Setting up specialized chat tabs in LOTRO

The default chat configuration in LOTRO results in a very cluttered General tab. Moments after you log in to a brand new character you will probably see World chat regarding in-progress conversations, offers for trades that don’t matter to you, and requests for fellowship that you can’t engage with. All of this tends to send relevant text in your General chat rapidly out of sight, like the introduction text of the starter instance (seen at the top of the below screenshot), or the NPC dialog like Bounder Boffin (seen at the bottom of the screenshot). I prefer to create a couple of more-specialized tabs to work with. Read on to find out how!

Initial Configuration

When you first log in to a character in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), your chat window has the default configuration.

This means you have:

• General tab with the following channels: Advancement, Combat Event, Emote, Error, Event Broadcast, Fellowship, Kinship, LFF, Leaderboard, Loot ( Fellow ), Loot ( Self ), OOC, Officer, Quest, Raid, Regional, Say, Standard, Tell, Trade, User Chats 1-8, and World.
• Combat tab with the following channels: Combat Enemy, Combat Event, Combat Player
• IMs tab with a side-tab for each other character you have chatted with.

Customizing the Chat Tabs

In addition to these starting tabs, you can add more by right-clicking the General chat tab and selecting Create New Tab.

Once you have a new tab, you can rename it to help you remember what it’s for by right-clicking the new tab and selecting Rename Tab.

I like to begin by creating three specific tabs for each of my characters with the following purposes and suggested names:

• “World”: Channels that anyone can see from anywhere like LFF, Trade, and World go here.
• “F/K” (or “KinFelRaid” if you don’t want a shorter tab name): Short for Fellowship & Kinship, this is where chat with other players I’m interacting closely goes. (Other channels like Raid and Officer go here too.)
• “Local” (or “Area”): Everything that F/K has plus /say and emotes. I like being able to see what emotes people are doing and what’s going on in say, but sometimes NPCs (or other players) spam emotes or /say too much. When that happens I can just switch back to the F/K tab.

Let’s look at their actual setups:

World

This is the first thing I make when I log into a new character for the first time. On the World chat tab I make sure only LFF, Trade, and World are selected. Since these three channels can generate so much chatter, I deselect them on my General tab. (I don’t do this for the other channels like fellowship & kinship.)

F/K

I configure the F/K tab with Event Broadcast, Fellowship, Kinship, Officer, Raid, Regional, Tell, and User Chats 1-8.

Local

I configure the Local tab with everything F/K had, plus Emote, OOC, RP, and Say. The complete list is: Emote, Event Broadcast, Fellowship, Kinship, OOC, Officer, RP, Raid, Regional, Say, Tell, and User Chats 1-8.

Putting your own spin on it

You might find that you prefer not to have some of these channels. Maybe you’d prefer not to see OOC and RP in the same place as your kinship chat? (Or not at all!) Now that you know how to customize things, play with it! Is there so much chatter in your kinship that you’d prefer to get it out of General completely? Do it! Are your fellowship and kinship chats always unrelated and combining them doesn’t work for you? Change it!

The Downside

Unfortunately, now that you have the perfect chat setup, you must manually recreate it on each other character. There’s no built-in mechanism to save your chat tab setup and recreate it at a later time.

Other helpful options

You know how sometimes you’ll see a group forming in LFF and get your hopes up, but when you reply to it they respond that they’re already done? I highly recommend turning on the Enable timestamps on chat option, so that you can know how old a message is before responding!