Joining Agora
Joining
Agora Nomic is an email based game. That means that all play and announcements happen via email. To participate, players subscribe to the mailing lists. Once you are subscribed, you will start receiving emails as they are sent, and you will be able to send emails to other players by sending them to the mailing lists. If you want to see emails from before you subscribed, you will need to look at the archives (see the links below).
The first step to joining is to subscribe to these mailing lists. Because of the high volume of messages, it is recommended that you either make an email account just for Agora, or set up filters on your incoming email to redirect Agora messages to a folder instead of your inbox. How you set up filters will depend on your email provider, check their documentation.
Currently there are 5 email lists to subscribe to, and it is necessary to subscribe to all five to ensure you receive all game messages. Three of them are the primary lists, and two of them are backups. When subscribing, do not choose "digest"; this option makes the game essentially unplayable for you. Here are the subscription links, remember to subscribe to each one:
After submitting a subscription to each one, you should receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. For Gio there may also be a delay because subscriptions must be confirmed by a moderator.
Technically, all official actions can be taken on Agora-Official, Agora-Business, Gio, and Tue. In practice, these lists serve different purposes. Agora-Official should only be used if you are an officer who is sending official information related to your office. Agora-Business should be used for all other game actions, including registering. Gio and Tue should be used if the others are not working; they are also ocassionally used to attempt to sneak things by players who are not registered or paying attention to them.
Once you have confirmed your subscription to all five mailing lists, and configured your email as you'd like, you are free to join and start playing. To join, send a message to [email protected]. In the message, indicate your intent to register and your preferred name. As soon as that message is received, you're a player and can immediately start playing.
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 plaintext 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 ettiquette. 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.
Double-check before you send. Make sure you're sending to the right mailing list. Agora-Discussion is not a channel you can take actions in, so messages accidentally sent there are ineffective. 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.