How To Navigate a Citadel BBS

When you connect to a Citadel, you’ll get something like the screen below. The important buttons are the Log In Button on the Left menu and the navigation and post controls at the top bar of the main window – circled in red below. Those buttons change based on the type of room you’re in – but Ungoto, Skip this room and Goto Next room are always available options.

The first thing to do is click Log In – which will open a Log In dialog You can enter your username and password here, or Register if you are a new user.

On your first log-in, EVERY message in EVERY room is a "NEW" message, which means you may be seeing months or even years of conversations that meander, go off topic, go back on topic, have had messages deleted... and each room can take a long time to wade through, especially if you try and read every message in every room. This may initially make a lot of people give up before they've seen the beauty of how this works.

Generally you will start in a room called “Lobby”. Here the new messages are displayed in pages. The total number of pages is displayed at the bottom of the screen, and the page you are on is displayed with brackets around it.

The trick usually is, on your first call, just <G>oto each room, one after the other. You <G>oto the next room with unread messages by clicking the “Goto next room” icon at the top of the window.

When <G>oto the next room, you’re taken to the next room with new messages, and all messages in the previous room are marked read.

<G>oto the next room, and so on until you find yourself back in the Lobby. You’ve now made a full circuit of all the rooms in the Citadel.




At the end click the Log Off button (or in the web client, log out). When you do this, all these changes are saved. 

Then on your next call - new messages will be much more manageable - and you'll be able to pick up on the CURRENT conversation in each room and start to contribute. 

Imagine if the first time you entered Facebook, you saw every message posted by EVERY person on your friend list (and you had a complete friend list). But the next time you went back, only the messages since the LAST message you read on your first visit would show as new. 

That is what Citadel does. 

Paranoid Delusions - Sysop - The Sanitarium BBS https://secure.wallofhate.com  http://wallofhate.com

This document is available in .docx format in the file directory room "TheSanitarium" on The Sanitarium BBS. Feel free to distribute freely.