The current version of the chat viewing tool lives here: http://duelingzone.org/lurker/
Once Jake and I work through some other things going on with the duelingzone sites, it's probably going to move, but I'll post an update when that happens. For now it's under DoS Madness because that's been my playground for the last month or so.
From the list of rooms that pops up, pick the one you want to see logs for and click it. This is a static list, so if new rooms get added to either site they won't show up on the list until I know to add it. Feel free to send me a PM or an EMail.
The next page is a list of the hourly logs for the given room.
* RoH: The RoH site only creates logs when there was actually some activity in the room. The downside is that it takes a little time to list them because I have to do some searching on the back-end to see what exists. The upside is that anything you select from the resulting list will have content in it.
* RDI: RDI lists every hour regardless of room activity. That being the case, there's no outside information I need so the hours list comes up a lot faster.
Click on the hour that interests you. Now you're into the view form. When it first loads it looks just like the chat logs do today except for the option tabs at the top and the navigation bar at the bottom. What follows is a list of what's in those option tabs and what they do:
Format Options:
* Display log in table format: Checking this box puts the log in a table and forces sentence wrap so that you don't need to keep scrolling left and right to follow.
* Apply colors: Requires table format to be on. Checking this will apply a random'ish color to each chat room participant, so that all their lines sent will be the same color and, hopefully, make it easier to pick out who is talking when you're following a conversation.
* Show Time Stamps: Pretty self explanatory. Shows or removes timestamps from the log display.
* Show Room Entrance / Exit Messages: Again, pretty self explanatory.
* Save Format Options: Clicking this will set a browser cookie for you that will store the options you've set on this tab. This keeps you from having to reset the same options every time you use the tool.
View Options:
* Here you will find a list of all of the UserNames to appears in the given log. In parens to the right of each name is a number indicating how many lines they sent in and to the left is a checkbox that, by default, is checked. Unchecking a box will remove the person from the log. Re-check it and they'll come back.
* Remove All or Include All buttons: They do just what the say. If you've been playing with the checkboxes and want to reset, click Include All and all the lines come back into the log. The Remove All button is probably more useful. If you want to follow a conversation between two or three people you don't want to have to uncheck all the others in the room. Easier to hit remove all and then add back in the few that you're interested in.
Other Stuff
* Printer Friendly'ish Output: All this does is take your current view settings and create a new page with it and without the tab options or bottom navigation bar.
* Text Filter: Type something you want to search for into the box and hit the apply button. The display will scale down to include only those lines in the log that contain what you're searching on. This turned out more powerful than I hoped and it supports most Regular Expression functionality. Such as:
- * search for multiple words at the same time, separate them with a pipe: eg: scotch|bourbon|beer
* search for different versions of a word putting variables in braces: dr[iau]nk to show drink, drank or drunk
* wild card numbers with \d eg: "\d\d bottles of beer" will match 10-100+ bottles of beer, but not 1-9.
* lots of other stuff
At the top of the options box and at the very bottom of the page you will see left and right pointing arrows. These will take you to the previous or next hour respectively. Note that this is the next real time hour and doesn't honor the RoH method of only putting up logs that exist, so you may well end up on a display that doesn't exist. Note also that the next page will not honor whatever you've selected under the View Options tab, so you'll need to re-select the names you want to display / exclude.
That's pretty much it. Comments / Questions / Bug Reports / Feature Requests are all welcome. The best way to reach me is through email to this name @aol.com.
~Kal
(Sticky applied by G)
edit Sept 29, 2014: Updated link to new location
