| Recording
and Playback of Chat
Recording
Playback
HTML Formatting Raw Chat Logs
Resources
Recording
Under
the Edit button next to the chat room title is an area
where you can specify a file name to capture the conversation
in that chat room. (Do not append .txt to the file name
- Web Crossing will automatically add it.) This file will appear
in your webx directory.
Playback
Chat
logs can also be played back at a specified time or in a continuous
loop. To set this up, you'll need the name of the log file you
want to play back. This log file must be located in the webx directory
on the server.
The
setting for milliseconds determines how long the chat clip
will run in total. If you put in a number shorter than the length
of the clip (as long as your number is greater than 0), the clip
will still play in total. If you put in a number longer than your
clip, Web Crossing will pad the extra time at the end of
the clip.
You
can determine the number of milliseconds in your clip in a couple
of different ways. If it's a long transcript, multiply the number
of seconds by 1000. It doesn't have to be exact. If it's a short
clip, you can get the number right from the chat transcript:
10185 m Clara@ cFF0000@hey there :)
11146 m Turner@ c000000@Hey early bird!
11439 m Clara@ cFF0000@yup, was cruising the neighborhood
so decided to stop in before I forgot ;>
394 m Turner@ c000000@Howya doin? When do you fly in
the big metal bird?
The
numbers just before the "m" are the number of milliseconds
that elapsed since the previous comment sent to the chat room.
Just add up those numbers and you'll know the length, in milliseconds,
of your chat clip.
Incidentally,
the "cFF0000" indicates the color that particular chat
comment from Clara appeared in - in this case, red.
If you
want to simulate or invent a demo chat, you can create a file
in this format and use it for your playback file.
You
might want to change the Access
List for the chat room to read-only while the playback clip
is running. Otherwise, users get no warning that what they're
seeing is recorded, and they can speak as usual. They might wonder
why nobody's answering them!
HTML-Formatting
Raw Chat Logs
One option
is to use the Chat
Parse macro in the Free Code Library, which takes raw chat
logs and makes them into HTML for posting transcripts online.
For Mac
users, Andre Hinds has written an enormously useful HyperCard
stack to take raw logs from any platform and format them into
HTML. You can use it, with Andre's permission. We've included
it here. (13K .hqx file) Read
Me instructions are included. (Sorry, the converter itself doesn't
work on Windows or Unix but you should be able to convert chat
logs from any Web Crossing platform.)
Resources
Sysop
Documentation
Sysop
Control Panel
- Chat
Services
- Chat
Status
Web
Crossing FAQ
|
