I expect you to log my data, sir

I’ve been struggling with this one for a while now, and after I lost yet another chat log I’ve finally had enough.

When I first started instant messaging way back in the days, I used Windows Live Messenger (or MSN Messenger as it used to be called). Even though Microsoft has added quite a few features that I find irrelevant and completely useless, and file transfers never seem to go any faster than 1 kB/s, I’ve stuck with it for the sake of compatibility with the majority of my IM friends, who also happen to use Live Messenger.

However, over the past few months I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in how Live Messenger stores my conversations: a conversation is only stored to disk once the chat window has been closed. That is, Live Messenger doesn’t log the conversation continuously like any other application would, but instead relies on the user to indicate that he’s finished.

At first, this might not seem so bad. At least your conversations are stored to disk at some point, right? Sadly, no. If you shut down Windows and there are open conversation windows, these are for some reason not closed normally and thus the conversations aren’t stored to disk. Imagine having had a conversation with a coworker all day and deciding that you should reboot your computer because Windows Update has installed new patches. Once the system comes back up, the entire conversation in Live Messenger is nowhere to be seen…

There is also the scenario of Live Messenger crashing, of course, which has been known to happen occasionally. In that case, your conversations aren’t saved either.

In my opinion, logging is something that should happen transparently to the user. He shouldn’t have to think about whether his current conversation has been saved or not. For instance, after having an hour long chat conversation in which several important things have been said, I shouldn’t have to manually close the conversation window to make sure it’s been stored to disk.

What’s the point in having logs if you can’t rely on them being accurate? If an application tells me that it saves my conversations, it really should do just that.

My friends all tell me to switch to another IM application, and maybe I will. I just find it very sad that an application like Live Messenger, which is in so wide-spread use, can’t get the simple features right before adding tons of other ones. I don’t care if I can insert cool, animated smileys or make the window shake from side to side if I can’t expect the application to actually do what it was originally built to do (or at least was supposed to do): simple and reliable chatting.