If you've been around for Desert Bus before, welcome back! If, however, this is your first time attending, here's 10 tips and tricks worth of FAQ (like, really, these come up in chat during Desert Bus *all the time*) to help you get the most out of your DB experience:

1. First and foremost, *get yourself a donor account.* You might want to do that right now so you're not scrambling to do it when that jaw-droppingly amazing prize you have to have comes up for grabs. Head to desertbus.org and click 'Signup' if you don't have one; it'll walk you through the process from there. (Returnees should still give their accounts a peek to make sure everything's up to date.) Having a donor account makes things a whole lot easier on everybody involved, including you should you manage to win a prize. Live and silent auctions may only be contested by people with donor accounts.
2. For the most part, DB chat is similar to normal LRR chat, but significantly faster-paced, and all the normal LRR chat rules apply (actually, think more along the lines of the stricter MTG Pre-PreRelease rules when things are also particularly hectic). You're liable to see all the people you normally run into, but also a lot of people you haven't seen in chat the entire rest of the year. However, it isn't *actually* LRR chat. It's twitch.tv/desertbus. So do remember that LRRbot has the week off and the LRRbot commands you know and love won't be in play.
3. There will be children watching too. Some of them are the very children we're trying to help. For their sake, the longstanding rule is no swearing, either on camera or in chat. If you feel the need to swear, please replace all expletives with "bus" or variants thereof.
4. When submitting a challenge, be sure to only challenge people you see on camera, as that's who's available to perform. People off-camera are likely busy with other things. Challenges regularly get purged (there's always a heavy bias towards accepting more recent challenges); if yours gets purged and wasn't explicitly denied, feel free to submit it again.
5. Should you opt to bid on one of the live auctions, the proper syntax is "!bid" followed by the number of US dollars you intend to bid, as DB operates in USD (e.g. !bid 420.69 in order to bid $420.69 USD). Go ahead and add some smacktalk afterward if you like. There is a $5 increment rule in play. The bot in DB chat can only see bids from people who have linked their Twitch and donor accounts, and yes, auctions *have* been won and lost based on that detail. Don't let it happen to you. Also, just in case it wasn't clear: These are real auctions, involving real money. FAKE BIDS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.
6. Donate/bid responsibly. It's okay if you're unable to financially contribute this year or in any year, or if an auction slips out of your reach. Just hanging out in the chat, being positive, spreading the word, that works too. And where applicable, if you are donating, get your tax receipts for those donations. Child's Play's EIN is 20-3584556. Child’s Play is a 501(c)(3) entity based in the United States.
7. Should you be so fortunate as to win a prize, please send an e-mail to prizes@desertbus.org to confirm your donor account- which hopefully has up-to-date shipping information (you remembered to do that, right?)- and the prize won. The sooner the shipping team has your info confirmed, and the sooner Child's Play has your donation, the sooner your prize can be sent your way.
8. The clock is always ticking. This gets forgotten a lot in the early stages of the run, only to become forefront in chat's mind once it gets into the final day or so, leading to a lot of people lamenting that DB is almost over while it's still actually going. If you want Desert Bus to not be over, all you got to do is keep putting hours on the clock, and you know how to make that happen.
9. The goal is always, raise as much money as possible. The goal is *not* "beat last year". If we do, that's outstanding, but this isn't Kickstarter, where not hitting the big number at the end means failure. However much we raise is awesome. Even if we don't beat last year- and it's going to happen sooner or later and very nearly happened at DBX- we're going to make a lot of kids happy trying.
10. Hopefully we'll make each other happy too. Be sure to have fun. We've been waiting all year for this, and it's been a long year.