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The Meade Hall started in the early 1990's at the College of William and Mary. There, Patrons convened on the college's bulletin board system, TEAMate, where they created a chat room specifically for the Meade Hall. The Hallmasters and Patrons interacted much as they do today; the Patrons wrote their characters' actions and speech in the Hall's transcript, and Patrons would discuss their actions, chat and catch up using TEAMate's version of private messages.

As the creators of the Hall, the Hallmasters and Patrons graduated and spread to the corners of the country, the Meade Hall was all but forgotten. Patrons and HMs would talk about resurrecting it, but it wasn't until May of 1998 that the Meade Hall came back online.

Internet Relay Chat

The first obstacle was finding a place where all the Patrons and Hallmasters could get together, despite being hundreds or thousands of miles apart from one another, and still be able to create the atmosphere that made the Meade Hall as fun and exciting as it once was. After looking at several options, I kept returning to Internet Relay Chat, or IRC.

I could go on and on about IRC and why I think it's the best option for the Meade Hall. But, because so many other people on the Internet have done so already, I'll just point you in the right direction.

There's a great site called NewIRCusers.com. It has tons of information for the IRC newbie, from what clients to use and how to set them up, to the basic and advanced commands used to do things on IRC. Definitely start here if you haven't used IRC before, or if your IRC commands are rusty.

Meade Hall Conventions

In addition to the standard IRC commands, there are several Meade Hall-specific conventions that have held over from the days when the Hall lived on TEAMate. Here's a quick run-down of those commands, so you won't feel totally left out:

Command / Convention	What It Means
::Braz grins::	Anything surrounded by a set of double colons is considered narrative. Plain text, OTOH, is considered as spoken text.
[Hold on, pizza's here...]	When text is surrounded by brackets, this is considered text said by Patrons, and not part of the official transcript. Usually, we use the bracketed text to express laughter. [LOL!]
{Is it safe?}	Text surrounded by curly braces is in some not-usually-understood language or communication. It could be elvish, it could be psionics, or sign language. Whatever it is should be apparent from the context. If your character understands the mode of communication, feel free to respond in kind. Otherwise... well, you can always ask.

How to Join the Meade Hall

The Meade Hall is currently run every Monday night, starting at 8:00 PM and running until 10:00, though it sometimes runs a little bit longer. If there is a night you would be more able to join the Meade Hall on, please let the Hallmasters know, and we'll see what we can do!!

The Meade Hall runs on irc.meadehall.org. Point your IRC client to this server, and look for the #MeadeHallChat channel. Any user with ops can invite you, and let you know who the Hallmaster is for that evening.

As far as IRC clients go, I'd recommend mIRC for all the Wintel users in the world. It's easy enough for the new IRC user to get up and running with little hassle, but configurable enough to keep the Power Users happy.

For users of the MacOS, we've found that Snak seems to be the preferred client. It's shareware, and only runs for 30 days without being registered, however. A slight caveat.

Patrons' Site

HM's Site