litphoria

Suggestion: Change chat mode post lifetime (before hiding) to ~96 hrs from 24 hrs

Given that a cycle of leaving a chat and coming back to it is often in the vicinity of 24hrs, keep old posts longer than this, (or make it configurable by the chat creator, including disabling the timeout). For example, returning to the Help chat the next day might show people the answer to their question, since it was asked the day before.

Yes, I'm aware of the 100 limit, and wasn't really thinking that this would skirt that limit.

There has been changes since this was suggested and it is mostly obsoleted; PMs no longer have a time limit for their old posts. This was indicated as being the most popular need.

I would be okay with increasing the backlog limit from 24 to 48 or so hours, now that there is time stamp logic to show which posts occurred on what day, but nothing further, as it starts to get into the "necroposting" stuff that chat folks explicitly told me they did not want to have to think about. As such, I am unblocking this, with that concession.

Well, I am suggesting that necro-posting is an over-used and abused term and that in any case it usually refers to posts that are more than several weeks out of date. (The whole term is abused because on the one hand you are told to do a search and preferably reply to existing posts, and on the other that you should not have necro-posted. Which is it?? Anyway, that is a personal rant. )

In the case of chats, I would prefer it be longer than 24, and 48 is better. I'm not sure why the explicitness of what some other users have stated makes a difference. If it does, I want to explicitly state that I want the option to extend the expiration to a specified number of days, not hours, and an option to never expire would be fine by me, if it is made configurable. Making it configurable by days lets people set it low for ephemeral type chats, or higher for chats of different themes that transitions to a more day-by-day thing for some period of time. For example, there is no reason to time-filter the Help chat. Let people read the Q&A that has happened over the last few days. It also helps the site not look completely dead when you go to a chat and find it completely blank. The 1-day/100-hr limit feels significantly too-tight in certain-themed chats or high-volume/rate chat.

I would love the limit to be higher, like 48 or 72 hours, in public chat rooms.

Necroposting is not a big deal to me and less important than assuring people there's life. At the moment, necro posting is not a problem! Site activity is! Who gives a crap what someone hates on some IRC channel, we have different urgent needs here for bringing the life to the site in the first place.

I'll spend endorsement points on this when some of mine are freed up.

I've upped the limits to 48 hours / 200 posts, whichever comes first, on the testing server. Will see how it works.

48 hours is certainly better, and addresses the 1-day cycle. Thanks for trying this. I could see people wanting a slightly-less-than 24-hour cycle so that a chat is fresh and clean the next evening, which is why I suggested some kind of configurability, but I'm glad for maybe getting the longer lifetime.

We might see configuration if chat archive (litphoria.com) goes through, or we might just have all chats have this 48 hour window with a slightly longer archive.

I could see a per-channel configuration being confusing for some users, particularly if they're relying on the window to try and "save posts" out into another roleplay. If you have one channel with a 4-day window and another with a 12-hour window, it'll be really hard for you to know how long the posts will stay there. It being uniform will ensure users know just how long they have before posts go away.

So I understand the need for configuration, but I don't know if I support it being a user setting after some recent conversations with chat folks about how they use chat to roleplay. We might have to try something else for slower channels which need longer retention just to seem like there's some life at all, or we might go down another road where we just show how many people are connected to the channel instead of how many contributions were made recently (so people aren't unjustly discoruaged from viewing it). Not sure yet where to go with it.

You could show in the header of the chat and/or down near the text-entry box what the Age Filter is set to for a given chat.

I never really thought about age on other chats before. Obviously there is one on f-list for the public channels, but I never actually put a second of thought into it until right now. I guess that means I didn't really give a care about what the age-filter was. I've done RP in public chats on F-list and here (once or twice, since it is rare to have the opportunity). Of course, private chats are technically not age-limited on either site, but that's a different case.

Showing the expiration rules by the input box is probably a good idea regardless if it's configurable.

Oh, but as far as the age-filter goes, saving out the chat saves all of the last 100 posts regardless of age, so there is still a way for a user to get older posts as long as the 100 (200) post-limit hasn't been exceeded. I just figured out that you can do that recently.