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A software version or two ago, I noticed that the Second Life client had started saying it was logging IMs, which is very handy! Whenever I pop up a new conversation with someone, it shows what the last thing was that we talked about. 🙂 At a certain point I noticed that it didn’t save those conversations across computers…if I IMed someone from a different computer later on, it wouldn’t show the IM log, which demonstrated to me that the IMs were being saved on the local computer.

Yesterday I began to wonder exactly how much was actually saved of those IMs, and in what form, and went looking. I didn’t have to look long. On my Windows computer, I just had to go to the logical location, which is C:\Documents and Settings\[your Windows user name here]\Application Data\SecondLife (I’m sorry, but I have no idea at all what that might translate to in Mac-ese)…and what did I find there? Why, a folder called kate_amdahl (along with one for my worker alt and another for a friend who has used Second Life on this computer), and inside it, a plain text file for every person I’ve IMed with on that computer since the feature was implemented in early August, containing the complete text of all IMs since that time.

Did you already know about this? I didn’t really realize. It seems less than ideally private, frankly.

Some of the logs were…um, a bit steamy.

So, I just wanted to share that! Maybe you’re now saying “Oh, yay, now I can remember that thing my friend told me that I’ve been racking my brains about!” or “Oh good, I want to revisit that memory” or perhaps “Oh my god, I have to get this stuff off my computer before my visiting aunt Ruby finds it!!!” Or maybe you already knew. 🙂 In which case…why didn’t you tell me???

You can turn this off, by the way…or you can log open chat as well! Go into preferences and select the Communication button, then check or uncheck “Log Instant Messages” and “Log Chat” (you have to be logged in to be able to do that). Hope that was handy! 🙂

^^^\ Kate /^^^