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Chatlog Chaos?

See a live preview of this and tinker with it on your own via Codepen.

Back in the Before Times, posting occasional chatlogs (usually from AOL Instant Messenger) was a fixture of many blogs and teen websites. Nowadays, typically when people post chatlogs, it’s for vitriolic reasons - to dig up their ex’s tumultuous past, for example, or prove just who it was who stole the last Chipotle burrito from the office fridge. I know; I have seen the chaos this can cause!

Back then, though, chatlogs could serve all kinds of awesome purposes, some of them quite wholesome, actually. We’d share our favorite conversations that were meaningful to us, most frequently with both people consenting. Or, we’d share logs from fandom roleplay sessions involving our favorite characters, just in case our friends wanted to read about the time (our version of) Scully was forced to choose between saving Mulder and stopping the apocalypse.

This has not been a thing, really, on the newer sites. In some ways, this might be a good thing given the culture that has developed around screenshots of chatlogs. I, however, am here providing a (mediocre) snippet for displaying chatlogs on your site in HTML format, with CSS styling. This, of course, requires you to copy and paste the logs from whatever chat interface you’re using (or type them up if the conversation happened IRL).

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HTML

I think this is a nice way to do things. It preserves the charm of sharing chatlogs, without the sheer drama of screenshots, because really, one could type anything here, and we all know that! It’s quite just for fun, and we’d know not to take it too seriously at that point. I also think it might be interesting to use it to transcribe conversations between characters, and actually have plans to do so myself in the future, since they won’t be quiet.

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