Designing your MOTD with Wordpad

First, to design your new MOTD, you’ll have to start up Wordpad. Open up Wordpad by entering "wordpad” in the search box if you use Windows Vista, or just press the WINDOWS BUTTON + R and type “wordpad” (without the quotes) and press enter. By now you should have the Wordpad editing program in front of you. Now, just design the MOTD to your liking.

Opening up the file with Notepad

Once you’re satisfied with your MOTD, go to File > Save As and save the document somewhere where you’ll remember. Once you’ve saved it, go to the folder where you saved it and right click on the file, then open it up with a program called notepad — not Wordpad. If you have successfully opened up the file with notepad, you can skip the next paragraph.

Notepad may not appear under the “open with” menu. If it’s not there, click on the “choose default program” option… then expand the “other programs” section and select notepad and uncheck “always use this program to open this type of file” option.

You’re almost there!

Now, you should have notepad in front of you displaying code that looks similar to:


{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}}
{\colortbl ;\red255\green0\blue0;}
{\*\generator Msftedit 5.41.21.2508;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\cf1\b\f0\fs32 Welcome to My Ventrilo Server\cf0\b0\fs20\par
\par
This is an MOTD!\par
}

Now, press CTRL + A to select all of the text, and then press CTRL + C to copy it to your clipboard.

Adding it to your Ventrilo Server. Voila!

For the final step, open up the MOTD editor in your ventrilo server by logging in as admin, then right click and go to “Server Admin” and select MOTD or Guest MOTD *. Then paste (CTRL + V) it in the window and click on send. Now your custom styled MOTD should be all done!

*Guest MOTD will be displayed to all non-users, the regular MOTD option will be displayed to those who have accounts on your ventrilo server.

Conclusion

We hope you found this tutorial helpful and easy to use. Ventrilo is a great program which allows for much customization. My Ventrilo Server offers affordable and easy to use Ventrilo servers for all types of users, clans and guilds. So if you’re ever in need of a new Ventrilo Server, be sure to check out our packages.

Caveats

Unfortunately, Ventrilo only supports Rich Text Format (RTF) which allows for basic styling such as fonts, colors, bold, etc. Advanced features like images like you would see in HTML (websites) are not supported.

Enabling dual ventrilo copies:

1. First you’ll need to make sure you have a shortcut to ventrilo on your desktop, quick launch bar, start menu, or somewhere else.
2. Once you’ve found the shortcut, right click on it and go to “Properties.”
3. In the properties window look at the “Target” field/text box and append ” -m” to the end. The contents of that box should look like: "C:\Program Files\Ventrilo\Ventrilo.exe" -m
4. Now, to start up multiple ventrilo clients, just double click on that shortcut for each new client you want.

1. Open up your ventrilo client and go to “Setup.”
2. Enable direct sound (check “Use direct sound”) and click on the SFX button.
3. Select “Compressor” and click on “Add.” Use these settings in the compressor properties:

• Gain (this is the setting that sets the volume for all users, change at your own liking): ~15
• Attack: 0.01
• Release: ~500
• Threshold: ~30
• Ratio: 100
• Pre-delay: 4.0

Another major difference between these two codecs is the bandwidth (or the rate at which your internet is transferring data) usage. GSM will generally use more bandwidth than Speex, although both offer lower quality formats that use less bandwidth to help compensate for this. But strictly speaking, the high quality GSM format will use more bandwidth than the high quality Speex format. If some of your users have a slower internet speed you may want to stick with speex, or use one of the lower quality formats. This should not be an issue for most people with a DSL, fiber or cable internet connection.

If you’re a My Ventrilo Server customer, you can choose from all of the codecs offered by Ventrilo in our control panel. If your current ventrilo host restricts you to the lowest quality codecs, you can switch to My Ventrilo Server and choose from any compatible codec you want at no extra charge.