted to that board straight into your mailbox so that you are sure not to miss anything.  It also has a link on the bottom of those forwarded messages so that you can go directly back to that board if you would like to make a reply to that message.  The old messages automatically scroll off the bottom of the board after 60 days.  So, if you'd like to see previous discussions, just click on the Archived link on the control bar... or if you'd like to see ALL the messages rather than just the first one listed or any NEW messages, then just click 'expand' on the control bar. (or Condense to fold them back to initial and new message format). The message boards also allow you to search for information. This is especially useful in compiling links to the thousands of articles contained in our archives.