Auto Pagination

[saveyourskin]

Great tool! I had been looking for something like this for quite a while. Even with commercial apps I ran into issues, but this one works flawlessly.

I especially appreciate the option to select a custom date range for exports, since I wanted to back up many years’ worth of data and several gigabytes of media.

One feature that would make it even better would be the ability to automatically split long chats into multiple HTML files, each with a navigation bar to move between pages. For example, it could generate one HTML file per year or month, or let the user define the number of pages and distribute the messages evenly across them (e.g., 10 pages with the same number of messages each).

[mtln]

Thanks for the compliments, @saveyourskin
This has been brought up before, and it’s on my TODO list.
Take a look at:
#10

I’ll keep your issue open so that others can see it’s on the list and comment.
I’ve made some recent code changes that should make the step towards pagination easier.

The thing is:

• From a usability point of view: If your browser can handle the huge file, you’d probably prefer not to have pagination at all, because it’s disruptive (you can’t search the entire chat at once).
• From a human user’s point of view: Pagination should ideally follow some logical structure, like by year, year+quarter, or year+month, rather than arbitrary ranges such as “messages 153231–154824 of 294328.”
• From a machine’s point of view: Each page needs to be small enough for the system (browser / OS / RAM / …) to handle without resource issues. Even if split by year+month, a month with “too many” messages might still need to be divided further. What counts as “too many” will also depend on the message contents: browsers can handle far more plain text messages than ones containing images, videos, or audio.

So how should pagination actually work—without forcing the user to choose from a bunch of options they have no clue about, and without needing them to guess which one would work best in their situation?

Also keep in mind (from an archiving perspective): what your computer struggles with today will probably be no issue next year (with a faster computer, a newer browser version, etc.).

It’s a bit like in the late nineties: if you ripped your CD collection to MP3 at a low bitrate just to save disk space, those files would look (and sound) silly now—since today the entire collection would fit on a cheap memory stick, and in much better quality.

I just don't want anybody to use the split function if it's not really necessary in his or her situation. But if it is necessary, it should be easy and convenient.

So, if anyone has thoughts on this, please comment here.

[saveyourskin]

Thanks for your response — I completely agree with your analysis of the issue.

At the moment, I split larger chats (1GB+ zip files) by year, since I’ve found that my computer can handle the smaller files with reasonable load times. At the same time, I also keep a full single-file version of the chat, along with the original _chat.txt file, while using only one media folder. This way, I have the option to open chats year by year for convenience, but I also retain the possibility of opening the full chat in the future if the system can handle it or even spliting in a different range recreating the zip file from the media folder and the txt.

Right now, I’m experimenting with manually adding a simple navigation bar in the HTML.