New here? This walkthrough gets you from a blank profile to hanging out in chat in about five minutes. Work through it top to bottom, or jump to whatever you're stuck on.

1️⃣ Finish your profile

• Add a photo and a few words about you. Head to Edit Profile to set your avatar, banner, status, and the "about me" blurb. This is the first thing people see.
• Pick a theme. Themes restyle your whole profile in a click. Browse the built-in ones in Edit Profile - or, if you're a Donor, design your own in the Theme Builder.
• Arrange your layout. Use the live drag-and-drop layout builder at the top of your own profile to move cards around - single column, sidebar, multi-column, masonry, or a header-banner look. Show or hide any card, and add your own custom cards too.

2️⃣ Find your people

• Browse members on the Browse page and send friend requests. When someone accepts, they show up on your Top Friends.
• Sign a guestbook on a profile you like, leave a comment, or fire off a private message to say hi.
• Post a bulletin from the Bulletins page - it's a quick broadcast to everyone, great for a first hello.

3️⃣ Jump into chat & cam rooms

• Open the Chat Rooms list and click one to join. Text chat works for everyone; rooms with cams let you go on video too.
• Set a chat nickname so a friendlier name shows next to your messages while your username stays in the userlist.
• Go on cam: click Cam Up and allow camera + microphone access when your browser asks. Only one app can use your camera at a time, so close Zoom/Teams/OBS first.
• On your phone? The cam room is built "cams-first" - the video grid fills the screen, and the chat box slides up when you tap the message strip or the keyboard button.
• Watch and listen together. Every room has a Media Center (the Media Center button in the room controls, or the 🎬 button above the chat box). Type words to search YouTube, or paste a link from YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Rumble, Odysee, SoundCloud or Spotify - even a direct .mp4/.mp3 file or a .m3u8 live stream - and it plays for everyone in the room. Adds go into a fair first-come queue, so nobody's pick gets bumped. Live channels are watched live together; Spotify plays full songs only for viewers logged into Spotify in that browser (their rule, not ours - everyone else hears previews).

4️⃣ Make it yours

• Create your own room. Anyone can host. Go to Create a Room and pick a name, a layout, a size, and whether it's public, password-protected, hidden, or request-to-join. Once you've made one, the Room Admin Guide unlocks for you with everything about running it.
• Build a Page. Under My Pages you can spin up extra profile pages (band, business, fan page - whatever) that live under your account.
• Leave a time capsule on the Capsules page - a message that unlocks on a future date.

5️⃣ Play, listen, and keep your streak

• Puzzles & word games. Open Puzzles from the Games menu for a daily Word Guess (six tries, build a streak), Sudoku in four difficulties, a timed Word Search, and a 90-second Anagram sprint. Every game keeps your best scores and feeds the leaderboards.
• Card Room. If the Card Room is open, pull up a seat for multiplayer Texas Hold'em. It's play money only - you get free chips, with a daily top-up if you bust out - so it's all for fun. No one else around? Hit Add bot to fill the table with AI players and deal right away.
• Board games with friends. Challenge someone to Connect Four, Checkers, Chess, Reversi, Gomoku, Battleship and more from the Arcade, or right from a player's name inside a room. The Arcade page also lists every other way to play here - Pool, the Card Room, the Casino and the Game Center - so it's the one door to all of it.
• Solo games with progress that sticks. The Game Center holds the big single-player games - run a crime empire, a farm, a grow room, a garage, a food truck, a pirate crew and more. Each one keeps a goal chain, a daily streak, collectible sets and achievements, and every one is unlimited play.
• Give your profile a soundtrack. Under My Music, paste YouTube links to build a playlist and choose autoplay, shuffle, repeat, and whether it starts open or collapsed. Visitors get a little player on your profile.
• Show up daily. Logging in each day grows your streak and pays out tokens. Hit the named milestones - Week Warrior, Fortnight, Monthly Regular, and beyond - for escalating bonus rewards. Your next milestone shows on the streak badge so you always know what you're chasing.

🆘 If something breaks

Most chat/cam trouble comes down to browser permissions, extensions, or your network - not the site. The FAQ & Connection Help page walks through the fixes: granting camera/mic access, ad-blockers, hardware acceleration, cookies, and more. Start there.

🏪 Marketplace

Buy and sell with other members. Open the Marketplace from the top menu.

