For those of you who are new to OURPGsoc Society Games, this page is here to serve as a primer to the wiki and how we use it for the game.
As always, if you have any questions regarding any of this, please don't hesitate to email the GMs.
The wiki is used primarily to keep all the information you need to know about the game's setting in one place (at game start anyway; as the game progresses the information may become out of date, and you will need to find in-game sources to keep up). Also, the wiki is used for players to submit their Turnsheets, which is how we facilitate actions between sessions (see the page on Uptimes and Downtimes).
You won't be able to edit most of the pages on the wiki – the GMs keep on top of that – but you will be able to edit the Turnsheets and other pages in your user space, as well as the playground, which is an OC page for game-related stuff. To get to your User Page, you can use the buttons up at the top right of any page (when logged in) to reach it.
Most formatting that you may want to put into a page can be accessed by the buttons in the toolbar along the top of the edit box; but if you want to know more details of this wiki's syntax have a look at the Syntax page.
Once you have come up with a character concept and gone through the Character Creation process, you need to submit your character to the GM team via this Google form, who will make sure that everything is alright with your character before setting up a wiki account for you. This will be under the name of your character, and will provide you access to a User Page on the wiki with Turnsheets and up to date information about all of the mechanical details of your character.
Your User Page is accessible from any page on the wiki. This page is private, so only you and the GMs can see it – you cannot see the User Pages of any other players. You can, however, see their public bios in the Characters page, and will be required to submit your own as part of character creation.
On your User Page should be a series of red links, named 'Turnsheet #'. These link to pages that don't exist yet, so when you are ready to begin writing up your actions, click on the link for that week and then click 'Create this page' on the right-hand toolbar on the subsequent page.
The Turnsheet will have a template prepared to show you the basic layout. Please try to stick to the format as much as possible, though if you need to do something different then make sure it's clear to the GMs what you are trying to do (and please don't delete the tags at the bottom or we won't be able to process it!). Once you have written everything up, click the save button to create the page so that you (and all the GMs) can see it. You may want to click preview first to make sure everything reads like you hope it would; but do remember to save it afterwards. Editing the page after this point is fine as long as it's before the Turnsheet deadline of 23:59 on Thursday – nothing will be taken as final by the GMs until then.
When a user account is created, you'll also receive an in-character email address of the form yourcharactername@brainwave.oxfordrpg.com. This will actually just link emails sent to that account to the email account you provide when signing up, and any emails sent to a xxx@brainwave.oxfordrpg.com email from that account will appear to come from your in-character email. Out-of-character email addresses will not be displayed, though OC names and other email metadata will be.
The function of this is that this system allows you to have IC conversations outside of session without anyone else necessarily seeing them (except the GMs, of course: a copy of every email is automatically sent to the GMs to allow us to keep tabs on what everyone is planning to do).
If you use an email program that allows you to send from multiple addresses, you can add these to the list of your email accounts by clicking the 'Update Profile' button in the top right. Emails will only ever be sent to your primary address, but this is just a precautionary measure and of course is entirely optional. This is especially useful if you use the Gmail + function, for example, and sometimes forget to send from a particular mailbox, or if you find that emails from your main account are going to people's spam folders.