10 Essential Tips For Online Bingo Chat Rooms

1. What makes a good chat room?

Every bingo site you come across will have at least one chat room. It's what's most important in making a bingo community. It's a place where regular players can chat, commiserate over losing, congratulate each on their winnings or just chat nonsense. How busy a chat room is, how it is moderated, what games are played on it all need to be balanced to make a good chat room

2. Whats the point of chat rooms?

Chat rooms have a two fold purpose. The main one for regular players is to meet people and to socialise, but the best use of a chat room for a newbie bingo player is to speak to the chat moderator (often known as the CM) and ask them any questions about how to play. On most chat room there will be a button of some description which will allow players to talk privately to the CM to ask queries without their questions getting lost in amongst everyone elses chat.

3. Is a busy chat room neccessarily a good chat room?

At first it can be quite daunting to start chatting as the pace of chat can sometimes be overwhelming. If a bingo site only has one chat room with fifty or more people having different conversations then it can be very hard to get in on it. Having more chat rooms with less people is always better. Even if there are only four or five people in the chat room, people will talk! It's the driving force behind the success of online bingo. Let's face it, playing bingo is not up there with 'extreme ironing' in the excitement stakes (although winning is!), but the social life of an 'extreme pepsi-max ironer' is not nearly as good as that of an avid online bingo player. So, the first thing to note when looking at a bingo chat room is how quickly are the conversations flowing

4. Chat rooms? I thought I was playing bingo?

Chat rooms are regularly used during, before and after the games are underway. How does this happen? Well, all modern sites are designed to include a chat room in the same window that you play bingo in. This means you can keep an eye on the game at the same time as chatting! What a clever idea.

5. What is someone oversteps the mark?

From time to time a drunk fool or someone with nothing better to do will popup during a game of bingo and start spreading abuse! Mr Tiddles has seen it himself. It is anonymous so people think they can swear sometimes or be rude to other players and get away with it. This is where moderators come in. All good bingo sites will have a moderator which is someone who just watches the chat and makes sure there is no swearing and so forth. If someone is abusive they will usually be banned for 24 hours and if it happens again, then banned for a longer period of time.

6. What do all those faces mean?

Most chat rooms will have some smiley faces (known as emotions) at the bottom of the chat window. These are for people to show how they are feeling. A picture paints a thousand words as they say. You may be familiar with these from MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger or something similar to that. Here is an explanation of the more common ones taken from Wink Bingo's chat room:

	I'm happy!
	I'm very happy!
	Excellent!
	Wink wink, know what I mean!
	Cool as a cat!
	Check me out!
	Goodness!
	Arrgh!
	Things are not going well!!
	Holey Moley!

7. You say they play games in the chat rooms?

Yes! Usually the chat moderators will play games in chat rooms with the people chatting. They may ask a question or give a prize when a certain event happens. The prizes are usually bingo points, which work as free credits for playing bingo. The CM's also generally encourage all the chatters to have a good time!

8. Acronyms

All chat rooms are littered with acronyms, some of which there may be buttons for, and others for which people just learn from being around chat rooms a lot! For a detailed description of all the main ones, chech out the bingo lingo page. Here's a couple just to get you started though:

GL - Good Luck
WTG - Way to go!
BRB - Be right back
TY - Thank you
LOL - Laugh out lound
ROFL - Roll on floor laughing
3TG - 3 to go (as in three sqaures left to cover for Bingo)
2TG - 2 to go (as in three sqaures left to cover for Bingo)
1TG - 1 to go (as in three sqaures left to cover for Bingo)

9. What chat options am I likely to see?

Usually if a site offers more than one chat room (like most do) then you can access them usually by a drop down menu. There should be a list of people in the chat room which you should be able to access. Changing the writing size and colour and clearing all the text are usual options on all chat rooms. Usually the number of people chatting will also be displayed.

10. What can I do if the chat begins to bore me?

Start making ASCII pictures! These are pictures made up of keyboard characters. For example here's on of Mr Tiddles!:

				
             								 ||\            | |
                                            /   \           | |
                                           /|)   `._________| |
           								  <                   |
                                           `.__.              |
                                                \            /
                                                || |-----(  (
                                                || |     ))  )
                                               ((__/    ((__/

Here are a few example chatrooms that you may come across. Don't some of them look similar?