I am announcing something that I've been working on for something like 2 months now. I'm thinking on this ever since the showdown with Cthulhu ended.
We agreed to not release the logs for public view because there is personal information contained in it, and we couldn't settle on a satisfactory way to censor it for public reading. However, the log is still in the chatroom. This means that, in the same manner Sophie can extract them, anyone else could do so by writing a script of their own, and that would be something done without our knowledge and authorization. And yes, there is personal information that should not be made public scattered in it. I know, all the log readers will know what I mean, and of course, whoever said things regarding health conditions or family matters and other such intimate subjects will know that it is there.
Deleting the logs partially solves that problem.
All the game logs are preserved. From the room creation to January 4th, encompassing most of the Post-Mortem. Sophie has a copy and, as of today (02/24/2013), so do I, for backup reasons. I anticipate some claims regarding "Why Pixel", so I'll address these now. It makes sense to have independent copies so that we ensure the content is not lost. I'm taking this responsibility because I'm both the original creator of the room and have been in there and read through essentially all of the content as it went up. Perhaps not as thoroughly as someone who read the logs every morning, true. But not much less than them, and as an admin of the chatroom it makes sense that I'm the one to do it. I am to safeguard the content so that it is not lost until it is properly censored for public view and released for reading. Sharing it with more people is unnecessary in regards to upping the security, and would be detrimental to actually keeping personal information out of view. And while I'll agree that any one who read the logs would be a viable choice, as an admin I do believe it is my responsibility, I hope you'll understand that and that you trust me enough to do this. The important message is that the logs from the ARG will not be lost permanently with the wipe of the ones stored in the chatroom.
As to the point of "losing content", the logs as they are there, are ultimately out of reach. It's unpractical to hit the "previous" link to recover that information. In that sense, keeping it there is useless. It's already lost by staying out of reach. Loading more than a couple dozen hits makes the client lag and potentially crash, losing the loaded content and making it, ultimately, impossible to access from the chat.
- As a first step, deleting the logs manually, periodically, is the proposal here. Once a week, one of the chat mods deletes all logged content. All five chat admins have already agreed to this unanimously.
But as a solution that is only partial. It's a compromise in that it'll change as little as possible about how things work. But it still leaves a big chunk of content in there for an extended period. Doing it once a day would be too much micromanagement, it'd be unpractical to the point of being unworkable. It essentially requires the chat admins to punch clock every day for the task. I'll not ask them to do that, as this is not a job.
- So, I wish to, in fact, disable the logging completely. It perfectly denies the possibility of anyone copying the logs from outside the chatroom.
All messages on screen will remain on screen as long as you don't exit the room. Regarding connection issues, everyone can see that what happens is that when you can't stay in the room you're usually unable to stay in the conversation. And about context, there's nothing stopping us from being civil and asking a simple "what's up?" and actually talking to each other, as that is what we already do anyway. Particularly on these last few weeks, there have been very few instances of someone actually entering the room in the middle of an ongoing discussion, when it happened, as I observed, a laconic of the topic at hand was usually provided. So yes, we can work without it.
My last point is that we no longer have a canonical topic that we are required to chronicle. We use the chatroom to hang out and chat casually. If something deserves to be permanently registered, we bring it to the forums, where it is indexed, searchable and open to more people than those only in the chat at that moment. It's how we pushed ourselves to behave during the ARG, I fail to see how it should be different than that now. And again, we no longer have a topic to chronicle from every single source.
This particular idea is not something I have discussed with the chat admins yet. I'm making it public here so that everyone can express their opinions on the matter. Lastly, as a disclaimer, the logs are still there. I didn't delete anything yet.
