Finally got a new version out! This was planned a lot sooner, but things got quite busy here, and the new feature required rather more coding than expected.
The new feature is that now there’s a checkbox in the chat history to enable logging of the owners of talking objects, as well as the location if available. This helps track down objects that spam or that are cleverly hidden somewhere they’re hard to find. It will also tell you the owner and the location of an object IMing you, so even if there’s an object on some entirely different part of the grid, you’ll be able to know who owns it, and where it is.
Here’s what this looks like:
[12:00] Some Object: Hi there! [(requesting) at secondlife://Ahern/128/100/50]
[12:01] Some Object is owned by Dale Glass
[12:05] Some Object: Test [Dale Glass at secondlife://Ahern/128/100/50]
The (requesting) part is because the viewer can’t always know instantly somebody’s name. It may need to ask the grid who owns the object and then may still need to ask what’s their name. So to avoid losing information, if it doesn’t know it tells you it’s looking it up, then adds the data to the history as soon as it finds out.
The location part took some work to get working. If the object is using normal chat and found nearby, then the viewer can easily tell you where it is. Nothing mysterious here. However, if it’s sending IMs from some other sim entirely, then things are a bit more complicated. The IM includes the region’s key and coordinates. However, there’s no way at the time to convert a region key to the sim’s name.
So what I did was spending a couple of days writing a bot with libsecondlife and made it teleport through the whole grid gathering data. That is about 13000 sims. The generated database is then shipped with the viewer, and currently includes about 10000 sims, so it’s slightly incomplete. This will be fixed soon. Private sims probably will never appear on it, as the bot must be able to connect to the sim to get the key. But there’s still data for most of the grid there.
Unfixed problems
Unfortunately this functionality doesn’t work 100%, though not entirely due to my fault.
Owner lookups may fail if the speaking object is being worn. This seems to be a problem with the grid which doesn’t return the data for avatar attachments. LL could probably fix that one, but that may take time.
And as mentioned above, due to the way used to translate sim keys to names, sometimes a name won’t be found. This should be mostly fixed by the next release with an updated sim key database.
