Joining Agora

Joining

The Mailing Lists

Agora Nomic is played via email. To join, you sign up for the mailing lists. When anyone sends an email to one of the lists, everyone signed up receives it.

Agora has 4 email lists. These collectively make “the fora” as most players call it. Three of these lists are “public” forums, that’s where the gameplay actually happens. The fourth one is a “discussion” forum, where people talk about the game.

The three public fora are Agora-Official, Agora-Business, and Gio. Business is where most gameplay happens, and where you will send all of your game messages at first. Official is where Reports are sent, which are summaries of what’s currently happening in the game. Gio is a backup list, used when the other two stop working (which sometimes happens). Rarely, players might send messages to Gio as a way to “sneak” past people that might not be subscribed to it.

The discussion forum is Agora-Discussion. Messages sent to this forum are never game actions, so people usually use it to discuss the game. By default, when you reply to a message sent to a public forum, your reply will be sent to Agora-Discussion. If you want to take an action, you need to change the “To” to Agora-Business.

Because many emails might be sent in a single day, you should consider either making an email account just for Agora, or setting up filters to send all Agora messages to a folder. Your email provider will have instructions on how to do that. For example, here are Gmail’s filter instructions.

Once you’ve subscribed to each mailing list, and confirmed your subscriptions in your email, you will start receiving messages as they are sent. You will also now be able to send messages. Now it’s time to register.

Registering

Registering is a special action in Agora, to make it as easy as possible. A registration email need only indicate that you wish to join; you should also indicate what name you’d like to use&emdash;don’t worry, you can change this later if you’d like. A straight-forward registration might say something like:

I register for Agora. My name is nix.

After Joining: Tips & Tricks

None of this is strictly necessary to playing Agora, but it will make your experience smoother.

Consider using an email client like Thunderbird, Outlook, or Apple Mail. Web interfaces for email, like Gmail’s, will often mess with plaintext formatting. Since Agora uses a lot of plain-text formatting (such as tables and charts made with spaces and tabs) preserving formatting is important. These email clients tend to do a better job at it.

Learn mailing list etiquette. When replying to a message, put your reply below/after the relevant quote from the original message. If you’re replying to a long message, cut out the unnecessary bits. This makes your reply much more readable to other players. If you’re using an email client as mentioned above, you can quote only the relevant part of the message by highlighting it before hitting reply.

Double-check before you send. Make sure you’re sending to the right mailing list. Replies default to Agora-Discussion, but you can’t take actions there; you will need to change it to Agora-Business if you’re taking a game action. Also keep in mind that the mailing lists are meticulously archived; what you say there will always be there, and people may come across it again. Don’t share anything you’re not comfortable making public, and try to make sure you’re saying the best version of what you want to say, not something you might regret or disapprove of later.

Read up on the game. Take some time to start reading through the rules. Get familiar with some quirks of Agoran language in the glossary.

And if you have any questions…

Join the chatroom. Most players are available via the chatroom. While the Discord server has several channels, and the most features, we have bots that connect one of its channels to the Matrix and IRC servers, so you can communicate with anyone from your preferred platform. This is the best way to get your questions answered and get to know other players.