![[Beacon Hall Archive]](image/bha.jpg "[Beacon Hall Archive]")
This is a page for officers concerning the HOUSE verb and related officer-specific privileges and abilities. The exact commands available may depend on the officer's position. Although there is an in-game help, here we attempt to provide a comprehensive and explanatory list, including examples.
It is intended essentially as an officer training manual as well as convenient reference. Much of the information is similar to what can be found in the official manual (Cooperative Houses of Elanthia - Officer's Manual.pdf), which is the authoritative guide. However, this version is not only fine-tuned for Beacon Hall specifically, but also offers more elaboration as well as full examples in an aim to be as comprehensive as possible. It also aims to spice up the droll of verbiage with some additional flavor.
Because of these unique and potentially significant commands and access rights, Beacon Hall Officers must never share their account passwords with others. This is stated clearly in the Officer's Manual. Do you really want to get blamed for the loss of a hundred million silvers?
At present, this is just a copy/paste from the in-game text for the Chair. I will add any differences with other officers as well as the linking to subsections of this article as I proceed to complete it.
| COMMAND | Description |
| HOUSE EVENT | Access tools for setting up House events |
| HOUSE EJECT {player};{reason} | Eject player from your house or annex areas for a period of 48 hours. |
| HOUSE EJECT LIST | List all players ejected from your grounds within the last year. |
| HOUSE NOTE READ [number] | Read the last [number] messages between your House and the House Controller (default 10) |
| HOUSE NOTE SEND; {message} | Send a message to the House Controller |
| HOUSE NOTE SEND EMAIL; {message} | Send a message to the House Controller in-game and via e-mail. |
| HOUSE EVENTLOG [number] [BRIEF] | View the last [number] messages in the House's event log (default 20) |
| HOUSE ACCOUNTING [number] [BRIEF] | View the last [number] messages in the House's accounting log (default 20) |
| HOUSE ROSTER [days] | List members recorded on House roster optionally only displaying those who have been seen in the last [days] days |
| HOUSE NEWS [command] | News submission |
| HOUSE TENT [command] | Tent commands |
| HOUSE DUES [command] | Modifies house dues. |
| HOUSE MOD [command] | Message of the Day commands. |
| HOUSE HOURS [LAST|CURRENT|ALL] | Shows last|current|all month officer hours. |
| HOUSE VOTE CLEAR | Clear current voting information, start a new vote |
| HOUSE VOTE TITLE; {title} | Title of the current vote (what is being voted on) |
| HOUSE VOTE OPTION; {option} | Add new voting option |
| HOUSE VOTE START {SECRET|OPEN} | Start current vote (secret ballot or open ballot) |
| HOUSE VOTE END | End the current vote |
| HOUSE VOTE RESULTS | View the vote results |
| HOUSE VOTE RESULTS DETAILED | View the list of members voting for each option (only available for open votes) |
House votes are used to allow members of a House to vote on anything of interest to the House as a whole. Once the vote has been STARTed, no further changes to the vote setup may be made without starting over via HOUSE VOTE CLEAR. Results may only be viewed once a vote has been ended.
an oval mahogany cart, affectionately known as 'Wobbly'
The main food cart of Beacon Hall. Wobbly's home is not Town Commons as some may mistakenly believe, but in fact the Archive Pantry, which is past the door in the kitchen.
> pull lever
> slap cart
> look in pantry
> pull cart
> push cart
This command probably should be HOUSE CRIER to be more informative, since, for example, it has absolutely no relation to the HOUSE EVENTLOG concept of an 'event', although it is related to Beacon Hall events in the sense that you may want to circulate a crier prior to the beginning of the event.
A page and a half of the Officer's Manual is dedicated to this verb, so only brief remarks are given here, and the interested reader is referred to the official documentation.
For instance, an example one at Beacon Hall is the gem2 crier, used for Gem of Fate:
A loud crack of thunder suddenly rips through the air. When the din clears, a lone voice is heard shouting, "Gem of Fate is starting soon!"
The proper verbiage to render this result is:
>house event execute gem2
which will preview the crier to be sure it is the one you want, followed by
>house event execute gem2 confirm
Note that the 'confirm' aspect is tacked on to the end of the entire command, and it is not either
>house event confirm
nor
>house event execute confirm
which will only give cryptic and unhelpful output.
