The 'Ignore' Function (VIP-only feature)

[Special thanks to Kelsea Hoare in the Newbie Question Forum for the help.]

Let's face it. Not everything will come up roses. Some places less than others. In most cases, I'd like to think you can talk out your differences, but in cases where you can't, that's where the 'Ignore' Function comes in.

It's pretty easy to use. It's just not obvious where to find it.

Well, okay, it is obvious where to find it once you know where it is. You just start wondering why you never realized it was there before once you do.

Keep in mind that this is a VIP-only feature, so if you're not VIP, you won't see it.

So, take a forum post, any forum post and look at the message header bar above the actual content of the message. Ya know, the pale blue bar that says who the post is by, who it's addressed to, messageID and date and time?

When you're VIP, you'll see an empty word balloon beside the name of the person who wrote the post, like so:



That's your trusty 'ignore' button...

To use simply click it, and it turns into a word balloon with an ellipsis:



The message text becomes hidden and you'll get a notice informing you that the user is ignored. From this moment on, anything this user says will be hidden from view.

'Course if you're curious enough, you can click on 'View message' to see if the ignored user has anything of substance to say. (Who knows? They may surprise you.) This will not undo the 'ignore' setting on this user. You just get to see what they said in that one post.

To remove an 'ignore' on a person, just click on the ellipsis word balloon above an ignored users message. It'll turn back into an empty word balloon, and it'll show all posts by this user again.





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The Main Menu Bar

Once you've created an account and logged into Popmundo, you'll notice this Menu Bar on the top of every page (without the crappy numbering, of course):


This Menu Bar will be your primary mode of navigation in the game. What each menu item is... that's pretty much self-explanatory, but I've listed them anyway, just so I can link to each item later if/when I write up more detailed entries for each.

That's if/when I get around to it.

1. Local City Time. Not to be confused with your local time of your location in real life. Your character may start out in a single city and spend most of your time there doing things and meeting people, but eventually you're going to wander into the great big world.
   
   This is when timezones will become the bane of your existence.
   
   The timezone of each city corresponds to the timezone of its real life counterpart (for most of the year anyway. There seems to be a hiccup twice a year when the world switches on to and off of Daylight Savings Time).
   
   So 8am in Paris in the game would be 8am in the real Paris.
   
   Keep that in mind when scheduling jams, gigs, bus departures and such. 'Tis not fun to schedule your tour bus only to find out you didn't take timezones into account and left too late for you to make your big concert in time.



2. City takes you to the City Screen, where you can find more detailed information on the city your character is currently in.
   
   More on this on a future entry.



3. Character goes to the screen where you can access pretty much everything related to the character you play in Popmundo. Probably the screen you'll spend the most time on in the game.
   
   I'll definitely type up an entry on this one.



4. Career leads to the screen containing information on your (musical) Career. Also sometimes called the Artist Page or the Band Page. Not to be confused with any non-musical career your character may also have. The screen you'll probably spend the second most time on in the game.
   
   Another one that'll need an entry.
   
   Probably several entries actually.



5. Company. (Only available to Company License holders.) Gives you access to the Company Screen. More on this later.



6. Location brings up details about the specific place (often called a 'locale') your character is currently in.



7. Community takes you to the Community Screen, where you can access information on the latest Game Development and Community News; the Charts; the in-game, in-character Magazine 'It's Pop'; and some other information that's escaped my mind at the moment. Hopefully, I'll remember most of it when I get to typing up that entry.



8. VIP leads to information on VIP Subscriptions. (Hey, somebody's gotta pay for those servers.)



9. Menu Icons. A few extra links behind the icons that lead to additional tools, features and functions. From left to right: the Phone (a VIP-only feature), the in-game Search Engine, the Discussion Forums (Will I be lynched if I say "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here"?), the Help Pages and the 'Log Out' button.

Also, missing from the Menu Bar is the link to the 'CEO' screen. (Mainly because I wasn't a CEO at the time I took the screen shot, and totally forgot about it. Normally, it's inbetween 'Company' and 'Location'.) More on CEOs in a later entry.

As I mentioned earlier, I'll update this post with links to entries that relate to different items in the Menu Bar. I just haven't written them yet, and it's going to take a lot of time to cover all these different things.


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Forum Message ID xxx.yy

Every single individual message (also sometimes called a 'post') in the in-game discussion forums of Popmundo has a unique ID number, found on the upper-right of each message header as highlighted on the image below:



The first six (or more) digits before the period identify the unique thread ID. (For those not familiar with forums in general, the term 'thread' is used to describe a series of individual forum posts that are ideally linked together by topic of discussion, but considering the organic and ever-changing nature of conversation in general that's rarely the case. More often than not, the only thing linking a particular message to a thread is the fact that it's a reply to a previous post that was a reply to a post preceding that one... and so on and so forth... And I'm rambling again... )

The digits after the period (ranging from 1 to 1000) represent that particular message's place in its thread. So message xxx.1 would be the first post in a thread, xxx.2 would be the second, xxx.365 would be the 365th post, and so on.)

Okay, I admit that's all dull and boring. But if you ever need to find or link to a specific message in the forums, it's something you'd need to know.

(I'll get into finding and linking to specific forum posts some other time.)



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