Chat History and You

So sometimes things can get a little hectic in that box, and when I've got 5 seperate IMs happening as well as a crowd of people talking, it gets very confusing!

I would like to offer two suggestions options for helping to improve this:

1) Completely remove IMs from the chat window or chat history box. As we already have a seperate IM window, this is a bit redundant.
2) Offer the option to color your IMs something seperate, so that the distinction can be more easily made at a glance.

And that's it! I realize there are limitations and such, but if this is anything like ANSI in MU*s well.. <grins> Thanks for hearing me out!

Coloring IMs so they are distinct from the normal chat would be cool.

I agree with Lyra's 2 suggestions

Agreed.

Also, would be nice if chat text colour was set to a person's "magic pixie dust" colour, and possibly outlined in black.

My magic dust IS black! <grins> Then what?

Consult your family doctor immediately.

Um, I said "outlined in black" so that it would be visible against most backgrounds. But if the text is black, and the outline is black and you're looking at something black, well then, I guess you're hosed.

I know Wednesday, it was s'posed to make you laugh, not think I was a dunderhead. <grins> But yeah.. hosed. It may be time to reconsider my magic dust!

i think there should be four "history" windows (or tabs, on the chat history): public chat, IMs, group chat, and object chat. when i go afk for a while, as soon as i come back, i check the history. however, among the local public chat i'm interested in reading through (i.e. someone came up to me and tried to start a convo), i find the chatter from any voting stations i happened to be standing near, as well as peoples' guns blabbing about "enter mouselook to shoot me!" or "trying to set animations ... permissions not set". also, if some chatter went on in one of my groups, i have to sift through the rest of the chat history to find it, and even then it's not clearly sorted. i realize i can find it in the group IM tab, but as soon as i close that, the history for that chat is kaput.

Ooooooo yeah, good idea Phil! Tabs like in DAOC, they work great! Especially if they would flash when something new shows up in that window.

Personally, I'm getting tired of the So-and-so is offline, So-and-so is online stuff. That's nice, they may be online.. but why can't I see that by checking my IM window? Bleeeeh. Is there a way to turn these off that I haven't found yet?

Anyway, thank you for adding that!

Almost any game allows you to turn on and off the messages about who is online and offline. I searched around today for it, because with 120 calling cards, its just spam...and I couldnt find a way to shut it off either.

As for the prims setting privs spam...thats just poor coding, IMO. That should be called to the IM window so only the user sees it. Someone made a thread about that in the Scripting forum, I think. I dont see why that didnt occur to someone long before now.

Avondell

I have to say I like that idea too. If Ive walked away from my keyboard for a little too long its very frustrating to come back logged of, seeing my IM button blinking. At that point I cannot click & read it nor was it sent to my email... its jut lost.

Have to agree, there should be a way to implement chat controls. Either color coded or new windows, along with the option to turn off such things as spams from scripts and the logging in and out of others.

I find I get very confused when too many chats both private and public ones going on.

I like color for IMs a lot. And a way to filter your "main" chat channel (IMs on/off, Object "tells" on/off, etc.). I still would like the ding ding on the incoming IM, but yeah when your'e standing around a voting booth, a gambling machine, people talking, and getting IMs, it gets terribly confusing and I usually just shut everything off, which is I suppose the digital equiv of putting cotton in my AVs ears and singing mary had a little lamb.

oooh oooh! i got another good (imho) idea!

in addition to the separated chat, how about chat history logging? i.e. the ability to have the client automatically log each chat history to a separate log file on your hard drive? that way, if you're afk, and the computer crashes or something, you can still go back into the log (provided it's intact!) and see what people said before you crashed.

i would love for the chats to be able to be logged, cause i crash alot (due to my moronic PC) lol, and i always miss things people say

Yeah these are good suggestions... I second them.

They color one is simple and would be effective.