Late at night on 04 Aug 2003, Prisoner started the debate by introducing a logging bot to lily-dev, and Maker, masto, and others debated the general practicality of having reviews that don't expire.

There are technical issues which could be solved.

There are social issues - letting people know it is infinitely being logged and how do you handle /review clear? Lily currently has a design requirement of JoinBeforeReview, and this could violate that principle. It was pointed out that many users already infinitely log their own sessions.

There is a legal issue as well which was not discussed.

Implementationwise, this could be done by logging to a dated file in a very simple format, and just catting forward from dates. This would handle most of the cases at least.

-- ThePrisoner - 05 Aug 2003

We also brought up the idea of having a discussion flag which would provide notice that a particular discussion is being logged. This could even trigger a warning on joining such a discussion. With a ClientSideBot rather than a ServerSideTask, it would be possible to emulate such a thing by having the bot message the user when they join. There was a brief discussion of whether it's a good idea to have bots send private messages. -- masto

I wrote up some of my thoughts on this topic in the JoinBeforeReview section...

-- GaranceDrosehn - 06 Aug 2003

The primary reason I always avoided these issues, and infinite review is tied up with infinite memo and infinite info etc, is that I did not want to touch the filesystem directly. There are mechanisms already available for MOO, in the form of patches, which permit file system access. These patches have existed since around the time the lilyCore project started, but I declined to use them for feature of the security implications of providing for the server, in used by many people, to touch the file system on the machine.

Does that make it a bad idea? Absolutely not! I am merely profoundly risk averse in this particular area and there are others with more experience and ability who could do an excellent job implementing such a feature securely.

-- ChristianRatliff - 06 Aug 2003
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