Chatlogs

[Sicon112]

Do you have a copy of the logs that you intend to release? Upon creating the chat, the metaguards intended to post the logs, but allow some people to go through and edit out bits of info they revealed about themselves if they didn't want it archived. What exactly is the plan on this count? I think maybe releasing the whole logs is.... overkill. Seriously, that is WAY too much. Maybe if you had a collection of the important parts stored?

[Dana]

You want us to go through and pick out the important bits? No, if you guys would like that, you can do that yourselves

I'll talk to our PM who has the logs and ask her how we're going to go about this.

[Dryunya]

We could split it into fragments, categorizing each one. So if anyone wants an opinion on the more important points, he reads the marked ones. If someone wants to touch the spirit of the Tram - the rest is there.

[Sophira]

I'm the one who logged the entire chat on behalf of all of us GMs, and so I'm probably the one to talk to about releasing them to the players.

I do know that Dryu had some pertinent questions during the ARG about editing personal info out, and I'm very interested in making sure everybody feels safe, so I'll help with that in any way I can.

(If you're wondering, the Morgan chatlog that Mr A released was an excerpt of our chat logs, with a bit of highlighting added to Morgan's lines. We have the entire chat in that format, split by day. It's possible we could do this by sending each day to a different person, but considering that the room's been in use for two months now and there's an average of over 5,500 lines of text in each one (you guys talked a *lot*!), that might be unworkable.

I'll see if I can think of anything.

[Pixelmage]

I'm up for editing it. But one thing we could do to ease the process a lot is to pass a filter through it with the RL names of everyone, replacing them with a [Personal Information] tag. Same for any email addresses and non-forum/non-twitter links. True, we did link very silly stuff like comics and funny videos which wouldn't hurt being there, but there are links to profiles and out-of-ARG content that could be traced back to our real information from a place we're not really comfortable with leaving there. That alone should take care of the bulk of editing we'd need to do.

After that the ideal would be if everyone could revise their own sent messages to see if there's anything they're uncomfortable with. But the volume of information and the number of players makes that unworkable...

If most people are ok with just removing their names and the links they can just PM the strings they want to remove. Or say if they're ok with leaving their names there. Then whoever still thinks there's something they might want to remove goes through for it.

[Dryunya]

Maybe we should release the logs to everyone, let everyone edit them, and then use something like diff. I'm not sure if it works this way, but I'm saying we should use crowdsourcing again. I'd use the google docs, but I'm not sure if it would leave all the data intact (including the date and everything).

[Scarab]

Maybe we should release the logs to everyone, let everyone edit them, and then use something like diff. I'm not sure if it works this way, but I'm saying we should use crowdsourcing again. I'd use the google docs, but I'm not sure if it would leave all the data intact (including the date and everything).

Can we even do that? I mean I was under the impression that the logs are so horrendously HUGE that something crashed every time somebody tried to get right back to the beginning of the thing... I'm nort sure it's POSSIBLE to get all that stuff back. And even on the off chance that is is possible, there must be literally thousands upon thousands of pages of logs.

[Sophira]

Maybe we should release the logs to everyone, let everyone edit them, and then use something like diff. I'm not sure if it works this way, but I'm saying we should use crowdsourcing again. I'd use the google docs, but I'm not sure if it would leave all the data intact (including the date and everything).

Can we even do that? I mean I was under the impression that the logs are so horrendously HUGE that something crashed every time somebody tried to get right back to the beginning of the thing... I'm nort sure it's POSSIBLE to get all that stuff back. And even on the off chance that is is possible, there must be literally thousands upon thousands of pages of logs.

We have all the chatlogs available in an easily readable format, remember. But if we use the crowdsourcing method, the uncensored logs are public for a while. Also, there really is a ton of stuff to go through.

Maybe it would be best to have somebody heading up the project and making sure everybody gets a certain part of the logs to edit? I'd suggest a maximum of half a days' worth for each load, which would make for about 130 loads.

[Sicon112]

All I need is the full log and a "find" function. Should be done in under two minutes, plus load time.

[Dryunya]

I was going to ask that in the technical subforum, but since it's here...
How was the log-gathering implemented? What tools, what scripts, what formats? Did you use a dummy account, or utilized that "invisible mode" glitch? Or something else?
(Yes, I'm actually interested.)

UPD: Oh wait, this is the technical subforum. Derp.

[Sophira]

You know the "Previous messages" link at the top of the chat? When you click that, it contacts the server to ask for the last 50 messages. It turns out that it's possible to code something that can get the entire chat logs, 50 messages at a time, using the same method the main site uses. Better yet, you don't actually have to be in the chatroom to do this. The site will allow you to get chatlogs for a chat even if you're not in it at the time. It also sends the information back in a format designed to be readable by computers, making it easy to use in a script.

I ran this script every so often, updating the chat logs to a location that could be accessed by all the GMs.

[Dryunya]

curl?