To get to the Commonwealth RP room, you must first have an active account at IMC. When you sign up, do NOT request any handles from the show (or any other show, movie, music, etc.). If you aren't sure what a 'source material' handle is, go to Google Search and type in your handle. Use the "with the exact phrase" field. If it doesn't turn up any hits or if all it turns up is someone's personal homepage, you're good to go. If it turns up a movie, a band, myth or legend... change the handle and try again. Then do the whole IMC sign up thing and be patient. Don't sign up multiple times, it just makes it take longer to process your account.

OK, you did that, you've got an active IMC account and now you're ready to rock. Go to the following spots:

This URL will take you to the Private Rooms area on IMC. That's where Rommie and crew can be found right now, though we hope to move up to Public status over the next few months. The room's site will change as needed to meet Tribune Entertainment's requirements so if you come back sometime and it looks different, that's what happened.

Select your mode (No Frames, Frames or Stream) and type in the PR name: commonwealth

That's it. commonwealth - you can do it in caps or whatever, it's all the same to IMC. You can also just click on one the link below to describe the method of use, and you'll get there, too.

You can choose No Frames and it looks like a plain web page. The chat will be at the top, your dialogue box at the bottom, and every time you 'send', it will reset the page to contain all new posts since you last hit 'send'. Recommended for webtv users.

Alternately, there's Frames. It's divided into three sections, a sidebar (usually with helpful links, at least in Featured PRs and public rooms), a large main frame where the conversation shows (and you can refresh as often as needed), and a smaller, lower frame beneath that where your dialogue box can be found. Recommended for users who want more bang for their buck than No Frames but who can't seem to get Streaming to load.

Finally, there's Streaming. It's the best, with the same layout as the Frames option but the text just keeps on coming at you, no need to refresh it but once in a great while. It even has an option called 'auto-scroll' which keeps the text moving along for you, at two speeds. Problem: Netscape v. 6.x doesn't seem to like the auto-scroll option and the most recent version of Mozilla seems to hang up a lot in Streaming, at least for me.

And guess what? There's something new! Detached Streaming!. It will open another, larger text window and the text and posts in the main window take up the majority. It's a neat option.