However, it is a good thing that these commands are multi-stepped and difficult to enter by mistake, since in this case it sends a message to everyone in the realm of River's Rest! Never issue HOUSE EVENT EXECUTE commands except before an event, and be sure it is the proper crier. It is usually best to send the crier just once about five minutes before an event.
If you would like a new crier for your event, be sure to submit it in advance, since they must be individually approved by the CHE Guru team. The process is expedited if you properly limit the realm and location, and are extremely thorough on reviewing your grammar. Most HOUSE EVENT items which are denied are from grammatical mistakes.
This command is a last-resort available to officers to physically eject a disruptive individual and prevent entry to the Beacon Hall grounds for 48 hours. Because Beacon Hall is always open to the public, in principle Beacon Hall ought to have more reason than most CHEs to EJECT characters (where otherwise simply removing them from inside the house would prevent them from coming back); despite this fact, it has rarely been required, since most people that live around River's Rest and attend our events act like adults and have a proper concept of how to role-play and remain in-character.
In principle a character should be warned prior to being EJECTed; however, depending on the circumstances, a warning may take too long in the case of blatant misbehavior, and more damage could result by the additional delay in issuing a warning or the repercussions of an immature individual to being formally threatened.
It seems unnecessary to give an explanation of when it is appropriate to use this command. If you have to ask, the answer is decidedly yes! It's only for 48 hours, anyway. Just don't use this as a prank on your friends, please.
Most likely, similar to other HOUSE commands with a semicolon, the main point for success is to not put a space after the semicolon
>house eject kaldonis;He imploded everyone!
This verb is extremely straight-forward. It shows anyone removed from the Beacon Hall grounds within the past year via HOUSE EJECT; despite the lengthy duration of the log, it is rare to see anything listed there. A rare log showing actual data is presented to shame the person who managed to get ejected from Beacon Hall.
>house eject list
Note: Bolded entries are currently active ejections.
Name Expiration Reason
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leash 10/14/2013 21:47:56 CDT Assault on house grounds
This command lets you review the messages sent by officers or the CHE guru to the system (which may also be syndicated to the CHE guru via email). To submit a NOTE to this system, see HOUSE NOTE SEND.
Our records appear to go back as far as April 2004. Apparently upon a time this system was used for more casual communication between the CHE guru team and Beacon Hall officers. However, this method of basic communication was last used by GM Alyias in May 2011 (and only sparsely after 2007). The present CHE guru team seems to prefer emailing officers directly, so long as they have the appropriate contact information.
These days, the main function is for officers to make formal records of events. This is necessary to obtain Influence Points. Messages must be submitted both before events (to show that they are planned) as well as after events (to record the number of attendees, confirm the event occurred, and specify the practical duration).
This command is very straight-forward to use, so no examples are given here.
This is the verb used by Beacon Hall officers to submit notes to the system, which can be reviewed by Beacon Hall officers via HOUSE NOTE READ as well as the CHE GM guru team. It is also possible to have a submitted message additionally syndicated by email to the CHE guru by using HOUSE NOTE SEND EMAIL. The distinction between these two is somewhat unclear, but in principle for event reporting, one should also send it via email to ensure the allocation of Influence Points.
The only real trick to ensuring this command is properly executed is to not put any spaces between the semicolon and the beginning of the message:
>house note send email; A message that can never be processed!
The proper way to do it is
>house note send email;A message can be processed because there are no spaces adjacent to the semicolon character!
You will know that a message was properly processed, because it will give a meaningful output in reply, such as:
The following message was sent to the House Controller:
If you do not get such a message after sending the command, most likely it was not processed correctly. A properly processed message will immediately be available via HOUSE NOTE READ, if you need to confirm whether a message was processed.
The messages are limited to 1023 characters (which Kaldonis determined inadvertently by his extreme verbosity).
The main purpose of this verb is to qualify an event for Influence Points. A message must be sent using this system no less than a week prior to the event, although it is stipulated that the message should not be sent "too early" which is a relative constraint. Presently, we aim to submit the pre-event NOTE seven to eight days prior to the event. A follow-up NOTE must also be submitted after the event is successfully completed; this note must be sent at maximum within three days, but ideally the same day as the event (to ensure we do not forget, and that the event is fresh in our minds).
Abundant examples may be found under HOUSE NOTE READ; there is also a simple example in the Officer's Manual, although following this model is not recommended for the somewhat higher standards of Beacon Hall.
It is highly recommended to compose an event report NOTE in an external text editor prior to submission, as there is no preview or confirmation step, and making alterations at the command prompt is tedious. Ensure that proper grammar and punctuation are used so that we don't look like a troop of fools.
