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.
Like every other site on the internet, we are occasionally entertained by people and/or machines who are more interested in peddling their wares than applying their mind to the intractable problem of the third quadrant. Some avant garde artificial intelligence techniques (and I mean this quite literally, since they have indeed been imported from the future) have been deployed to detect when this is taking place. If your intent is savoury, you'll be given guidance as to what to pop into the magic word box to demonstrate your credentials. Contact the admin (see below) if you are unable to solve the riddle.
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.
Anything and everything you post here is visible to the entire universe - this being the point of the internet, after all. You are expected to understand - and take full responsibility for - the consequences of posting any details about yourself that would allow your identity or whereabouts to be gleaned by anonymous third parties. If you can't agree to this, don't post.
If you choose non-standard site settings from the Settings page you have the option to store these in a cookie so that they are remembered on future visits. The sole use of this cookie is to store these settings within your browser. I have no way of identifying you from this cookie. Other information provided by your browser may be used as a means to aid management of the server (e.g., fighting spam, countering attacks, optimisation etc) but no other purpose. In particular, it is not shared with any third party.
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?