If, when listening to Radio Four, you're disappointed when the immortal words "And now it's time to play a game called Mornington Crescent" aren't uttered, you've come to the right place. If that makes as much sense as a flatpack furniture assembly instruction booklet, have a look around. If it floats your boat, join in. If it doesn't, don't panic: your statutory rights are not affected.
Each match has a well-defined 'winning stance'. If you play this, and the server believes you mean it, the bout will close and a shiny new slot will appear in its place. A couple of points of etiquette: lurker's victories are normally declared null or void (but not both). It's sometimes helpful to hoist ideas for new events up the designated flagpole in the Banter Page to ensure a fighting chance of attracting a larger field than one.
The trick is to insert some HTML into your stance. This may be enough of a hint for some, but the unenlightened will need a helping hand. Your mission is to insert tags (commands, if you will) into your stance that tell web browsers to switch on (and, crucially, off) bold text and the like. <b> is the tag that emboldens text, <i> does italics. Tags should be wrapped around text <b>like</b> <i>this</i>. Luckily for us all, Dr Qu+xum has a lucid explanation of wide ambit on his website.
This site steals an idea from Dan's site, namely a hidden text feature. Wrap some text you don't want to be revealed immediately in a <hide> - </hide> pair. When your stance is submitted, a thousand fairies raise themselves from a deep slumber and hide your secrets away until brushed upon by passers by. The lovely Samantha will now demonstrate: (View the source to read the hidden text) . Those of you watching in black and white can view the hidden text in the source, just like in the olden days of HTML comments. Unfortunately - but only for really dull technical reasons - you can't put HTML into hidden text (yet).
The STEAM power driving this site has an exciting new auto-dwimmery module installed, which transforms dodgy old Bakelite HTML into shiny new Steel and Glass HTML for the New Millennium™. This means that it will sometimes not Do What You Mean, and Do Something Else Instead. Likely culprits are missing closing tags and the use of tags which are forbidden on account of their potential to rock the applecart. When this happens click the 'What Happened?' button.
Sometimes when making a stance that includes links to other sites, you'll be asked for a magic word to pop in the box. This will allow your stance to appear. Other uses for this box may be employed at some point in the future.
The scripts that go together to make this site do what it do were hacked up by rab and is emblazoned with a logo lovingly crafted by Projoy back in the days of yore and more recently brutally mutilated by rab. In more general terms, we are of course indebted to BBC Radio Four for the inspiration and to similar sites past and present (Delphi, York, MCiOS, Pants, Orange, BPMCF, YAMCS and any others I might have forgotten) for showing the way.
Although it's easiest to leave a message on The Banter Page, you can contact rab personally by noting that the URL of this page contains 'rab.org.uk'. Slap rab's name in front of that with an 'at' sign and you'll be done. You might wish to include your nom de trellis to aid identification.
Mañana, darling.
What do you think?