#19 Easy access to chat logs for review

[Anonymous]

Great product...amazing, really.

I wondered if there was an easy way to link to past chat conversations for each room/channel? That way if someone misses something, they can go back and review it.

thanks!

[Philip Nicolcev]

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The only way to view old chats is to view the logs or to set the config to show enough old chat messages to see what was said. Chats are not broken up into conversations either.

In order to have every post linkable that way, a number would have to be added to each posts for reference. There is also the potential security risk of allowing people to essentially view all the logs even if they are not administrators, since they could always just link to every single post to look for what they want.

[Thom]

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If you're worried about security, how about just making it easier for the admin to select a particular log and either save it as a text file, or email it to someone.

What I mean by a particular chat log could be simply a date/time *range* (e.g. 12:10-12:30 or 4:15-6:40 or 2008/5/10 23:30 - 2008/056/11 02:30) in a particular channel (public or private).

This avoids any security concern, or the need to add anything to the database, it puts the onus on the admin to determine the start and end times, and who is allowed to view it (outside the system since it's now an external text file).

[Philip Nicolcev]

That's not too hard to do and worth considering. There is currently a move to give the admin the ability to clear the logs and print them to a txt file. One user wrote a mod for this already here:

https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=3007180&forum_id=774132

that's more likely to be the implementation we go with because the log size currently gets pretty big if you don't have it set to prune