Persistent chat rooms

[notaktak at gmail.com]

Nathan Walp wrote:
> Chris Stafford wrote:
>> I hate having the previous conversation appear. not least because my
>> main reason for closing the window when the conversation hasn't finished
>> is that I don't want somebody who's looking over my shoulder to read
>> what has been written. Otherwise what's wrong with keeping the window
>> open?
> That's what I use Ctrl-L for.

That's true, although I would rarely if ever think of using Ctrl-L in a
conversation rather than a chat. it's just an example of where the added
'useful' information is a potential irritant for me. In fact my main
objection is the uselessness of the history and the cost of providing it:

- I tend to close the window when a conversation is over, and very
rarely need to refer back to the history which gets inserted
- Because the history is not relevant, it isn't contextual information,
it's just noise. To say that it is only history from since last time
Pidgin was started is irrelevant - Pidgin tends to run for several days
at least on my system, and it's not uncommon for it to stay happily
running for several weeks
- Even with a limit on the scrollback the amount of data which is being
kept lying around increases

The only exception to this I guess is where I close the window to be
faced a few seconds later with a new window because the person at the
other end isn't finished saying goodbye, and in fact that's more of a
logging issue, since I rarely need context to understand somebody saying
goodbye.

Reading the article provided linked by Sean, what would probably be more
useful is an interface that made it easier to search and view logs
within the current window, rather than having to open up the log window.
Maybe that would consist of a button which inserted the entire log as a
tree into the window, and let you open up conversations as required
(obviously that isn't possible with the gtkimhtml as it stands, and
would potentially look horrible)

cheers
chris