Allow the GM to delete a line in the chat text

Okay so I've been using Roll20 for my campaigns as of late, and only recently went for the full support option, but, I figure if I'll do that, then I may as well offer some suggestions, if any at all. Fortunately this is more of a quality of life suggestion than anything, and it would be an ability that only the DM/GM could do to other players, and even then, It'd only be to enhance things. Right, so, me and my players strictly -do not- talk whatsoever during the game, and we do all of our roleplay completely by text. This is fantastic, but, of course, as you'd expect, there are these short moments of conversation discussing the rules, or just out of character joking that happens, and while that's nice at the time, we all kind of agreed that having to sift past a bunch of nonsense to find what "That one Kobold barbarian said" to be kind of frustrating, so, my suggestion is rather simple. Why not allow GM's to delete particular messages within the immediate chat bar, at any point in time. I mean the chatlogs would still have what happened in them (For banning purposes, or what have you) but in the chat they'd be invisible and impossible for the players to see. That way, when the game's over, anyone who'd want to come see what happened could do one of two things. - Show deleted messages - Don't show deleted messages Both directly in the chat log, and not possible in the current on-going game itself. This way, it could make the stuff seemless for those of us that are text based junkies. What do you guys think?

I think it's a fine suggestion where the Suggestion post would probably perform at its best if you change the subject line to something like, "Allow the GM to delete a line in the chat text".

If I could change it now, I would, but I'm so new to this that I can't actually tell how to do that, if I'm even able to. That aside, I'm glad you like the suggestion.

Nicholas M. said: If I could change it now, I would, but I'm so new to this that I can't actually tell how to do that, if I'm even able to. That aside, I'm glad you like the suggestion. Hi Nicholas. You can request a title change by sending a PM to one of the Forum moderators. May I suggest The Aaron ? :-)

+1 for allowing the GM to remove some text from chat. Not really what you are suggesting, but related; There is an option to "Clear Current Chat Log" (found in the sidebar settings). This will clear out the current session's chat log, but does not clear the chat archive. Cheers

Right. Just gonna slightly change the title really quick then. But do you guys see where I'm coming from exactly? I feel like this might be handy too, if for some reason you manage to get a troll in your group. Some of my players have been really unruly about interrupting stuff, and while I never minded it immediately, once I went back to backtrack, and swim through dick jokes, I kind of got a bit miffed...

Need this because I accidentally sent an attack to chat and it's going to spoil my trap. :(

Make a bunch of fake traps and trigger them to mess with your players. The real trap spoiler will be hidden among all the false positives. ;) This does sound like a good idea and I think it could be really easy to implement. In the DB, chat messages would just need one more field ```isDeleted``` in case players/DMs want the option to be able to view deleted messages. The rest of it would just be some UI stuff to: hide/display deleted messages (displayed deleted messages could be slightly faded) a corner widget to delete a message (only appears when the GM mouseovers a message and prompts "Are you sure?" if clicked) a similar widget to restore deleted messages. A widget in the player's settings for whether they want to hide or show deleted messages. Then of course, there would be a few RESTful calls to handle the backend machinery to basically just toggle a boolean value of whether a particular messages has been deleted. #FreeAdviceForDevs

I think this is a great idea! I can think of quite a few instances where this would come in handy.

+1. Would definitely be useful and while I'm not a programmer myself, seems like a simple enough feature to me.

I whole heartedly support this suggestion as my community is nothing but text based players and GMs. Everyone in the community would love some type of additonally editing ability to text chat.

+1 i agree there needs to be more finate control over all aspects for anyone who IsGM. Removal of lines in the chat log vs clearing.... even make them a mini mod of the game base thread chats. 

Out of votes, but fully intend to vote for this when I get some back. I have a bad habit of accidentally pressing attack macros while prepping for a session, and would also like a way to test out new attack macros without spoiling things for players or pasting the code into a completely seperate, player-free game.

+1 here. When setting up its character sheet I accidentally made a roll for an npc that the players hadn't encountered yet. So I had to back up the chat and then delete all of it in order to keep that thing hidden until it was supposed to be revealed. Would've liked so much more if I could just go into the chat history and snip snip.

Asha L. said: Out of votes, but fully intend to vote for this when I get some back. I have a bad habit of accidentally pressing attack macros while prepping for a session, and would also like a way to test out new attack macros without spoiling things for players or pasting the code into a completely seperate, player-free game. Hi Asha! Good news. There is already a way to keep your prep-time chats hidden (as "a way to test out new attack macros without spoiling things for players").&nbsp; When you begin prep, Put this in Chat: /talktomyself ON When ready for game day, use this: /talktomyself OFF Wiki Docs for this, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Talk_to_Myself_" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Talk_to_Myself_</a>.... Note: It would still be great to have ability to Delete a line of Chat like the Suggestion says!

Gold said: Asha L. said: Out of votes, but fully intend to vote for this when I get some back. I have a bad habit of accidentally pressing attack macros while prepping for a session, and would also like a way to test out new attack macros without spoiling things for players or pasting the code into a completely seperate, player-free game. Hi Asha! Good news. There is already a way to keep your prep-time chats hidden (as "a way to test out new attack macros without spoiling things for players").&nbsp; When you begin prep, Put this in Chat: /talktomyself ON When ready for game day, use this: /talktomyself OFF Wiki Docs for this, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Talk_to_Myself_" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Talk_to_Myself_</a>.... Note: It would still be great to have ability to Delete a line of Chat like the Suggestion says! Slight caveat to this... you won't be able to fire API commands while this is active but as long as you don't use something like powercards for your attacks (like me!) you'll be fine ;)

I can't seem to activate "/talktomyself ON"

Just use&nbsp; /talktomyself It will toggle the function on and off.