• Posting: click Post a Listing, pick Fixed price or Auction, add a title, category, photos (up to 8) and a description. It's free.
• Auctions: set a starting bid, increment and how long it runs. Bidders see the live high bid and full history; a late bid auto-extends the clock so nobody gets sniped. Add an optional Buy-It-Now price to let someone end it early.
• Make an Offer: turn it on for a fixed listing and buyers can propose a price. You can accept, decline, or counter from your Offers page.
• Buying / contact: open a listing and use Contact seller to message them, or Pay with PayPal if the seller added theirs - payment goes straight to the seller.
• Watchlist: tap Watch on any listing to save it to your Watching page.
• Saved searches: save a keyword or category and get a notification the moment a matching listing is posted.
• Ratings: leave a seller a star rating and note after a deal. Every member has a public store page showing their listings and rating.
• Sharing: every listing has a Copy link button and a Share to chat picker that drops the item into a cam room's chat.
• Featured bumps: float your listing to the top for 7 days ($2.00 via PayPal).

📡 Free TV Streams

Free TV Streams is a guide of free live US channels. Open Free TV Streams in the menu, tap any channel to watch, and tap the star to save favorites. Use the category chips and the search box to find something fast.

Play on your profile: while a channel is playing, hit Set profile channel. Visitors to your profile will see a small Now Playing card for it.

In cam rooms: a channel can play on a shared screen that sits below the cams, so everyone in the room watches together. The room owner or a room mod sets it two ways: from the in-room TV bar (the Change button) or from Room Settings > Free TV Streams. The TV screen never covers a cam tile.

Send a channel to a room: while a channel is playing, hit Send to a room. If you host or mod the room, it goes up on the screen right away. For any other room, it is sent as a suggestion.

Suggestions: anyone in a room can suggest a channel. The room admin gets a PM with a direct link to the channel, and can either open Room Settings to set it or accept it in one tap from the Suggestions button on the in-room TV bar.

Channels are free ad-supported streams from services like Pluto TV, Samsung TV Plus and Plex, plus public broadcast feeds. Availability can change, so if something will not load, use the Report button.

📊 PulsePoll

Head to Polls to weigh in on what the community is debating. Vote in one tap and the results reveal instantly, then jump into the thread to make your case. Got a hot take? Hit New Poll, drop your question and two to six answers, and watch the split roll in.

🔎 SEO tools (admin)

Under Admin → 🔎 SEO you can build an XML sitemap in one click, edit robots.txt, set a site-wide meta description and social-share image, pin a canonical domain, and drop in Google/Bing verification tags — with a health check that flags anything missing. Rebuild the sitemap after major content changes and submit its URL in Google Search Console.

⚡ Sparks - the feed on your home page

Sparks is where posting happens. It sits on your home page in full - write, react and vote without going anywhere - and it has its own page at ?page=sparks for permalinks, replies and the hall of fame.

Posts live or die on engagement. Every spark burns on a 24-hour clock and slides out of the feed as it runs down. Every reaction, reply and vote resets that clock and adds heat. Cross 12 heat before time runs out and the spark graduates: it stops burning, becomes permanent, and pins to your Greatest Hits on your profile and in the sitewide hall. Sparks that never catch on slip quietly into embers, kept on your own page only. Reacting to somebody is not a throwaway tap here - it is what keeps their post alive.

• Six ways to post. Plain text is the default. You can also run a poll, a this-or-that, "rate this" out of ten, "caption this", or "guess this" with a hidden answer you reveal when you like.
• Polls are real polls. A poll or this-or-that spark becomes a full entry in the poll feed with its own debate thread, and the two share one tally - voting here and voting there are the same vote.
• Pictures anywhere. Every field you can post from takes an image or a short clip - the composer on any post type, and replies too. Upload a file or paste a link. A picture on its own is a fine reply.
• The Daily Spark. One question a day, the same one for the whole site, on the Daily tab. That tab also lists everything else posted that day, and shows replies underneath each answer so nothing gets lost.
• Streaks. Post on consecutive days to build a streak, with token rewards at 3, 7, 14, 30 days and beyond. Miss a day and it resets.
• Your Stories are sparks too. Stories already expire in 24 hours, the same clock a spark runs on, so they appear in the feed automatically and can earn heat, replies and graduation like anything else.
• Your profile, your call. Your profile shows your sparks as full cards by default. From your own Sparks page you choose what appears there - all your sparks, only your Greatest Hits, or nothing at all - how many, and whether to show your streak.