A chat log is an archive of transcripts from

online chat Online chat is any direct text-, audio- or video-based (webcams), one-on-one or one-to-many ( group) chat (formally also known as synchronous conferencing), using tools such as instant messengers, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), talkers and possi ...

and

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

conversations. Many chat or IM applications allow for the client-side archiving of online chat conversations, while a subset of chat or IM clients (i.e.,

Google Talk Google Talk was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication. The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users. Google Talk was also the name o ...

and Yahoo! Messenger 11 Beta) allow for the saving of chat archives on a server for future retrieval. Most

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

clients and many

IRC bots 409px, An IRC bot performing a simple task.An IRC bot is a set of scripts or an independent program that connects to Internet Relay Chat as a client, and so appears to other IRC users as another user. An IRC bot differs from a regular client in ...

include chat logging to a local file as a standard feature. Websites exist that publish chat logs, usually dedicated to a single channel and including a

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

. This can conflict with users' expectations of privacy. Some

IRC networks IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

have published guidelines on making chat logs public. Due to their real time nature, chat logs may be used to identify anonymous users by correlating information posted on different mediums.

Examples

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

has integrated its own chat archiving feature into

Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

, which lists Google Talk conversations alongside email conversations. *

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

first experimented with online archiving of Yahoo Messenger chat logs through its

Yahoo! Messenger Yahoo! Messenger (sometimes abbreviated Y!M) was an instant messaging client and associated protocol created and formerly operated by Yahoo!. Yahoo! Messenger was provided free of charge and could be downloaded and used with a generic "Yahoo I ...

for the Web application, which separately saves its own chat archive when users communicate through that client. In 2010, the beta of the 11th version of the standalone Messenger client featured online archiving of chat logs, although the archive is only available and viewable from within the logged-in client. * bash.org is a website hosting user-posted chat logs from IRC.

References

{{Instant messaging Instant messaging