A fellow “RXer” has been kind enough to create a forum for the sharing and discussion of RX-Plugin rules. You can access it here.
There is also another forum for the discussion of my IM Tweaks plugin which can be accessed here.
So far there is not much information but that should change soon. I will do my best to add to the discussions from time to time.
Hope everyone is enjoying their NFL season opening Sunday.
Here is a Redskins themed ‘yell’ rule for my RX-Plugin. This is similar to the existing yell rule except that it adds a color gradient from gold to burgundy. Just add ‘@@’ to the end of you message to trigger this rule.
Click here to import the ‘Redskins Yell’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings
Enjoy, and Go Skins!
While I won’t post a rule with actual profanity in it, I will help you get started on creating your own profanity filter. This won’t get rid of all the profanity in the world, but at least it lets you control what comes in through your AIM client. It can even help you in your own moments of angst by filtering what you send.
For starters, you need to have the RX-Plugin installed and running on your AIM 6.x client.
The rule lets you define a list of “bad-words” that will be replaced with “**EXPLETIVE**” in your IMs. Each “bad-word” is actually a sequence of bad characters. For example, if I filter out the sequence “test” then “testing” will show up as “**EXPLETIVE**ing”. So, choose your words carefully. 
The idea is that you don’t want to send or receive any of these “sequences of bad characters”.
Click here to import the ‘Profanity Filter Starter’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings
When you click on the above link, you will see the RX-Plugin Settings… window appear and show the rule. Here is a screen shot of part of that window:
First, for neatness, change the rule’s name by removing the “Starter” part. You can give it any name you like.
Let me explain the options in the Match section. Starting with the Scope options, I chose “Text only” because we are only concerned about the text and not the markup (HTML). Next is is the “Apply to” option. Here I chose “Both”, but feel free to set it to Incoming our Outgoing IMs only. Lastly, are the options. I want this rule to apply everywhere, so I unchecked “Skip in Chat rooms”. I could have chosen “Word boundary”, but that would limit me to matching “bad” and not “bad1″ or “1bad”. Ignore case is needed for obvious reasons. Global is needed to make sure it replaces all instances of any of the “bad-words”. Finally, skip in <a> tags is not needed in this case since I am not trying to insert a hyperlink.
The Replace section is pretty straight forward. I simply replace what was matched with the markup in there. Since this is actual markup, I left the “Escape all…” option unchecked.
Now, back to the Regular Expression in the Match section. This is just a list of words delimited with | bars which means OR in regex ease. One thing to note is that you need watch out for sub-words. If you want to filter out “bad” and “reallybad” then you need to make sure that “bad” follows “reallybad” in your regular expression.
You can have spaces if you want to filter out word phrases, but I find that it’s better to filter out specific words. Besides, you will need to do it in a way that accounts for multiple spaces and perhaps some punctuation marks between words.
Once you have the rule the way you like it, just hit Apply or OK.
The best way to test this rule is to send yourself the entire contents of the regular expression in an IM. Everyone of them should be shown as **EXPLETIVE** with the | bars between them.
That’s it. I hope this helps you sanitize your AIM experience.
Since this is a new year, I thought it would be a great time to improve one of the original RX-Plugin rules.
The “goim” rule let you send a screen name as a link so that your buddy could click it in order to open an IM with that new buddy. Thus, saving your buddy the effort to copy and paste the screen name into an IM form.
Here is a rule that lets you IM someone a link to a Wiki page that they might want to see.
What you do is type an IM message that starts with “/wiki ” followed by the search term, e.g. “/wiki AOL Instant Messenger”
The rule will convert the text that follows “/wiki ” into a link that says “Wiki page on …”. where … is the text that followed “/wiki “.
Click here to import the ‘EZ Wiki’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings
NOTE: When you import a rule, it is placed at the bottom of the order. This means that it is the last rule the plug-in will convert. Since this rule consumes all of the text following the “/wiki “, I recommend that you move it to the top of the order. (Highlight the “EZ Wiki” rule and press the up button until it’s at the top. You can also highlight the rule and press CTRL + UP ARROW to move it via the keyboard.)
Here is is sample message to send: (after clicking on the above rule and clicking the apply button, click the link below and send it to yourself.)
Here is what you and your buddy will see:
Enjoy. Let me know if you need help creating and sharing your own rules.
I have been updating this plug-in for almost two months now. I thought it would be a good time to write a few new rules to demonstrate some of its power.
The first step in creating a rule is to think about the effect you want to achieve. Basically, I believe that if you can compose it in the IM field, then you can also write a rule to do it. One thing I have seen many people do is to yell via IM. Basically they type in something like this:
This is time consuming. Nice and easy “yelling” is an example of something that is lacking in IM. The rule I wrote lets you type in any text and end it with two exclamation points. I used two exclamation points so I can still send un-altered messages with one.
So with this rule, you can type: “Shhhhhhhhhhh!!” and you will see:
Click here to import the ‘Yell’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings
The second rule came from some requests I saw people post online. They wanted to send a hidden message. The thought I had was to be able to type “/hide this is my hidden message.” and let the RX-Plugin send it in a hyper-link. The link would be useless, but if you hovered the mouse over it, the tooltip would show the hidden message. Here is a sample:
Click here to import the ‘Hidden Text’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings
So those are two rules you can add to your RX-Plugin settings by clicking the links above if you already have the plugin installed (version 0.7.1). You can also share your own rules on the Web and via IM by going to the Rules page of the RX-Plugin Settings window, selecting a rule, and clicking “Copy to Clipboard”. Then just paste it into your text editor, web page, or IM compose window.