Re: CB history - not an hour any more?

[Zero_Flop]

First, I’m split on merlins concerns. Yes, anything posted here could be used against you like anything else that is published on the net. As with anything you do, you should be aware of your audience and their potential stupidity. You take a risk writing any post, should you drop your guard just because it is in the chat?

On the opposite side of the coin I think that we as a community we should agree that we should minimize any potential risk that may impact any of our group. In other words if by minimizing the chat history will protect someone’s free speech, minimize it.

Here is my penny solution: Create an option in user nodes which will allow the user to request anonymous – Chat in the chat history.

When someone posts on in the chat their name is posted as normal, when the post goes to the CH the name is replaced by “Anon Post.” The only danger this raises is if someone is recording the chat in real time. In that case having a history of 5 min or 24Hr does not really matter.

[diotalevi]

No. In effect this means allowing Anonymous Monk to chat. Not only is it technicaly infeasible the social consequences are undesireable.

[Zero_Flop]

No, it does not allow Anonymous monks to chat. You are still forced to post who you are in the real time chat, it just means that your identity is only tied to what you say while it is fresh. Those in the Chat will be able to tie you to what you have said, but it would be harder for anyone to legally tie you to it 1hr later.

As for the technical feasibility, you have to log in to chat. During the chat the system is capturing who you are. A 0 identity bit can also be passed in the post. As the Chat updates with a new post, it checks 10 posts prior ( one that has already scrolled off the screen), and clears the identity if Identity=0.

[diotalevi]

No really, it is technically infeasible. This problem arises because perlmonks chat is partially the central perlmonks server but also a small flotilla of non-perlmonks servers which do things for their own purposes. grenekatz.org is one such server, desert-island.dynodns.org is another, there's another which I don't know the name to but I suppose I could find out. The list goes on.

Most of the chat clients that work with Perlmonsk (including my stuff) pull up one of the XML tickers on a regular basis. The only way these clients know who said anything is because Perlmonks.org said who said what. Once perlmonks.org has said who said something, the chat client continues to know. The issue of making stuff anonymous after ten posts is actually up the implementors of 95% of not-running-on-perlmonks.org clients to do and this would also require each chat client to somehow determine every chatter's preferences when launched (because a number of them don't have settings that stick around). It also requires a change to the perlmonks server where every user's preference setting for this would be open to the public because every user needs to be able to query every other user's setting to decide whether to forget who said what.