Additional Chat Archive Filters & Features

The Chat Archive itself is a great feature. The way I see it, however, it has a few flaws in its current form. 1. First and foremost, I believe the option should exist to downgrade the archive into plain text or similar for those of us whose computers aren't exactly powerhouses and have to open the massive chat archives of long-running campaigns where the chat has been used extensively. 2. Secondly, an option to download the chat history from your campaign to your computer either in the form of .html or .txt files, preferrably separated between "live chat messages" and "whispers". 3. Speaking of whispers... I found when browsing the Chat Archives that you can see your own whispers to other players, but you can't see whispers from them to you. I'm not sure if this is just on my end, or if it's an issue throughout the site as a whole. Either way, this should likely be remedied so you can browse received whispers from other players and the DM. 4. There is an option in the Chat Archive to "hide whispers"... How about adding a reverse feature, displaying only whispers? 5. Time-based filters. If you're looking for messages in a certain time period, you should be able to load only the chat logs of certain time periods or months instead of being forced to load the entirety of the chat history every time. Such as loading only logs of the past week, month, six months, year... Or specific months.

This is a well-thought-out suggestion. Nicely presented. I'd like to see all of those ideas come to pass. Would make the chat archive much more useful on several levels. There may be another Suggestion similar to #5, but the rest are novel ideas. #2 goes hand-in-hand with the desire to export character sheets -- the overriding theme: people like to be able to export their writings and use it in other programs or crosspost it in your forums, not to move out of Roll20 but rather to enhance the overall campaign with Roll20 as the central plank.

Ah, thank you! :) And yes, there's other suggestions for timestamps and the like, which is why I didn't include that myself. Similar, but moreso complementary of previous suggestions along with new ideas.

I personally manually save chat transcripts after each session. My setup: Go into full chat archive, pop into Inspect Element mode and copy inner HTML of the relevant container to grab all messages, then I toss that massive block of text into Notepad++, search for the last line of the previous session, and delete all text before that point to be left with a single session's worth in a file. While the full chat archive is best for full searching, an offline copy saved per session helps me with checking small details without the 15 second browser hang from opening the full beast of a log 15-20 sessions into a campaign, plus I find it better for keeping a sense of when events happened. I also manually toss in css to hide avatar image links (which break locally, of course) and roll details, hiding the div.formattedformula class takes out the big quantumroll icon and die images which take lots of vertical space while leaving in the result. If the chat archive by default only loaded archived messages from the last month with a further button to load everything, that would smooth out the last rough spot in my setup (it's hard to reference messages from earlier in the session, as even if they haven't gone off the chatlog you're still scrolling up to check). Making the logs more portable would also be lovely, but what I really want is to avoid triggering that total browser lock unless I really am downloading a year's worth of roleplay. Starting each session with a consistent headline for easy searching is a good idea that I should do as well. Being able to set markers for session/arc (episode/season) would be nice window dressing, but I'll hold off on wanting that until after we get date filtering.

We need better chat logs. So I support this change.

Update on this: Around 60 sessions into one of my games, the chat log has stopped properly loading, and at 64 sessions it crashes Firefox when I try to open it. I can still open the chat log in Chrome with just a temporary freeze. Plaintext archive would be greatly appreciated.

Oh! Thank you for your response. I forgot this thread still existed. All the same, I'm still standing behind my suggestion and hope others see the potential merit in it.

A million times this! Not being able to see messages sent to your character sheet in the archive has been a big issue for my campaign.

Same. It's been very annoying in information-heavy games and the extra work that goes into having to keep your own off-site archives is... well. Not lucrative in the long run. Especially in cases where a conversation suddenly becomes relevant that you thought wouldn't be, and you're long past the point of being able to read it immediately and the Chat Archive is large enough that it crashes your browser every time you try to load it. :)

Pagination has solved the chat log loading problem. Search and export are still a concern, so I'm consolidating my vote onto one of the new suggestions .