My friends in L.A. they don't know
Where I've been for the past few years or so
Paris to China to Colorado
Best thing about this game is meeting people. And then making them laugh with silly emote text.
./sit slips into BA Stealth Mode. FYI - BA Stealth Mode is currently broken: it only works when no one is around to see it.
I'm sure there are probably guides on the chat system, but don't know of any off hand, so I'll just explain some of the basics.
The chat box serves basically three different purposes: It's a place where the game software can notify you of what's going on. It's a place where you can have conversations with other players. And it can be used to perform various actions within the game.
The information you see in the chat boxes divided into different channels.
Channels like "Standard" and "Combat" are for notifications from the game software about what's happening to your character (or in some cases what's happening in your vicinity).
Channels like "Advice", "LFF", and "OOC" are for players to use for conversations with other players.
If you right-click on the current tab at the top of the chat window, there's an option for "Filters". This allows you to select which channels you want shown in the chat box when that tab is selected. You can also add additional tabs and set different filters for them, if for example, you want one tab that shows everything, and another that just shows what's being said in the "Advice" channel. (It's easier to follow a conversation if you can look at it by itself without stuff from other channels interspersed amongst it.)
I'll divide the rest of this description by the three purposes I mentioned at the beginning.
Notifications from the game system.The most significant of the channels used by the game software is called "Standard". This is the channel that will tell you when you earn XP, when you advance a quest, when you complete a deed, when you earn reputation, when you receive items, etc. You'll want this displayed (i.e. included in the "Filters" option described above) on at least one of your chat tabs, and that's probably the tab you'll want displayed most of the time you're out adventuring.
Conversations with other players.Some of the channels are for conversations with other players, and are divided by topic. You'll see displayed whatever channels are included in your display filters.
To select which channel you want your own messages to appear in, click the little speech-bubble icon in the lower left corner of the chat window. A few of the most common output channels ("Say", "Fellowship", and "Kinship", IIRC) appear in the first dropdown menu. There's also an "Output Channel" option that will bring up the other possibilities in a secondary dropdown menu. (I don't know why they didn't just put them all under "output channel". It would have made it much clearer.) Note that although the game will remember your display filters from one game session to another, your output channel will be reset to the default "Say" each time you log in.
The basic channels for conversation:
Advice - This is where to ask questions about the game, or answer other players' questions. If you don't understand how to do something, there's likely someone else around who can point you in the right direction.
LFF - This stands for "Looking For Fellowship". It's where people get together with others hoping to do group content together.
Trade - This is for advertising items that you want to sell to other players or ask for items you'd like to buy from other players.
OOC - This stands for "Out Of Character", and is basically for general chat with other players that doesn't fit into a particular category.
Say - This channel has a smaller area that it gets broadcast to. Whereas the channels listed above will go to all players in the region who have the channel in their display filters (e.g. throughout the Shire if you're in the Shire, or throughout Bree-land if you're in Bree-land, etc.), "Say" will only be seen by those who are nearby. It's meant to emulate the audible range in which your character could be heard if he/she was talking. If you're role-playing, this is where to put whatever your character says. This is also the default channel you'll start out in each time you log in.
Emote - This channel is somewhat of a combination. It shows actions your character or others around you take using emote commands (which I'll describe below), but can also be used by role-players as an output channel in which to describe actions their characters are taking that don't fit into the emotes defined by the system. Like the "Say" channel, it also has a smaller radius that will only be seen by those nearby (roughly near enough to be within visual range).
Fellowship - This channel is used when you're grouped with other players in a fellowship. Anything said in the fellowship channel will be broadcast to all other members of your fellowship, but not to any other players in the area. It's where to plan your strategy for how to complete a quest or decide what objectives to do next, etc.
Kinship - If you're in a Kinship, this channel will broadcast to all other members of your kinship who are currently online and have it in their display filter (no matter where they're at in the game world). It can be used to discuss anything that would be of interest to your whole kinship (which can vary from one kinship to another).
Tell - The Tell channel is used for private conversations between two players, and it works a little differently from other channels because you need to enter a command to direct the message to a specific character. For instance, if you want to say hello to my champ character, Ceolrath, you would type "/tell Ceolrath Hello". The person you direct the Tell to is the only person who will see it, and they can see it no matter where they're at in the game world.
