*BitWise* is an automated message system, and cannot be added to your contact list. *BitWise* can inform users of different events, such as when they are added as a super buddy, or when someone adds you to their contact list.

In the future, *BitWise* may have ever more automated messaging capability.

To block a user, right-click on their name in the contact list, find the Visibility submenu, and select the "Blocked" option. Any messages from the selected user will be destroyed and you will not receive messages from this user unless you un-block them at a later time. Blocked users will always see you as offline, and you will always see them as offline. Blocked users are also noted in bold on your contact list.

A person's username on BitWise does not change. However, you may elect to provide an alias for a user, so that the name is more recognizable to you. Assign an alias by highlighting the name you wish to alias and pressing F2, or by right-clicking and selecting "Rename." Aliases can be removed by right-clicking on the user's name and selecting "Restore Original Name."

For example, someone could register as "KevBo121212." You may wish to refer to that user as just "Kevin;" that is the purpose of the alias. Providing an alias does not change that user's name, just how the name is shown to you.

Whenever you are added to someone's contact list as a super buddy, you will receive a short message from *BitWise* indiciating who this person is. You need not wait for them to contact you; feel free to contact them and welcome them.

You can meet other users in three ways:

1) You may see a list of users who have designated themselves as "chatty" from the Contacts menu in BitWise.

2) You may search for other users by geography or interests, also from the Contacts menu in BitWise. If you fill out your directory information, other users will be able to find you (strictly optional).

3) The forums are also a good place to meet people, and also to learn more about BitWise!

No, BitWise is a separate service from the others. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it is because we don't want to deal with reverse engineering a protocol and then relying on it for our services. This strategy has proven problematic for other chat software, and such problems were what inspired BitWise in the first place.

Most importantly, when we make our own protocol, we can add the features that we want to add, without worrying about compatibility with existing software. This can be confusing when using other software; certain programs can operate in certain ways with other programs, but it is not always consistent. In BitWise, there is one medium, and it all works the same, even across platforms.

In order to add a contact, you must know the other user's name on BitWise.

From the Contacts menu on the Contact list, select Add Contact / Group. Then, type the name of the contact you wish to add, and click Add Contact. The server will be contacted to verify the user and then return with success or failure (if the user does not exist, for example).

The new contact will then show up on your contact list, and you can send him or her a message by double-clicking on the name in the contact list.

You can highlight text: after you finish your selection, the selection is automatically copied to the clipboard. This saves the effort of needing to manually copy it, since there would be nothing else to do with a block of selected text. The status bar does note when text has been copied to the clipboard.

You can disable this feature from the Conversation preferences.

Grouped conversation view allows keeping all conversations in one window rather than having multiple windows cluttering your desktop.

It can be disabled from the conversation preferences.

Two options, Integrate and Roll, give even more power to the grouped conversation view. Integrate prevents needing to "switch" between conversations, instead showing everything on one continuous window. Roll will automatically switch who you are sending to so that you can conveniently respond to incoming messages without having to manually select the user to respond.

Removing the timestamp before each message is easy. Open the preferences, and simply clear the box next to "Message timestamp."

To remove the timestamp from the logged conversations, open the logging preferences and clear the timestamp boxes there as well.

There are two possible answers to this question, depending on which message count you wish to remove.

To remove the message count appearing before each message, edit the message timestamp (Preferences->Conversation), and remove the %C from the timestamp.

To remove the status bar shown at the bottom of the conversations that shows the message delivery confirmations, uncheck Show Message Status from the Conversation menu.

Selecting a contact icon is easy. Open the Preferences, expand the Conversation item and select Contact Icons. Click Select Icon... to choose the image file that you wish to use. You may use any image file as your contact icon, and it will be automatically resized when loaded to fit into the 64 x 64 size used by BitWise.

The original image will not be changed or modified in any way.

The solution to the locale changing when you send a message is to select a different message font that supports the keyboard locale that you are using. This will vary depending on your version of Mac OS X and what keyboard locale you are trying to use. Use some logical guesses and some trial-and-error to locate a suitable font.

Nowhere. BitWise does not have any public chat rooms. More often than not, public chat rooms are large collections of spam, porn and otherwise unuseful material and thus there is no reason to create them for BitWise.

In the future, users will be able to host their own BitWise chat room servers, similar to IRC.

No, there are no limits imposed on conferences. Of course, the person who started the conference will be processing a lot of information, but on a modern computer there should not be any problem hosting even a large conference.