This command shows the membership activity of the house: people who were initiated (joined), people who resigned (quit), investment of officers (promotion), and removal of officers. It is unclear the maximum number of entries which are tracked by this system, but Beacon Hall's goes back to 27 September 2007.
The name is somewhat confusing. For a log of past Beacon Hall events, please see HOUSE NOTE READ.
This is primarily useful for determining when members resign from the house, since they do not need any contact with the house or officers to do so. This is the means by which we keep the list on Members up-to-date, now that HOUSE ROSTER is defunct.
Sometimes it shows false entries, for example if a character is invested to a previously empty officer position, a false entry will be generated for the removal of no one from the post. Please disregard phantom entries such as this one:
12/15/2014 23:23:51 CST: prespeech^custom^default^postspeech was removed as Hall Guardian by Kaldonis with Fyrentennimar as a witness.
This verb has been deactivated, and may never be re-implemented. If you enter it now, you will get this message:
Due to significant lag issues potentially caused by this command, all roster requests must be directed to the CHE GM.
You can blame the House of Paupers for having infinite members, basically; that and some poor coding with lack of foresight for the number of players that would join houses. Here is a quote from Whirlin's player:
House Paupers has like, 14 billion members. I think our roster is larger than the entire current playerbase.
I ran House Roster command once and only once, and man ohh man... you should have seen LNet light up with instant lag complaints.
The House Roster continued for about 15 minutes. Just to ensure that I was the sole responsibility, I logged to an alt in the middle of it, and everyone was saying that the lag appeared to clear up. So I logged back to Whirlin, and the roster resumed to tell me each and every member, in batches of 100 or so. Then everyone complained about lag again.
I then learned that Thondalar had done the same thing the previous night.
Definitely a nice power trip if someone annoys you, you can lag out the entire game for everyone for 15 minutes, basically bringing everyone's hunting to a halt. I singlehandedly controlled the emotions of hundreds, invoking fear and hatred followed by joy and hope just to revert back to crushing disappointment and hatred. But I can definitely understand why *I* shouldn't have that power.
I have no complaints about this change.
If you would like to see our present roster, see the Members page. The main practical use of this command was to issue it for the last day only to see which house members were playing. We try to inform all new members to set PROFILE TOGGLE HOUSE immediately after initiating them, so that they will appear under WHO HOUSE BEACON-HALL when logged in.
For historical interest, we retain here a compiled output performed on 19 June 2013 shortly before the HOUSE ROSTER verb was deactivated on 19 September 2013; it was by this way that the present Membership list was initiated, which we now update manually. It was not a trivial task to compile, so is kept in this state for archival purposes. This list includes anyone who was ever a member and has not resigned. However, organizing by last login offers some sense of activity. Be aware that some members have since resigned, and other new members have joined.
Although there is no intent to keep this list up to date in any significant way (for example, from the time lapse, some formerly active characters might now be inactive), for characters coming back from a long break, they may be happy to see their names not on a list of many years of inactivity. Those names are below:
a crimson and ivory canvas tent with an open tome over the entrance
This is our house tent. It has a main room and also a dance floor.
[Beacon Hall Archive Tent]
Hardwood floors of gleaming birch are inlaid with darker woods forming an intricate Beacon Hall Archive coat-of-arms. Cheerful candles on gold candelabra brighten the spacious tent, casting merry shadows upon its lush, ivory velvet interior walls. A heavy crimson damask curtain embroidered with an open tome separates the dance area to the north from this main gathering spot. You also see a discreet tent flap.
Obvious exits: north
[BHA Tent, Dance Floor]
A small, corner-bound dais rises up from the gleaming birch floor to provide minstrels and musicians a place to perform. Tall, ivory velvet walls are brightened by well-placed candles, and a heavy crimson damask curtain embroidered with an open tome separates the main gathering area to the south from this dancing spot.
Obvious exits: south
HOUSE TENT DEPLOY
HOUSE TENT DEPLOY CONFIRM
HOUSE TENT REMOVE
HOUSE TENT REMOVE CONFIRM
This is a command for CHEs which require a regular influx of coins from their membership. However, Beacon Hall Archive does not have dues. You absolutely cannot toggle this command, as it is a violation of our bylaws and the conditions under which every member joined. For the best results, pretend this verb doesn't exist. If seeing it every time you type HOUSE is too much a temptation for you, consider learning how to squelch.