Alex Little

I’ve now implemented the chat history function on the msg.open.ac.uk server, so we can try it out there for little while, before I transfer it over to the msg-openlearn server.

I have found a couple of little ‘quirks’ which I’m not sure will annoy users or not…

1. the chat history is only written to the log files every 120 seconds (or whatever no of secs I set it to), presumably to stop too many file read/writes which would have performance implications. But it means that if you have a conversation, close the window, then immediately re-open a chat with the same user and try to load the history, you may not see the message history from the last couple of minutes (the history will be there later, just not now). I don’t know that I can completely resolve this, but I have set the log files to be written every 30 seconds, so hopefully it won’t be an issue.
2. another thing that may look a bit odd is that if you have a chat with someone for a little while, and then decide to load the history, the messages from over 2 mins ago will appear twice. I don’t want to just overwrite the whole chat window, because then you won’t get the most recent messages (due to (1)), and I guess seeing the message twice is better than not at all. I think I’ve got a way around this, and that is to load mark the “loaded chat history” in the interface, so you know what is currently stored – and it then won’t look so odd that some messages appear twice.

Any feedback on the new chat history function is much appreciated