I would really appreciate this feature as well, being that I don't always remember to toggle /talktomyself and the edit gear for an NPC is really close to the initiative button...

This is a basic and oft-needed feature for games that feature intra-party secrets and intrigue.

Id love this.

Oh my gosh yes! I am terrible about accidentally hitting buttons when prepping and it's SO annoying! I love this idea!

Yeah, why not to remove the line with bad message, if you are GM? Also allow to remove it on the chat log seems better, though.

This would also be really handy in text only games when you post as a PC by mistake when choosing an NPC from the drop down menu, as it often creates no end of confusion.

I feel "delete a line" is necessary to provide Roll20 with something approaching the basic "functions" of playing tabletop games in-person. Let's put it this way: very few players at an in-person table would intend to whisper something to the GM or another player but, thanks to a tiny slip of the tongue, shout it out loud to everyone at the table instead. Since there's not much of a way to account for that in the moment given the chat interface, the GM should at least be able to wipe it from the record as they see it appear.

Carey said: Need this because I accidentally sent an attack to chat and it's going to spoil my trap. :( This is why I want this feature as well. :-P

Joe said: Carey said: Need this because I accidentally sent an attack to chat and it's going to spoil my trap. :( This is why I want this feature as well. :-P The inability to edit chat text is one of the main reasons why I have moved my RP text to discord. My group still uses Roll20 for the sheets, maps, and dice but anything involving roleplaying is now offsite till we can get some basic text support such as editing lines (even it is GM only) inside the game itself. We tried using the forums but it did not work as well (to many notifications among other reasons) as discord does.

I also offer my support to this idea, I don't want to have to clear my whole chat log to hide spoilers!

For those prepping games...you can start the session of prep by type /talktomyself in the chat. &nbsp;That will make all your test rolls non-visible to the real chat. &nbsp;It doesn't help the other situations, but you can use that to safeguard yourselves while prepping games, at least.

+1

+1

+1. Carey said: Need this because I accidentally sent an attack to chat and it's going to spoil my trap. :( I thankfully haven't spoiled anything with my vague, mysterious "1d8-1" message in the chat, but I'd still like to get rid of it.

Gold said: Asha L. said: Out of votes, but fully intend to vote for this when I get some back. I have a bad habit of accidentally pressing attack macros while prepping for a session, and would also like a way to test out new attack macros without spoiling things for players or pasting the code into a completely seperate, player-free game. Hi Asha! Good news. There is already a way to keep your prep-time chats hidden (as "a way to test out new attack macros without spoiling things for players").&nbsp; When you begin prep, Put this in Chat: /talktomyself ON When ready for game day, use this: /talktomyself OFF Wiki Docs for this, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Talk_to_Myself_" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat#Talk_to_Myself_</a>.... Note: It would still be great to have ability to Delete a line of Chat like the Suggestion says! OMG! This just changed my life.&nbsp; Thank you person from 1 year ago that probably will never see this!

Gold is still around.

Also like this suggestion. I do use /talktomyself, but while I'm testing token actions and configuring tokens I I like to make calls to TokenMod via the API!

I also like this suggestion a lot!

Yeah I just sent a private message to the group, very bad, like personal real life stuff bad..

It's been 4 years, could we please get this?

I fully support this! I found this thread because I was looking for this function.

I support this idea. I don't think I would need to use it, but I see where a lot of groups would.

I could really use this right now. I accidentally clicked on the villain's secret legendary action while editing him, and it's right there in the chat now... And yes, the "talktomyself" option would have been great had I known about it, but since it's too late, a delete or "Hide this from players" option would be nice.

Time to make a copy of the game for reference, take your players off of it so they can’t open that copy, and clear your current game’s chat history! :-P Jeremy R. said: I could really use this right now. I accidentally clicked on the villain's secret legendary action while editing him, and it's right there in the chat now... And yes, the "talktomyself" option would have been great had I known about it, but since it's too late, a delete or "Hide this from players" option would be nice.

+1

+1

And this finally hits 200 votes!

Thanks for the suggestion. I have a couple questions for your opinions. When we do this, should the option be to delete and remove the specific chat entry? Or would the preference be for converting that one message into a Whisper?

I would think delete would be easiest. I can’t think of a time when I would need to keep an accidental posting around. Convert to GM-whisper would be a perfectly sufficient answer for my needs, though, if that is useful to anyone else. I suppose the convert use case might be if a player took an official action that they meant to be GM-only, but my answer stands.

Deleting it is fine, I fail to see a reason why I'd need to keep a accidental post or convert it into a whisper if it's not something I intended to send?

Delete a post is the most needed.

Yep, definitely delete the post. If it needs to be whispered it can be re-posted as a whisper.

Kenton said: Thanks for the suggestion. I have a couple questions for your opinions. When we do this, should the option be to delete and remove the specific chat entry? Or would the preference be for converting that one message into a Whisper? Delete is enough.&nbsp;