How to use Arabic chat rooms on a first visit

This is a first-visit guide. You will see what the form asks, which room to open, and how a line gets sent. Aweena is a writing room. It is not a directory of profiles, photos, and phone numbers.

The form asks for five things. A nickname of two to twenty characters. Gender, including “prefer not to say.” An age from 18 to 99, because the rooms are for adults and we do not check documents. A country, including countries where Arabs live abroad. An emoji from a fixed set. That emoji is your picture. There is no upload.

What happens after you enter

You land on thirteen rooms. You can join up to five and read one at a time: General, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Iraq, Algeria, the Maghreb, Arabs in Europe, and Arabs in the US and Canada. You can reply to a message in the room. Each room keeps the latest one hundred messages. Older lines are deleted. Do not treat a public room as a diary you can scroll next month. Public-room messages can add a simple level on a profile. There are no prizes.

The page refreshes on a short timer while it is open. That is not a promise of instant delivery to the millisecond. If your network drops, the composer keeps your sentence and shows a reconnecting state instead of posting five copies. Each send carries an id, so a retry does not insert a second row.

Private chat is a second step

A public line is readable by whoever is in the room. A private thread starts only after you request it from someone’s profile and they accept. You can only keep a few requests pending, so the feature cannot be used to poke an entire room. One pair has one thread. There are no read receipts. The thread keeps the latest three hundred messages, and nothing older than thirty days.

Use the room for anything a passerby can read. Use the private thread for a conversation that would clog the room or expose a detail. Even then, do not send a phone number. Blocking and reporting exist because a free room with no account still needs a way to stop abuse. Repeated qualified reports from different people pause the target’s sending automatically for a while. They can still read.

No account, on purpose

No account means this browser is your identity. Come back on the same device and you continue. Another device is a new visitor unless you optionally add an email later and use it to recover. If the mail cannot be sent, the screen says so. We do not pretend a code was sent.

Deleting your identity removes the rows tied to you: profile, session, messages, requests, and reports. It is not a soft hide. Clearing the browser without using that button simply abandons the cookie. Both are consistent with a room that never asked you to register.

What to do in the first minute

Open the Arabic home, fill the form, enter, pick a room such as General or the country you actually want, and write one plain sentence. If the name is rejected, the reason appears under the field. Empty messages do not send. Past five hundred characters the counter turns red and the message is refused until you shorten it.

Then read how safety works before you share anything you would not say on a bus. If you live outside the region, the Europe and North America piece explains those two rooms without turning them into immigration advice. The room list in English is on one page. It links the Arabic general room, whose page links every other room for the local detail.

Rooms without a sign-up form only stay decent if people write as if others are present. They are. Say hello, skip the phone number, and leave the thread cleaner than you found it.

The first time you open a room in a visit, a small card that only you see welcomes you and links the room rules. When you join a room, the people in it see a short «انضم» (joined) line with your name; if you leave and join again within half an hour, it does not repeat. For two minutes after that line, anyone in the room can press «رحّب» (welcome) once to send you a hello, and a short notice tells you who did. The join line is not a message: it does not count toward the hundred, and it earns no points.