litphoria

This I am all for. I only have issues with the concept of showing 'lurkers' because I often pop into various rooms at work and would prefer that I not show as a potentially active user when I clearly will not be.

To be clear, if you want any post persistence at all, you should not being using chat mode. That is literally the entire reason to use chat mode - that posts go away.

Chats are also useful because they have a better aesthetic appearance for short posts and won't send out a stream of email alerts. Since those aren't features you can have in a Roleplay, it's not really the case that the "entire reason" to use chats is that posts go away.

Standard role plays do not send out e-mails if you are actively connected to them.

Say you make one post to a roleplay being used as a chatroom. Two days later, 5 people have a conversation with 300 posts.

You now have 300 new emails.

I disagree that the entire reason to use chats is to make posts go away. That's not why I use chats at all! I use chats because they're chats! Post expiration isn't important or even something I'd ask for.

Not only connected, if you're either connected or active at all, it won't send. It only sends if you're completely inactive - which is what you want, because it's a new post in something you want to save! Something you care about.

Satsuki, it's the only reason to use them here, since standard roleplays have literally all of the features of chats, including typing notifications and live updating, without losing posts.

Chats are also great for conversation and a meeting place for striking up various topics. Roleplays have a more formal purposeful design for Not That.

Yes. Casual conversation. Where you want posts to disappear eventually. As I said before, the only reason to use chat.

No. Not where I want the posts to go away.

Okay, went ahead and made a new feedback for this sort of case, since it seems that the only feature of chats is the lack of permanence.

So, look, the backlog getting cleared after a while is helpful. The fact the message get deleted forever is not, and an archive would be amazingly good. I use chats because their aesthetics and features support conversation. Roleplays do not, they devote large para space to every message and have limited messages in view which is bad for conversation.

And I do not use chats because the messages get deleted. as I said, that isn't a feature I want or ever asked for myself, and is not my entire reason to use chats at all, and I would use them whether this happened or not.

If people told you "chats are great because the messages get deleted!" then you need to ask more people because they gave you bad Intel.

Chats can potentially have thousands of posts in a day, while a roleplay will be exceptional to have a thousand over the entire lifetime of its course. It is therefore not feasible to me to keep logs forever like you can with standard plays.

I may be interested in a still-revolving non-temporary but longer log than 100 posts, e.g a whole day, or something like that, but not forever permanence.

Maybe a 48 hour log, giving all users plenty of time to save the posts and move them elsewhere if they so desire? I've already seen people moving their chat based role play into standard role play for log storing purposes.

Sure! Keep an archive of the past two weeks paginated by days maybe.

Two weeks seems like a bit much, Satsuki, to me at least. Why do you feel the need to have that long a period archived?

Why not? This is about an archive in the first place. 2 weeks is not a long time, and more importantly it's less than forever.

It might be more practical to limit it based on how much data is being stored. Two days with 50k posts is gonna take up a lot more space than a year with 300.

Because there could be thousands of posts in a two week span and it honestly feels like a bit much. It is a simple waste of space, imo. If you want to save your posts, so that you personally have them forever, 24-48 hours is plenty of time. It is also plenty of time to take a peek and see what people have been up to over the past few days.

Storage space is cheap and even infinite for some web hosts. Who knows how much space we have to work with, Avent only said they couldn't be kept forever, not that we have a single floppy disk to work with.

Yes, two weeks is not going to cut it. I'd rather see a short, high-functional period wherein you can go back and pick posts to "promote" to a full play, and it would actually move those posts over instead of just resorting to you copy-pasting.

24-48 hours is not plenty of time. 24 hours is our current expiration time and that is not plenty of time at all. Neither is 48.

There is no such thing as infinite web hosting. There are some places that say they have infinite but obviously data isn't free and if we're talking up 100TB because we can those hosting providers are going to have a word with you.

I'd like to design things with success and scale at mind. I'd like everything on the site to work even if everyone from f-chat moved over here and started using it, in full, tomorrow. I do not believe we'd get there if chats retained posts for two weeks, at potentially hundreds of thousands posts per.

Back of an evelope calculation: 500 posts/day (generous for every room) x 150 characters each (also generous average, that equals bytes right?) x 14 days = 1,050,000 bytes. One megabyte. Times, what, twenty chat rooms active in the past two weeks. Twenty megabytes total for a two week archive feature. That's it.

If it creates more life on the site it is a long, long, long time before we will be taking up even onegigabyte, and we gain from it in the meantime.

I'd like everything on the site to work even if everyone from f-chat moved over here and started using it, in full, tomorrow. I do not believe we'd get there if chats retained posts for two weeks, at potentially hundreds of thousands posts per.

