5 ms·

I've seen that FOSDEM chat are archived, does element web interface allow user to save their chat room to text files on their computer ? https://github.com/vec

by guerby 6y ago

I've seen that FOSDEM chat are archived, does element web interface allow user to save their chat room to text files on their computer ? https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2630 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2630 This issue has 149 thumbs up, as I noted I don't know of any other chat software without the ability to save discussion to a local file. Thanks!

Arathorn 6y ago
Matrix itself is a conversation store, which means we haven't prioritised exporting to text file (or HTML file or whatever) in Element. A workaround for now is https://github.com/russelldavies/matrix-archive https://github.com/russelldavies/matrix-archive, which works really well.
- guerby 6y ago
  Thanks for the pointer. I installed a debian 11 VM, installed then launched the matrix-archive.py script --all-rooms with my not-for-profit ISP matrix+element credentials. I follow mostly my not-for-profit ISP channels (quite small) and may be 4 or 5 rooms on matrix.org, fosdem.org and mozilla.org. After 30 minutes it has written 878 MBytes of archives and it's not done yet. I don't see an option to resume / append to an existing archive. So I assume I will have to restart from scratch each day? I wonder: will it scale if everyone uses this script?
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    So yes, that tool is intended for one-off archives. And I'm not surprised that the archives are large, given Matrix rooms live forever by default, so if you're in some room like #matrix:matrix.org the full history goes back to Aug 2014 will be millions of messages by now. The 'right' solution is presumably to give Element a button to maintain ongoing archives on desktop (it already archives your encrypted rooms into an encrypted sqlite DB for indexing) - with a control to limit how far back in time it goes. Separately, having a "save the last N days/msgs of this room" button would be useful in Element Web. But both simply haven't got to the top of the todo list yet.
    - guerby 6y ago
      Hopefully I checked and I'm not subscribed to matrix:matrix.org via my local ISP matrix+element :). I noticed the archive json files have timestamps, so may be 'archive since previous archive timestamp' would do the trick (if there's a way in the matrix protocol to do that, and if matrix software is efficient in ressources in this timestamp to timestamp case). And having a starting timestamp being channel join time minus a user specified number of days to go backward a bit in your archive.

by guerby 6y ago

Arathorn 6y ago

Matrix itself is a conversation store, which means we haven't prioritised exporting to text file (or HTML file or whatever) in Element. A workaround for now is https://github.com/russelldavies/matrix-archive https://github.com/russelldavies/matrix-archive, which works really well.

guerby 6y ago
Thanks for the pointer. I installed a debian 11 VM, installed then launched the matrix-archive.py script --all-rooms with my not-for-profit ISP matrix+element credentials. I follow mostly my not-for-profit ISP channels (quite small) and may be 4 or 5 rooms on matrix.org, fosdem.org and mozilla.org. After 30 minutes it has written 878 MBytes of archives and it's not done yet. I don't see an option to resume / append to an existing archive. So I assume I will have to restart from scratch each day? I wonder: will it scale if everyone uses this script?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  So yes, that tool is intended for one-off archives. And I'm not surprised that the archives are large, given Matrix rooms live forever by default, so if you're in some room like #matrix:matrix.org the full history goes back to Aug 2014 will be millions of messages by now. The 'right' solution is presumably to give Element a button to maintain ongoing archives on desktop (it already archives your encrypted rooms into an encrypted sqlite DB for indexing) - with a control to limit how far back in time it goes. Separately, having a "save the last N days/msgs of this room" button would be useful in Element Web. But both simply haven't got to the top of the todo list yet.
  - guerby 6y ago
    Hopefully I checked and I'm not subscribed to matrix:matrix.org via my local ISP matrix+element :). I noticed the archive json files have timestamps, so may be 'archive since previous archive timestamp' would do the trick (if there's a way in the matrix protocol to do that, and if matrix software is efficient in ressources in this timestamp to timestamp case). And having a starting timestamp being channel join time minus a user specified number of days to go backward a bit in your archive.