Chat, ironicly, is one of the less featurefull things in SL, yet it is also one of the most used (yet it is much more transparent in its use). As someone who is usualy always on IRC chatting with people and who used chat rooms through most of their life on the internets, SL’s craptastic chat bothers me. Theres alot of neat under-the-hood stuff, such as distances, object messages, and such like that. But then theres a lot of basic expected features that are missing. So here we go, los list…

1) Clickable URLs - My biggest and longest continuous gripe in SL. All I want to do is be able to click a URL in chat history . The llOpenURL command does help, but built-in goodness is always needed!

2) Auto-Save Chat Logs - This is usualy a “hot topic” since some people worry of “being logged”, but really that can be done now-days, the most annoying thing however is when you talk to someone about something important then log off and realize you’ve forgotten a key point, this happens to me alot, I forget stuff. :/ The simplest form of this would automaticly save all chat (and IMs) to text files in a selected folder upon log out with the name of the text file being the date.

3) Contained Parcel Chat - Currently we can contain and keep out noises from our parcels, this is great, but what if we could also do the same thing to text? I found that this would be especialy useful when I had a parcel right next a telehub, so you’d be talking, sometimes about private things, and bam, someone would teleport in, sure you could go up in the air, but should that be the solution for everything? Go up? So the idea is that in the About Land window I could somehow set it so the parcel has “Contained Chat”, any thing typed inside the parcel can not be “heard”/”seen” outside, and vice versa. Like a sound booth, but for text. This would have alot of other useful applications.

4) Bolding For Lindens - An idea borrowed from ActiveWorlds in which “administrators” can turn their chat bold if needed. This helped alot in crowded text areas to keep up with what was going on. Something like this for Lindens would be nice for Town Hall’s and such.

5) Colorful Names - Preferential option, something similar in style to how some IRC clients will auto-assign colors to names based on uh, something. Also could potentialy take the color that is set in Preferences used for the particles when someone selects an object and apply that to the name. It helps at a glance to tell who is saying what by color. Only problem that arises with this is “omg stop using my color”, heheh. Can’t be any worse than “omg you’re wearing my dress”, right? Right.

6) Pie-Menu for Names in Chat History - Again borrowed from AW, right clicking a name in the Chat History would pop up a Pie-Menu as if you clicked on their avatar. Could make it handy for finding someone in a crowd easier and doing tasks on them. Such as someone spamming the chat or griefing or even just looking up a profile.

7) Chat Bubbles Redone - Thinking on chat bubbles, PDC Lounge (link is borken right now) had a neat take on this, where it was basicly like SL’s chat history, but would have a little arrow coming off of it pointing to the people in view. Not the best solution, but it could help, maybe.

And for now thats it! A lot of these could probably be solved by other solutions, but most of them would probably be more time consuming and advanced. These are sort of “quick” fixes. I recall also that Jabber was discussed as being used for SL’s chat, which would solve some of these problems as well.