No, other BitWise users do not have access to any of the files on your PC. The only way that others have access to your files is if you enable file sharing, and even then, only the files in the shared folder can be accessed. BitWise checks and re-checks your file sharing and file transfer preferences at every step, and will deny any inappropriate action being attempted by another user.

No, there are no restrictions on file size or the number of transfers that you may make. Transfers do not go through our server in any form, so there is no reason for us to impose any limits.

There is a 4 GB file size limit due to various technical reasons.

Numbers will be automatically added to the end of an auto-received file if there is a name conflict in the auto-receive directory. The numbers indicate the time that the file was received.

For example, say that you have a file called "MyFile.txt" in your auto-receive directory, and someone sends you a file named "MyFile.txt." The second "MyFile.txt" will have the time placed at the end, such as "MyFile.txt103215" indicating that the file was started at about 10:30 am.

Offline messages are checked every 15 minutes and then sent via email to you if you have enabled offline message forwarding via email. The time may be slightly longer if there are a large number of messages being sent on the server. Offline e-mail setting can be changed from the Preferences, under Server Preferences.

The BitWise "day" runs from 0401 (am)- 0400, Eastern Time. While still a 24-hour day, it begins four hours later than the standard clock. If, on a particular night, you want to reset your counter at midnight, you may manually update it via the Preferences (although it will still be reset again at 4 am).

This is done for a variety of reasons, but the biggest is that our servers have a large number of daily tasks that need to be run when the least fewest users are on the system.

There have been several reports of the offline messages being sent via email never arriving. As it turns out, spam filters will frequently identify BitWise offline messages sent via email as spam. This is probably due to our notice at the bottom of the email referring to the messages being never sent unsolicited.

We recommend that you adjust your filters to allow messages with the subject or sender that you specified in the offline message preferences. This will vary depending on how you receive your email.

You may send an offline message the same way that you send a regular message. When the recipient user is offline, the message will automatically be stored on the server for when the recipient next comes online (or checks offline messages from the web site).

No, your email address is not revealed to anyone at any time. When you enable offline message forwarding to email, that address is only used to send the messages to you. It is not revealed to those who send you offline messages, nor do they know whether or not you are forwarding offline messages to email.

A custom away message is a way for you to override the away message that a certain contact (or group of contacts) will see if they read your away message. You can set up a custom away message before you actually go away, or you can do it afterwards. Either way, once the custom message is set, if that contact (or contact in that group) reads your away message, they will be sent your custom message. You can verify a custom message is sent by right-clicking on the contact (or group) again, and if a custom message has been set, there will be a check next to the "Custom Away Message" menu item. All custom away messages are cleared when you log off.

Note that setting a custom away message does not actually change your status, it only changes the away message sent if your away message is retrieved while you are away.

The profile is a freeform profile that is displayed whenever anybody views your current status and you are online. You can use this to display information about yourself, witty quotes, or any other information that you wish to share anytime that you are online.

Directory information is stored on the server and is more analagous to a phonebook. Directory information is always available from the server. Filling in your directory information is completely optional, but filling in some areas can help you meet new people.

A regular away message is stored only on your computer when you go into away status, and is no longer viewable when you go offline.

An extended away message is a message that is stored on the server for when you are going to be offline for an extended period of time. When you go into away status, if you check the box Store to Server as Extended Away Message, your away message is sent and stored on the server. Even after you log off, your extended away message can be viewed by users who view your status from the Status/Profile option.

An extended away message is cleared the next time that you log in to BitWise.

BitWise has "web bugs" that allow you to display your BitWise status (Online, Away, Offline) from your personal web site; you can even link to a special site that shows your BitWise directory information. You can enable web bugs and get the code you need for your web site by logging in to Web Services and clicking on Preferences.

Yes, emoticons are planned for inclusion in BitWise. After the release of Version 1 we will be moving the conversations to an HTML format, at which time emoticons will be able to be included, along with additional text formatting options.

At this time, we are not making any statements regarding inclusion of web cam features. We are monitoring new technologies that will enable such support across all operating systems (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X).

We're always working on something new. Sometimes the progress is more visible in terms of new features and releases, sometimes it's somewhat less visible, such as new web site features or discussions in the forums about major new BitWise features, and sometimes it is completely invisible in the form of internal restructuring to be able to support future features.

Regardless of what form it is in, there's always something happening to make BitWise better, faster, or bigger.

BitWise currently has one simple but challenging game called Conquest. There are no plans to create additional games at this time.