Legion promoted to ActiveWiki Administration

We don't post a ton of news out of the ActiveWiki these days, but today I'd like to welcome Legion to our team.  If you haven't taken a look at the recent changes page lately, you wouldn't know about this... but we've been dealing with a pretty horrible spambot problem for a few weeks now at least.  It had gotten so bad that GSK has implemented a protocol for deleting and banning these new accounts/pages on sight, but they post with such frequency that it's a bit of a chore to cleanup if one of the administrators ignores the page for more then a day.

Since GSK and I are the only currently active community administrators, bringing another guy onto the team was desirable and Legion stepped up and volunteered before it had even come to asking for help. :)

From what I understand of the problem it's a pretty fix if someone who knew what they were doing had access to the wiki backend.  Unfortunately neither of those conditions are currently met, so we have to deal with this on the frontside.  :(

At any rate, feel free to welcome Legion to our team by leaving a comment on his talk page.

Tutorial - Navigating the ActiveWiki

Over at the ActiveWiki we get a lot of questions from folks who aren't used to wiki software, and consequently have difficulties both navigating and editing the Wiki.  I've offered to teach a class on the subject before and have even taught individuals directly.  As a followup to that, I feel that a quick tutorial may help ease a lot of the confusion in getting around.

Vintage Logo

Before I begin with the details, you should think of the wiki as an outline.  The navigation throughout the entire wiki is formatted as an outline, where important or general topics link to sub-topics that are elaborated on.  You won't find pages on the ActiveWiki that are titled "How to Build," but you will find very detailed lists of the building commands and very intricate examples of how each one works.  The key to successfully navigating the ActiveWiki -- or any wiki, really -- is to know what you're looking for, and then to pursue that as a topic.

Building - Byte's Interactive Building Class, detailing the At trigger and Timer command

For anyone who missed it, Byte taught an excellent class detailing AT trigger and Timer command today.  This topic was of particular interest to me, because I love building games and characters you can interact with.  Virtual buildings and cities are great, but what's the point if they're lifeless?

Both of these new features exist to make interactive building a bit easier, and they expand upon what we could do originally with astart scripting.  For those of you who are lost, here's a rundown:

AT trigger - The at trigger will activate commands after a set amount of time, or at a scheduled time in VRT.

Byte:    The at trigger has two uses.  It is used to either trigger a set of commands at a certain point during a timer, or to trigger a set of commands in sync with the VRT clock.

TIMER command - The timer command creates a timer in memory that allows a user to activate events after a set amount of time.

Byte:    First off the timer command can be used with any trigger, even the at trigger, to create, reset, or stop a timer with a given name.
Byte:    Every timer has a duration, which is the number of milliseconds the timer will last for.
Byte:    An example of a timer called ABC with a duration of 1 second would be:  create timer ABC 1000
Byte:    Timers have multiple parameters, though.  They take the form: <trigger> timer tmName duration [loop=1] [stop | reset] [global]