To subscribe to the particular instance help, you would type
zctl sub message help \*
In any of these examples, you can also use zctl add. This
would give you a permanent subscription, in this case to the instance
help. A permanent subscription to the instance help would
show in your .zephyr.subs file as the line message,help,*
Looking at the above example of a subscription to instance help,
the * in the recipient field indicates a broadcast message. (You need to
type a \ before the * so that it is interpreted correctly by
the shell.) In other words, the * means that means that you are
receiving zephyrgrams that have been sent to everyone who subscribes
to that instance. The other option for recipient in a Zephyr
subscription is %me%, which indicates that you are subscribed
to zephyrgrams sent specifically to you. This is generally not useful
on an instance such as help, which is intended to send messages
to a large number of people, rather than a specific user. The
help instance is used by people who want to ask a question, about
anything ranging from using Athena, to progamming, to random facts
about MIT, Boston, history, etc. If you just want to ask a
question,
you probably want to use zctl sub to ask it and see the answer,
since there are a lot of zephyrgrams on this instance, and you may not
want them distracting you when you don't have a question to ask. Many
knowledgeable people are subscribed to the instance help.
Public instances are not limited to the instances people often write
to. Any public instance (i.e. on the class message) that
someone chooses to write to exists when they decide to write to it.
Obviously, you can't explicitly subscribe to each one of these, but
you can explicity subscribe to instances that you know of. Some
others besides help are white-magic, which is an instance
for random chatting, b5, which is an instance where
people chat about Babylon 5, and instances like 6.170, where people
talk about that particular subject.
You can also subscribe to every possible public instance by typing
zctl sub message \* \*. In this case, the * for the instance name
acts as a wildcard which subscribes you to all instances in the class
message. The * wildcard for instances is the reason that instances
on class message are called public--anyone who chooses to subscribe to
message \* \* will get zephyrgrams sent to any instance you might send
to, so there is no way to keep people from finding out about the instance and
jumping into a conversation on it. There are actually a number of people who
are always subscribed to ``star star,'' as it is often called.
If you do want to subscribe to message \* \*, there are a few
useful things you might want to know. First of all, a word of
warning: you will receive a lot of zephyrgrams, which can be
very confusing if you do not customize your dotfiles to make
zephyrgrams on instances look different from personal zephyrgrams, and
change where they appear on your screen. It is also rather distracting. To
decrease the volume of zephyrgrams somewhat, you can filter out
zephyrgrams on certain instances that you have no interest in reading
by creating ``negative subscriptions'' in your .Zephyr.subs
file. For each instance you want to filter out, you would add a line
reading -message,silly-instance,* (where
silly-instance is the name of the instance you want to filter out).
You would then be subscribed to all public instances except those
listed with a minus sign in your .zephyr.subs file. Also, there
is a command called zpunt in the sipb locker which you can use to
unsubscribe from a particular instance temporarily. The zpunt
command is necessary for people who are subscribed to ``star star''
because using the zctl unsub command will not work in this case.
It works in the same way that the ``negative subscriptions'' in your
.zephyr.subs file do. To use zpunt, you would type