Yeah but let's be realistic. They won't, and if they did, the site would probably die and your provider would ask you to move to bigger hosting. You'll get a small trickle and grow slowly. You can implement features that work now and scale up and increase performance as demand for doing so gets bigger. Take advantage of that.

Okay, what on earth is the benefit of having posts past in a chat past two days?

It is a number I picked that is definitely long enough. If I'm away for a day or two, I can find out what happened. It's long enough to point people to things that happened recently, if they go away for a few days. 48 hours of log is just barely enough to provide minimum usage but won't always be long enough. 14 days is an arbitrary number that is almost certainly going to be enough for anything dependent on the posts surviving a moderate but not long amount of time. Pick a week if you prefer, pick 48 hours too if you really want.

I'm drawing these numbers from considering my activity in chat rooms other than Main Channel.

I also don't mean to commandeer Griz's suggestion. He didn't specify a time. I threw two weeks out there, and when I got replies of "too much space" and "100TB" I just calculated what it really was. I am not attached to 2 weeks, I JUST threw that out there as a number.

I also don't think it's a good idea to design the site for a scenario that won't happen. It WILL reach thousands of users one day if we do things that help it grow. But if we make design decisions based on what would happen if five thousand people were active RIGHT NOW, and what the current infrastructure could support, we would be cutting out almost everything. The site would crash under five thousand people. Chat wouldn't work. Design decisions should be practical and made assuming we'll have long term steady and eventually exponential growth that will one day taper off and become logarithmic, because that's actually realistic.

Since the main issue is scaling, how about a conditional system. The Chat Archive holds messages for a minimum of two days, but only the last 5000 posts.

So each day, it would check and see if there are 5000 or more posts and 3 or more days of content. If so, it would then remove a day off the archive, then check again. It would repeat this process until either there were only 2 days in the archive or 5000 posts.

I also don't think it's a good idea to design the site for a scenario that won't happen. It WILL reach thousands of users one day if we do things that help it grow. But if we make design decisions based on what would happen if five thousand people were active RIGHT NOW, and what the current infrastructure could support, we would be cutting out almost everything. The site would crash under five thousand people. Chat wouldn't work. Design decisions should be practical and made assuming we'll have long term steady and eventually exponential growth that will one day taper off and become logarithmic, because that's actually realistic.

Chat here was not designed willy-nilly. It is basically forums that update live. This system can handle considerably more than F-chat without issue since it doesn't have things which are specifically designed to not scale, like statuses, and, even if chat totally crashes... the site is still fine. You could still post, you could still refresh. Things would still work. I did not design these things like an idiot, and I don't really think you'll get far in the conversation insisting that I don't know w hat I'm doing and this site won't scale.

Since the main issue is scaling, how about a conditional system. The Chat Archive holds messages for a minimum of two days, but only the last 5000 posts.

So each day, it would check and see if there are 5000 or more posts and 3 or more days of content. If so, it would then remove a day off the archive, then check again. It would repeat this process until either there were only 2 days in the archive or 5000 posts.

I don't have any issues with your original suggestion here, Griz, or at least, not many. A day or two to copy things out to a more permanent place is a good addition, and if it's kept on another page, the server can appropriately dish it out when it is not needed, and not constantly request it whenever someone loads up chat. The issues I have start to occur when we say weeks, "in case I go on vacation" or something like that.

I'm not insisting you don't know what you're doing, but I don't think you should cut features that could help site activity, because it might gain 5,000 users tomorrow. We need to get there first, and in that time we can scale features or choose to shed them, and we need to add features that will help it get there, including ones that might not work if five thousand were active tomorrow.

Fair enough, I just tend to think in terms of compromise. Find a solution that pleases both parties. Right now, the 2-day cutoff seems to be based on scaling issues, while Satsuki (and myself) would like something with a bit more room. People are lazy and forgetful generally, so having a good buffer is comforting. Even if someone diligently copy and pastes logs--or later is able to select certain posts and promote them directly into a roleplay, which would be nifty--it's still nice to know you aren't being pressured to do it right that moment or if you forget it'll be gone by the time you remember. If it's a system that can scale up even to f-list levels and works for everyone, so much the better.

Are the issues you have with a longer archive then more related to the idea that chats should not be used like roleplays?

When I think of 24-48 hours of scaling, I think that is archived data, beyond what is actively held in chat. So, assuming that chat holds 24 hours, and it may be upping to 48, that means the archive would go back, from the active chat state, to 72, or even 96 hours. That seems like more than enough for your needs. If you are gone longer than that, do you really need all of the logs?