There are also user-defined channels. If you and some friends want a chat channel between yourselves, you can use the "/createchannel" command to make one or "/joinchannel" to enter a channel one of your friends made. The more widely used version of this is to join widespread user-defined channels. For instance, many players (particularly once reaching the higher levels where they'll be doing end-game content) find the division of channels like "LFF" into just the region you're in to be inconvenient. So most servers have a long-running user-defined channel for Global Looking For Fellowship. (On some servers it's called GLFF and on others it's called GlobalLFF. Ask on your server which they use.) You can join this by using a command like "/joinchannel glff" or "/joinchannel globallff". Some servers divide out the functions similarly to the standard channels, so will have a global advice channel, a global OOC channel, a global trade channel, etc. whereas on others the global lff channel sort of became a general global channel for everything.
Once you've joined a user-created channel such as GLFF, to send a message to it, you would set your output channel to User1, which simply means the first user-created channel you joined. If you join multiple user channels, they become User1, User2 and so on, in the order you join them, up to a maximum of four.
Actions.The chat window can also be used to perform actions. That you want to execute an action or command is indicated to the system by including a slash character "/" at the beginning of what you type.
The most common types of actions you can perform using the chat window are emotes. For instance, if you type "/sit" or select "sit" from the dropdown menu under the speech-bubble icon, your character will sit down and a message stating that you sat down will appear in the emote channel of the chat window. If you type or select "/smoke", your character will take out a pipe and start smoking it and a message to that effect will also appear in the emote channel. You can find a listing of all the emotes currently available to you under the drop-down menus when you click the speech-bubble icon. (It takes several pages of menus to list them all, so you'll see a "more" option at the end of the first list of emotes that will bring up a second list, and so on till you get through all of them.)
For some emotes, it makes a difference who/what you have selected when you perform the emote. For instance, if you're simply going to sit down, it doesn't make much difference who you have selected, except that the text in the emote channel will say "<your character's name> sits with <selected character's/item's name>". However, if someone is playing music and you want to applaud their performance, it's good to select them when you do the "/clap" emote, so everyone can see who you're clapping for. If you want to thank someone, select them and use the "/thank" emote. Not only does the text change from "(name) gives a hearty thank-you to everyone nearby" to "(name) thanks (target name) heartily for {her|his} help!", but your selected target player gets a point towards a hidden deed that could earn them the title "The Helpful".
Many emotes are available to everyone, but there are others that you can earn in the game. For instance, during festivals (such as the fall festival running now through Nov 7) you can go to the Party Tree in the Shire and do a dance quest to learn the /dance_hobbit or /dance_hobbit2 emotes, go to the basement below Thorin's Hall to learn /dance_dwarf or /dance_dwarf2 emotes, go to Duillond in Ered Luin to learn to dance like an elf, or to the festival area north of Bree to learn to dance like a man. There are emotes you can buy with festival tokens (for instance, 12 fall festival tokens can buy the /BOO emote), emotes you can learn by having other people use emotes on you (for instance, if enough people select you and perform a /bow emote, you can learn the /heropose emote), emotes you can get from factions you have reputation with (for instance, once you reach Friend status with the Inn League you can get the /dance_jig emote from one of the faction's traders), and so on. (Many of these are now also available through the LOTRO Store, but IMHO it's more fun to earn them than to just buy them.)
There are also commands you can send to the system other than emotes. I already mentioned the /createchannel and /joinchannel commands. The /afk command will toggle on or off a notification that you're away from your keyboard (the text <AFK> will appear in front of your name and anyone who sends you a /tell will get a notification that you're afk.) The "/rp on" or "/rp off" commands will toggle your character's name display to white text as an indication to other players that you're role-playing and would prefer them to speak to you in-character if they're going to talk with you. Typing /loc will give you the coordinates of your current location. (This can be useful if you found a guide online telling where to find something you need for a current quest. Such guides often specify locations by their coordinates.) There's several others as well. (I'll update later if I find a complete list.)
Ok, well, that explanation is getting rather more long-winded than I originally intended it to, but hopefully the answers you were looking for are in there somewhere.
Like this city is on fire tonight
This could really be a good life, a good, good life
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