So I'm a player in a game that's been going for about 2 months, now, and so we've accumulated a LOT of chatter in the logs.
And today, I needed to go through and find the loot list so that we could post it and divide it up on the forum, because one of our players couldn't make the last session. And I have to say, it was one of the worst experiences I've had with a Roll20 system.
The problem lies in the way that the information is loaded: It's essentially streamed in, in some format that isn't plain text (I think it's either Flash or JavaScript). When you have two months of accumulated chat, it can take a LONG time for everything to load, and because of the way it works, your browser will basically freeze up. And Firefox gives you these annoying "A script has stopped responding, would you like to end it?" windows, which means that if you want the system to keep loading everything, you need to keep clicking "Continue".
So, to make going through that less of a hassle, I have a few suggestions:
1) An option to load the chat log in reverse order. ie: From most recent first, going backwards to the beginning of the campaign. I'm much more likely to need something relatively recent than something from a couple months ago, so having that option would be excellent. Then I could just stop the script early, and have the stuff I need available.
2)An option to store it in plain text. This wouldn't do much for the sheer volume of stuff, but since it's just text, instead of a flash program thing, it would take a LOT less time to load it all. Downside is that dice rolls wouldn't be as easily read, and the /me's and stuff wouldn't be color coded.
2a) Similar to 2, but with color coding. Stored in HTML format. This would be plain text, with the /me stuff and dice rolls being color coded, as they are in the in-app chat.
3) Both. Plain text in reverse order, possibly with color.
Of course, these could all be optional settings, preferably individual to each person, or selected when you go to view the archive.
Thanks!
~Ian
