Saving open IMs when logging off

I'm continuously forgetting to check my instant messages before logging off. Because of this I sometimes miss important personal messages.

Once logged off these messages are gone forever, weather I read them or not.

I think it would be a good idea if any personal IM messages that haven't been closed already, are saved until next logon.

Once you log on you already have the feature of recieving messages that were sent to you while you were offline.

With my suggested feature the result would be that, when you log on, you would recieve any messages you hadn't read yet when you logged off and any messages that were sent to you while you were logged off.

This way no messages would be missed.

What do you think?

Rocky.

That sounds like a great idea. And it should be simple to implement I'd think (saving it on the client side probably).

I'm thinking that if the saved messages are to be loaded back in the standard IM window then they will probably need to be saved on the server side. I'm sure that the Lindens would want to keep some sort of control of what appears in their IM windows.

I don't see why it would have to be saved on the server side Rocky. The IM already arrived. The message data has already been stored locally (either to memory or cache). Lots of windowed applications allow you to save the window state on shutdown. Saving any remaining data in an open but unseen IM session only to restore it the next time the application is opened should be trivial to implement. Why wouldn't LL want you to see an IM addressed to you which already arrived? How could that be considered a loss of control? The client even "knows" whether you read the IM or not (the IM received button disappears when you read it) so it shouldn't be difficult to work out when IM data should be saved to disk and restored in the IM window when Second Life is launched again.

Your idea is a good one and I'm surprised it wasn't proposed a long time ago.

This feature is currently in the current 1.12.4.1 beta client, see http://secondlife.com/community/preview.php for more info

and there ya have it! GREAT FEAUTRE!!!

Hmm...

I see the logging options but I'm not sure my feature idea is covered.

It looks like you can log the IMs (which is a feature that seems to be in high demand) and automatically show the end of the last conversation you had with someone when you start a new conversation but it doesn't look like it will reload previous IMs that hadn't been closed when you last logged off.

Those features are good but I could still miss messages if an unopened IM was saved to a log but I wasn't aware of it. It would still be nice to have previously unclosed IMs automatically reopened.

Maybe you could have the open IMs log file tagged as open and when you closed the IM, its log file is tagged as closed. Then when you log on again the log files tagged as open would automatically open again. Sounds good?

I may be wrong in my understanding of the feature list of the beta, if so I'd like to hear from anyone who is using it. What can you do with the logging features?

Cheers.

The way I figured out it works is that everytime you open an IM window it fetches any and ALL existing logs and prints it out line after line. And then you see the bottom of it. I didn't test with a lot of lines (at least 50), I reached the point where I gave up trying to find the upper limit.

That's the way I understood it to work.

So it doesn't automatically reload previously left open IMs when you log back on? Cos' that's the feature I'm looking for.

Nope, and based on the way the logging works, I'm not sure it could.
Maybe they could base it off that "blinking" piece of code, but I'm not sure how that works.