You won't get five feet in the door before you come across the shortened language that is STF. So it's best to become familiar with STF's abbreviations and acronyms:

STF is the short name for our club. It's a lot less of a mouthful than www.star-fleet.com.

LOA means Leave of Absence. You take this if you're going to be away from club activities for several days or more.

AWOL is Absent Without Leave. If you quit participating in the club without declaring an LOA, you will be considered AWOL.

OOC means Out of Character. It's used to denote when the player is talking rather than his character.

IC means In Character. This is only needed if you write an aside OOC, and then need to return to roleplaying in the same post.

WeBB is the name of the current STF software. It stands for Web-based bulletin board.

CO stands for Commanding Officer, aka the captain.

XO is short for Executive Officer, aka the first officer.

The DH is the Department Head. The standard DHs are CE, chief engineer; CMO, Chief Medical Officer; CSO, Chief Science Officer; and COS, Chief of Security. There are other DHs you'll find around the club, which are more commonly called Swing positions. These positions aren't on every ship and typically the department has just the one character. These specialized DHs include: CNS, Counselor; CTO, Chief Tactical Officer; and CME, Chief Medical Engineer.

What would a DH be without his JO? JO stands for Junior Officer, and signifies any character that does not have an all-caps title. Players marked as Eng, Med, Sci, and Sec on the roster are junior officers.

NE stands for Nameless Ensign. This is STF's version of the NPC, or Non-Player Character. For instance, say a ship's CMO is on away team duty and a new med player joins the ship. The person playing the CMO might create an NE to give the new character something to do and someone to interact with, rather than splitting the timeline. The alternative to NE is NC. This is the same type of character, but on the training ships. So it's a Nameless Cadet. Despite the Nameless bit, most NEs have names. NEs also have the distinction of being the most abused and disposable characters in STF. They bravely carry the torch first lit by the Red Shirts of Kirk's era: To boldly die so no player character has to.

FComm stands for Fleet Commander who, as the name indicates, is in charge of one of STF's seven fleets.

Last, but by no means least, is GM. This stands for Gamemaster, and indicates the person running your sim.

Once you join STF, you'll receive a welcome letter from the Personnel Department that specifies your login name and your ship assignment. Armed with that information, go to STF's login page: www.star-fleet.com. This page contains a lot of handy information, including links to various departments. The part you want looks a bit like this:

To get access to STF, you put your member name in the Login ID box. Your password is the one you submitted along with your application. Hopefully you remember what it is. Once you've filled in your ID and password, click LOGIN. Assuming the information is correct, you will find yourself on STF's start page. Congratulations.

Every time you login, your account gets hit with a time stamp. This function tells the program where to have you start reading. If you last logged in on Tuesday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time (regardless of your location, the WeBB translates all time to Eastern), the program will start you off with the first message posted after 5 p.m. But what happens if you didn't finish posting and/or reading when you last logged in, and now you want to finish? The easiest way is to tick "Resume Session" on the login box. This tells the program to behave like you never logged out the last time. All messages will be displayed using the previous session's time stamp.

A caveat: If it's been several hours between sessions, and you use the resume, be prepared to reread a lot of items the next time you login. In an effort to explain: Say you login Monday at 8 p.m., but you didn't finish posting. Tuesday at 8 p.m. you come back and do a resume. The computer doesn't change your time stamp. When you come back Wednesday at 8 p.m., the computer thinks the last time you logged in was Monday at 8 p.m. It will begin the messages at that point. That translates to a lot of rereading.

There is a way around that, however, and you'll learn how in the next chapter, Navigation and roleplaying basics.