The current plan as I see it is this:

• Current chat behavior will continue unchanged, or have its post expiration raised somewhat (to another day, maybe, something like that)
• We might get 200 messages in the backscroll instead of 100 (or 250, etc)
• There will be a link to view older which will not be part of the backscroll. Here is where the stuff you would use to copy out appears, and goes back at least for the rest of the day, but potentially farther.

Something just came to me a day later. I've been sick today, so I hope this is a good insight and not deranged.

There are some chat rooms whose main point is conversation. The conversation here is arbitrary. It meanders into many various topics, including sensitive or politically divisive ones. This is the kind of room where people are relaxed enough to say stupid shit and whatnot. Main Channel and Adult Main Channel would be a couple of these. Archives aren't important here, they're almost meaningless, and roleplays of substance are best brought elsewhere (like to a roleplay room). People who weren't involved in a conversation at the time either don't benefit all that much from seeing it or, sometimes, probably just shouldn't be able to see it.

Other chat rooms have a purpose of community. The KLK's raison d'etre is more or less to unwind and have some fun within the KLK canon. We talk, we roleplay, we have a small community of people who take the time to get to know each other. A sort of 'refresh' where the backlog disappears is helpful here for keeping things transient and keeping us from being too bogged down in what happened a while ago, but archives are also helpful (in a separate page): they build a history for our shared experiences and looking at what other people did is important for building a sense of where we are now, or just there for fun. People who weren't there at the time still benefit from seeing it, or others who were still benefit from sharing what did happen.

The Fight & Fuck room would also be one of those community-oriented rooms. Griz, what rooms are you picturing in terms of benefiting from an archive most of all? RPG Chat too, right?

I still think this is better for that. If you want to look at something that appears to be a chat, it seems like it would do that!

I used to think like this, but I think at some level the posts disappearing is still desired. That idea would just make a standard RP look like a chat one, e.g the posts would still be retained forever. This can not be what is desired when we're talking about a chat channel --- in fact I'm pretty sure it never is. It's still a good idea, but it's solving a different issue entirely.

The appearance of a chat is part of its function. From something I said earlier:

I use chats because their aesthetics and features support conversation. Roleplays do not, they devote large para space to every message and have limited messages in view which is bad for conversation.

Also the backlog clearing itself regularly is helpful in ways it isn't for roleplays, but still having a longer recorded history than a day or two is helpful for the community.

So, why can we not have this? If it's basically the same as forum code-wise? Why is message limitation necessary?

In SlimCat automatic log saving was a very useful feature, and not just for saving RPs. Going back to a message from a certain date was how I used it the most.

The reason why chats are limited at all is because it was decided that was desirable after canvasing chat users. In the current system, chats tend to slow down the larger the message backlog is, but this particular reason will become irrelevant with the new system.

It's important to remember that you can choose what to make your channel. Chat only needs to be picked if you actually want posts to be erased after a period of time.

Chat also needs to be picked if we want a chat. It has different psychological tuning for users.

In the current system, chats tend to slow down the larger the message backlog is, but this particular reason will become irrelevant with the new system.

Really? Does that really happen? Huh.

What are the differences between chat representation and forum representation? Apart from backlog. I mean I can understand some separation, but erasing messages? What's the psychological tuning in that? As a chat user, I have no clue.

I don't mean there's psychological tuning in deletion. But if it looks like a chat and feels like a chat, people get chatty, it's less formal. That can be good!

Well, yeah, that part is true. But what about deletion? Is it really necessary?

I think that as the site evolves, the chat/roleplay distinction is just going to keep blurring. On the test server right now, the differences between the two are

1. Roleplays save everything
2. Roleplays send out an email to everyone who has posted in it if they aren't connected to lit.

The appearance of a chat or roleplay is now a user-display item, and the archive and email options will presumably be the same. The big thing here isn't that "chats should let messages expire" vs "chats should keep everything like slimcat does!", but "do whatever you want to do", which is the best of both worlds.

The appearance of a chat or roleplay is now a user-display item, and the archive and email options will presumably be the same.

That makes difference #3: Roleplays start out looking like roleplays. Chats start out looking like chats.

I'm mentioning what they look like because it cues people to behave differently. Who exchanges "Hi!" "What's up?" "lol nm" in a roleplay? Things get kept fairly strictly-business there. There's a reason Honnouji Academy was made a chat rather than a roleplay, so that things didn't have to be strictly business.

So there's kinda three options at the moment: (a) whether everything gets saved, (b) whether there's email alerts, and (c) what it looks like by default. These options are tied together in ways they don't need to be, preventing me from having (a) archived (b) no alert (c) chat.