Suggested feature: Save chat window to log file

[juanriccio]

A feature request: Save chat window to log file

The chat window often contains links to sheet music provided by musicians sharing it with the others, or other important info that is valuable enough to save or examine after the jam's over: favorite keys for tunes, list of tunes to play in future occasions, etc. For this reason, it would be nice to be able to examine the chat after the heat of the jam is over. During the jam, the music and realtime interactions often absorb the participants' full attention.

The saving could be triggered by a button ("Save chat") or it could be automatic on a session-by-session or server-by-server basis.

Thank you for considering!

[pljones]

Even easier - keep a Google Doc open and cut-n-paste across. Or a local doc. Or other storage option.

I can think of some things that would be useful

• an option to clear the chat buffer on connect to a new server
• maybe with an automatic copy to clipboard before it clears it - no interruption with a save dialog, you just paste the clipboard somewhere when you remember

[juanriccio]

The clipboard is volatile though. An option to be sure the text isn't going to get lost would make jamming easier, especially in the case of server hopping common when the lag is too high and looking for a better home.

[pljones]

The saving could be triggered by

• a button ("Save chat") or
• it could be automatic on
  • a session-by-session or
  • server-by-server basis.

I guess for these you could have a "log dir" setting in your profile and each time it saves it could save by timestamp and clear the window. As the window is a single element, you'd have to clear the window or else you'd end up saving the same log multiple times.

Given it adds little above the copy/paste method and losing the entire window each time might be seen as more of an inconvenience, I'm still not convinced.

[juanriccio]

With these inconveniences, I agree it would not be a definite improvement. But just adding messages to a log file would be indeed handy. And no duplication!

[pljones]

There should be a JSONRPC notification containing any new chat message received by a Client, so you can stream those to a file, if that's what you're after. In fact, the connect / disconnect notifications exist as well, I believe, so you'd be able to do it per session or per server, too.

[ann0see]

I think there was a discussion and implementation a few years ago which saved chat messages. I didn't support the feature for privacy reasons as people can share eg telephone numbers or other Pii over the chat which they'd rather not have logged (potentially automatically).

[juanriccio]

That's a reasonable point. However, I think a bad actor motivated in saving personal info could just sit there and collect the info anyway. A full solution could involve personal messages to individual participants, but that goes beyond the scope of my request.

[dingodoppelt]

A full solution could involve personal messages to individual participants, but that goes beyond the scope of my request.

We "kind of" have that now. Private messages can be sent from the server via the JSONRPC interface, not from the client though.
Apps like JamChat use the JSONRPC chat interface (no private messages, yet)