les wrote:
Let’s start with the recent one that’s in everybody’s current thoughts.
Chat logs have been disabled.
The reasoning behind this, in my understanding, is that as the chat room is an inherently live one on one part of Milovana things may be said that will be regretted later.
It is unfair for third parties to be able to retain a copy of such bloopers to be used out of context else where or at other times.
…………………………………………. Les
I believe this analysis is correct.
I also believe it is a fairly flawed line of thought on the part of the admins (no offense at all)
If someone in chat wants to retain the data, they can - whether or not milovana likes them to. Lets remember, anything the milovana server sends to a particular chat client (user) to be displayed as "live" data, can be stored by that user, using 3rd party software or something as simple as pen and paper.
In short, there is no way to prevent anyone from maintaining a history of everything that has been said in a way that is visible to that particular user if they want to, so why try?
I think a much better direction to go in for this particular issue is information - make sure all chat users realize that what they write in chat is not necessarily gone the next minute, the next day or the next month, but may in fact be logged. Simply because as I already pointed out, this is the case, completely regardless of what anyone might want it to be.
Please realize I am exclusively discussing technical fact here - I might very well be in agreement that having a strictly "live only" chat being a good idea - I am just advocating the fact that it is not possible.
Even if the network traffic was encrypted, still nothing would prevent anyone from setting up a video camera, taping it all, and transcribing it digitally later...
