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TABLE OF CONTENTS
About Tripod Membership
Homepage Building Help
Help With Chat
Help With Message Boards
Pod Help
Search Help
Web and Community Guide Help
Personalization Help
Reporting Abuse at Tripod
Tripod Chat Troubleshooting
This section attempts to address potential problems with Tripod
Chat. Peruse this list of possible gaffes and goofs to see if the
glitch you're looking at is something we expected.
- Why doesn't the back button work in chat?
- Why doesn't my scroll bar work properly?
- Why did I stop receiving messages?
Q: Why doesn't the back button work in chat?
The back button is completely local to your browser. Chat doesn't get any signal when you hit the back button, so it can't properly react. You will get out-of-date pages, or perhaps a note saying that the page has expired.
The solution is simple. Don't use the back button. Leave a chat room by using the "exit" button, or by typing /exit or /quit.
Q: Why doesn't my scroll bar work properly?
If your scroll bar isn't working right, you have several options:
Set your push time to 0. (Type /push 0). The page will load at once, and the scroll bar will then appear. The downside to this is that you will have to refresh the screen manually whenever you want to see new messages.
Type /bottom to set the push time to 0 and to put the text input box at the bottom of the page. This works well on many platforms because despite having to manually refresh, the latest messages and your text box are right next to each other.
If you're just lurking, hit refresh often to prevent Chat from assuming you've lost interest, and to prevent the list of other people's messages from scrolling off the screen.
Make the text size smaller, so more text fits on your screen. (Use the /textsize command. Also, check out the /space command to make sure Chat isn't printing blank space between messages.)
Limit the number of old messages that appear on your screen when you refresh or say something. (You can use the /lookback, /messages, and /overlap commands for this.)
In any case, check out the Customizing Chat section for explanations of all these commands.
Q: Why did I stop receiving messages?
If you're running Netscape, it's probably because you have been inactive (idle) for a while, and the chat room thinks you've lost interest or gone away. Say something! This is Chat, after all, not TV. Or, if you're feeling quiet, you can just click "refresh."
On non-Netscape browsers, unfortunately, by default you never receive new messages automatically. You will have to manually click "refresh" to see new messages.