Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Suggestion: Download of PMs

I know this is probably a mess to code...

But an epic tale of an RP has come to conclusion. There are so many options for RPs, be it just of our own collections or to work them into actual novels with our writing partners... It would be nice to have the option to download a single PM conversations much like we can character profiles.

I would say too for forum topics but I think that might be more difficult to do then a PM.

+1 vote for this!

I'd love this functionality too. And would even be content if came down as just the raw BBCode that I needed to reformat a bit. If it keeps things cleaner, dice rolls could be excluded. (Or included if that's actually easier! Anything would save me a lot of time copying and pasting into my own archive!)

I add my vote!

I've spoken to Mipps via Discord, thus got permission from them to add onto their thought.

Like Mipp's thought about forum posting, if we could possibly have this option for groups as well, that would be fantastic to me.

I'm part of one group that is focused on rp, and I'd love to be able to hold onto what I have with this person (as long as of course my partner would be fine with me saving our rp). But if it is too daunting to do, then I too will settle for just PM options and do the daunting copy/paste of posts by hand if my partner gives approval/permission.

Me too...it indeed would be neat. I've often wished to be able to download a PM thread as a PDF file and then keyword search it, because when I forget the name of a place or the description or name of an NPC that was created during the RP, I end up needing to go back page by page to figure out where that information is. It adds time to responding and sometimes that time ends up making me put off writing my next response, or just being able to get one response out and not another. So it would make my turn around time for an RP response way faster if this were a feature, which would lead to more successful RPs and more satisfied RP partners.

I feel like I've read somewhere before that loading too much data at once can be a problem on some people's computers, or something like that, but maybe downloading a PDF type thing would be different?

Anyway, I dig it.

I recall something similar! This has been requested before for both forum and PM threads, and the reason I believe it wasn't implemented is because the amount of data and/or converting that data into a PDF can create such huge files depending on the thread that browsers just straight up quit and crash because they're not designed to handle that.

I'm wondering if the alternative is some way of having a zipped file emailed to the registered email address upon request (automatically, not manually! Poor Kim lol), but I'll be honest and admit that I've no idea how resource intensive this is, nor if it's feasible at all.

To be perfectly honest i would settle for an option for a "print mode" that changes it all to simple text with no formatting or anything in-between so it might be copied and pasted at a user's leisure ... I think that would put the data on the player and not so much RPR.

Generally in print modes that I have seen it will give you an option to either print it or save it in a PDF which I think is more through the computer rather than the server?

I am by no means an expert on this ... I'm just throwing that ideas to see what sticks.

From what I recall, this seems like this speculation is correct, and it would be a nice solution for this. Because like Abigail stated too, it sometimes can be so time consuming to try to go back through pages upon pages of an PM thread to find the specific reference I am looking for, and many times I end up missing it. So, having an option to have all the content together, in one document that I could search would be a nice feature for those of us that like to try to keep things consistent and use information our partners have provided in previous posts.

Just adding my two cents.

You can already save PMs via Print mode.

Opening the PM you can right click anywhere and say print. As long as all the windows are visible it will be able to be saved by PDF through the Print mode dialog or print out physically on your printer.

Also if you highlight any text anywhere and right click (Command click on a mac) and go to print it will only show that text which is highlighted. All modern computers and browsers should be able to handle this task. The real question will be your internet speed on how long it takes to download and how much time you want to spend going through page after page of Pms to do this.

But that's exactly why this feature is being requested, it can be very cumbersome to go through pages and pages of PM's. I know I personally have an RP that spans like 15 pages. It would be nice to have a feature that saves the whole conversation into simple text.

^^^ What Tora said. I got like over 20 pages in this 1x1 group rp alone. And when I've needed to go back through stuff, it is a lot of back tracking to try to find exactly what I need.

Right I was simply confirming Mipps' earlier comment of settling for a "print mode" feature.
It already exists if you want to put in the work thus does not really remedy what the vast majority of you see as a problem in need of fixing.

I'll just toss out there that conversion to PDF, including the way it's handled for character profiles, does not reliably create a PDF with searchable text. I'm not sure if it's always the case, but in my experience, the text ends up getting traced to come out as an image instead of text. It is possible to use other software to convert it into text again, but for something searchable, it might actually be best to just go through the PM, tell it to display all posts as you go through each page, hope you can estimate to narrow down which pages you need to check, and use ctrl+F (or the equivalent in other devices) to do a search of the page. Or take the time to copy/paste the whole thing so you don't have to deal with finding/paying for something to identify the text (possibly incorrectly) in a PDF.

Possible alternative if there was a function to consolidate multiple pages into a PDF: It seems to recognize the text as text before the file is actually made, at least, and even allow copying of it from the preview. Down side is you get a huge chunk of text with absolutely no formatting.

Edit: Also depends on how it's saved. Some ways work properly. Some don't.

Ultimately not everybody has a PDF program to accurately read the files to begin with.

I would rather go with an option to pull a full conversation without anything in between.. rather than go page by page when I talk about a print mode. (Such as removing dice rolls, ooc, reply buttons ect)

Generally they turn them into text files not PDF. Text files are fairly low on data compared to something like a PDF.

In previous programs logs would be saved as text files and it was fairly easy on users.
This of course has no formatting.

That's more along the lines of what I am thinking when I would request a download of a role play

I did some digging, and I remembered that Kim mentioned how browsers often can't handle the amount of text some threads generate. There are forums and PMs with thousands of messages, and browsers have limited resources for loading this much data. It differs per browser and the device it's on, so there's no real way to tell at which point to safely cut-off the output, especially since every post has a huge max character limit that some people actually manage to hit. This has been the primary reason Kim wasn't able to offer an export of PMs/forum threads to my knowledge.

It was brought up during Operation Audacious Phoenix and Kim did mention she would revisit the possibility of this, as it's a popularly requested feature!

Since I seem to be bringing up RPR 2.0 back-burner stuff of late, I thought I would tap this topic as well.

I understand the scope of exporting complete PMs would vary widely with their length, but could it be possible to export a text-file of a complete PM? It would be quite convenient but I’m assuming it isn’t done due to the enormity of what would be involved to make it possible. That seems to be the consensus I’ve read in discussion threads on this subject on other RP sites. Curious what Kim’s thoughts are on this subject.