Yes, but chat logs are logs of ... chat. By nature, it's disorganised, free-wheeling, contains lots of casual meandering (as any conversation would). Not very u

Yes, but chat logs are logs of ... chat. By nature, it's disorganised, free-wheeling, contains lots of casual meandering (as any conversation would). Not very useful to a third party. How often do you find solutions in public archived mailing list posts when Googling problems? I imagine often. While some e-mails are more terse than others, fundamentally e-mail list posts demand a certain structure. Can you imagine having to pour through a 25-page chat log instead? And with that, the entire idea of "search the archives before asking a question" would go to pot.