New Newbie Rules

The first big change is the "visit Whyville on 5 different days before you can chat" delay for newbies. Hopefully, newbies will spend more time exploring the many, many parts of Whyville other than chatting, especially the games, which should bring down the begging you see in the Square.

The main reason for the delay, though, is to keep out child predators and people who only come to Whyville to curse and say foul things. We believe that most of these freaky people are looking for an easy way to attack people, and they won't have the patience to visit five times on five different days. Without the delay, any cyber-freak could sign-up to Whyville right away and start harassing our citizens with just a few clicks, and that was lame. Now, most of those people will give up before the 5-day delay.

There is a way to get around the delay, though -- if you get your salary up to above 20 clams, you'll be able to chat the third day. We figure any newbie committed enough to get that kind of salary should make a good citizen of our town.

Rules like these may seem strange and unfair at first, but give our reasons some consideration. We hope that they make sense to you too.

Vaporize

For those that last through the week, our two new tools come into play. The first one is vaporize: if you run into somebody who upsets you -- whether it's your annoying brother or some foul-mouthed citizen -- and you wish you never had to see or hear them again, just vaporize 'em!

When you type in vaporize so-and-so (where so-and-so is the person's name, duh), that person totally disappears for you and only you. You can't see their face, can't hear what they say in chat, can't even get Y-mail from them! To make this permanent, go into your Address Book and click "vaporize" for that person. (Obviously, you do the reverse if you want to un-vaporize somebody.)

You can also double-click on the person -- that will bring up a menu of options, from the old warn and silence to the new vaporize and 911.

But don't just vaporize anybody that bugs you! For one, you'd end up all alone if you did that to everybody! After all, it's the variety of opinions in Whyville that helps make it the coolest place on the web! For another, if that person who bugs you is a stalker, a child predator, a generally foul element that means harm to our town, there's something much better that you can do, something that'll help us get rid of him!

The 911 Report Tool

Don't use 911 on everybody -- it's ONLY for cybering junkies, stalkers, and child predators. It's also for people who ask for private information (like where somebody lives, their full name, that kind of thing) or who say what other people's info is, because those people could be stalkers or predators. The point is, use 911 when you think somebody is a danger to our community, who threatens the safety of our town.

When you find somebody that should be reported, type "report so-and-so", or you can double-click on the person and select report. You'll need to fill out a form, so make sure you know what time the problem happened and in what room, otherwise City Workers won't be able to find the incident in their logs, and you may lose a whole week of chat privileges for abusing 911.

Be very careful using 911 -- you only get one report at a time, so it had better be a true one!

In Summary...