Save IM window til closed manually

Once again, I ask that the suggestion be considered:

IM windows should not auto-cllose on logging out.

Considering the amount of crash bugs in SL, I really really really hate having people IM me, especially while offline, having several to read, crashing, and then having my IMs lost.

Let's instead have it so that we have to manually close out the IM windows. It doesn't require any additional effort by players, and we know this is both possible, due to the fact that offline IMs are saved until a person logs in.

What about having it so that if the person logs off, or is disconnected (crashes), and IM pops up 5 seconds or less before disconnect, it sends it to your email or saves it for when you log back in?

There have been a few times, where I log out, and just as the "Logging out" screen pops up, I hear the chime of an IM, and groan because I often *can't* log back in to see what happened, and I wish that the IM had been sent to my email and/or saved for when I come back.

/bump

I've decided, to illustrate how annoying this problem is, to /bump it until Linden Lab comes up with a solution to my problem.

My apartment just had a brownout shortly after I logged on.

I just lost 4 peoples' worth of IMs.

Make it generic and you can kill at least two birds with the same stone.

Both IM and vicinity chat history text output should be written to separate logfiles by the client at the time that the information appears in the IM or chat display windows. If this is done, then on login any IM or chat history windows that you had open on logout (or on crash) can be prefilled trivially with the last portion of the relevant logfiles.

Easy.

Furthermore, then we can even use the logfiles as input to our own programs --- eg. a speech synthesizer is a very common application. (That's what I do right now with the output from IRC and from various alerts for example.) It all becomes very powerful and flexible, as well as solving your difficulty here.

Why not log IMs to disk realtime? This is a common feature among all major IM apps (Yahoo, AIM, Trillian) and hasn't been a legal problem, yet. It could be included as an option, turned on by default so everyone knows their IMs may be logged.

While I'm at it, why not allow SecondLife IMs to interoperate with a program such as Trillian(multi-IM client) so folks can send IMs while at work, to friends who are inworld!

Sorry, external IMs were covered in a previous thread: (/13/4e/23642/1.html)

LOL, that's what I said. Log IM and chat.

Hmm, despite our posts being separated by 4 hours... I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I wrote my reply. I don't post much because someone has usually said what I have to say. And I don't like re-reading what has already been said.

Logging IM to HDs would be an acceptable fix, IMO.

LL has a history of disliking chat logs, so I'm guessing they are not likely to implement them. However, I've previously suggested an effective solution to this problem...

When you attempt to close SL, it disconnects but instead of closing the application, it takes you to the "grey screen" that we get when a server crash occurs.

That would allow us to review any last minute chat history or IM logs. Attempting to close SL a second time will then close the actual application.

This isn't an effective solution when my computer crashes, like when I have a power hit or when SL crashes because of Radeon conflicts.

I'd suggest that you come up with an alternative to logging then, unless you think you can turn the tide on the general aversion LL has to logging.

I'd like logging too, it just seems highly unlikely.

A UPS would prevent your problem during brown-outs and would also protect your computer.

Kex,
An alternative already exists. For those of us with offline IMs NOT going to email, they are stored until we log in. Possibly the same mechanism could be used to store online IM data.

I like the idea of logging though. The text is displayed to our screens, we can cut and paste it; there's no added privacy leak.

Kasandra,
I was waiting for someone to say this.

I use a standard surge protector, but often brown-outs last longer than a simple power hit. I refuse to pay $50 for a battery backup just to fix a software problem on one game.

Besides, the battery backup still does not fix the problem about when SL crashes for reasons other than power, which for us Radeon users is ... sadly... too often.

/bump

I crashed when SL crashed my vid card and lost IMs. As per previous note, I'll bump this every time I lose IMs.

Please implement a client option to log all IMs and, for that matter, chat!

Stop him before he bumps again!

Uh...think of the children! Won't somebody please think of the children?!

Heh. "General aversion to logging" doesn't compute. I stuck it in a file and compiled it up, and the compiler came back with "R U NUBI?".

Maybe they have a more technical reason than aversion. If so, it would be good to hear it. There's certainly no obvious reason common to development projects, and I've seen a hell of a lot of projects in companies.

I support this call strongly. Any textual information that reaches our screens in chat or IM is already "logged" by our brains, and writing it to a file is no different than if we kept pasting it into a file ourselves directly. So, there are no new issues here regarding logged content.

Also, the implementation is obviously trivial, a matter of an hour of design+coding and no more than a few hours for QA to test it thoroughly. It really shouldn't be a problem.

/bump

2 more times that I lost important messages because IM windows got lost during shutting down / crash of SL

I agree with Hiro.
Log chats and IM, not only for when you crash, but also to be able to find who said what and when.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had times that he wished he had a log file to see exactly what was said.
Maybe even log the sims you were in. Wouldnt be the first time I saw something worth buying or having a better look, and then the next day I cant remember where that was..

Offcouse, make it optional, so you can choose wether or not to log to disk.

Maybe a scripter can write a script that writes to your disk every x minutes? It's possible to upload an image to your disk, so why not text? (nightmares of screens with chat history being snapshotted and uploaded to your harddisk... )

/bump

Had a crash today due to heat + SL using 100% of system resources (HOG! bwahaha) and lost some IMs

This has happened a couple times since my last bump, too.

free bump and good times

Save the IMs!

Hearhere!

/bump

More IMs lost due to a crash. This is really inconvenient and is losing me business and other important IMs.

/stamp twice in triplicate

/bump

Lost some IMs due to the 1.5.9 crashing happening... offline IMs that could have been important, but I'll never know, now will I?

When AOL instant Messenger / Yahoo / trillian / etc crash, it leaves the IMs up, or has an offline save, or a logging feature. Why can't SL have one of the above?

/bump

Again.