chat transcripts / old messages

[glyde]

Hi,

I'm very interested in your chat package for use within an online learning environment (moodle). With this in mind, I have two suggestions for features both dealing with old messages:

The first suggestion is chat session transcripts / logs. This is obviously very important for an online learning environment. If a user misses a chat session, they need to be able to see a transcript of what they missed. This could be achieved by logging each message within a chat session to a file / database.

The second thing which is very important for me is that when a user enters a chat room / session, they can see all of the previous chat. This is an issue for me because many of our users are on dial up modems and will regularly disconnect and reconnect to a session. Some chat applications will not display previous messages on entry to a chat room.

I know that these features are specific to my requirements, and I would definitely suggest these only as optional features for any chat session. In general, I would also suggest that a lot of the new features are made optional such as private messaging etc. All features are not required by all users, and if your application is kept flexible, you may find that the take up is better.

I await a response, but will be looking closer at this with a view to creating a moodle add on module with your chat application. Any suggestions on this would be appreciated.

kind regards,

Andrew Clarke (Glyde)

[jeff]

I want to use the chat program for online meetings. I would like to have a record of each meeting so I can print out a transcript or simply archive it. Right now it seems any message beyond the $params["max_msg"] is lost forever, and there is no distinguishing between chat sessions.

I currently have the default max_msg, and when I download the messages.data file, it only shows the last 20 messages. So I have no way to know if I missed anybody that typed a message earlier. As web site administrator I would like to see all messages (max_msg=infinity?) for each session. I would define a session as starting when someone logs in and ending when nobody is logged in. For now I guess I'll increase my max_msg to a high number.

[Yautja_cetanu]

I think this is important for security issues. I'd definitely like to see this as a feature. Though maybe private messaging is more important to me.

[Azrael Strife]

Indeed, I'm very interested in this feature as well.

[Rhialto]

I would say that I'm also looking for this. Mainly to get access to the log in case someone report me abuse...

In our case, the chat (once launched) should not be used a lot everyday. So I got this idea:

Raise the "max_msg" to something like 500 and set the oldmsg style the same color as my background, in our case white: div.<?php echo $prefix; ?>oldmsg { color: white; }

But the oldmsg style is not applied for some reason. kerphi is aware of that I think.