How to: Prepare and review logs for an incident report

This article is part 3 of a series on logs. Part 1 of the creation, and Part 2 on the cleaning of personal logs, are in the archives.

---

We in the Vigiles are very low-drama. We strongly believe drama and rumors are a thing for rp stories and intrigues, and we expect honest, honorable, and forthright behavior from our members in all ooc interactions, in and out of guild space.

That said: even the best of us have misunderstandings among ourselves, and from time to time we will all encounter people who do not live up to the virtues we expect from ourselves. It is our position that these conflicts are best resolved in a public or officer-mediated space, with transparent, documented processes and stable, clear guidelines.

Violations of the EULA are of course, best left to SOE.

For all other personal conflicts, within the guild or not, our single greatest resource for promoting justice is the keeping and reviewing of logs. 

In the heat of any rp scene or hunt, there are inevitable mistells, overlooked chatter, and unclear or misinterpreted dialogue. Running your logs through the cleaner program, in the same way you would for personal archiving often allows you to clear up simple misunderstandings and/or gain a little distance from an emotional scene.

That record can also crystallize problematic interactions and grant us the necessary perspective for discerning when a behavior is part of a larger pattern, and when an action clearly oversteps the allowance for misunderstandings and transgresses our rules.

Even if you have not yet reviewed your logs, if you feel an IC or OOC transgression has occurred, or if you the player are feeling unsafe, objectified, disrespected or in any other wise uncomfortable: Please! Do not keep silence for the sake of an imagined peace. Go to an officer as soon as you are able. We are here to guide and protect all the Amicae, both in battle and in life. Poison festers in silence and shadow: we cannot take action unless we know there is cause to act on.

As of this writing, the officers and their alts are listed below. 
Feel free to approach any of them in private, through /tell, /group, in-game mail if you are able, or to the guild email which is only accessible to the officers of the high council.

• Praetor Ariahdnia 
• Alts
• Zapdash
• Chrysopraze
• Chevanima
• Veset
• Karrha
• Legate Sytan
• Alts
• Folodu
• Baarca
• Skih
• Marconis
• Luddicia
• Legate Fafnier
• Alts
• Andrejja
• Urgnog
• Edusa
• Yorrik

Please note: If the dispute is solely an IC matter, please specify that you are wishing to have the matter handled only IC. If the issue is an IC interaction that crosses your boundaries, violates our OOC rules, or in any way is an issue outside of the story-space of role-play, please make that clear to your officer(s).

---

In the course of bringing an incident to the officers' attention, or as the officers investigate an open incident, you may be asked to provide logs. Further details about what logs are may be found in part 1 of this series.

• If you do not have logs, they will be requested from the other actors in the event which has been brought to our attention.
• If no logs exist of the incident in question, the matter will remain open, and all actors will be asked to keep logs going forward.
• Any repeat of the offense while a matter is in open consideration will escalate the officers' analysis of the severity of the matter 
• Any member who fails to keep and provide logs after a specific request from an officer will be reprimanded.
• Any member involved in an investigation who fails to provide clear, undoctored logs for the timeframe requested will be subject to reprimand, and judgment based on whatever logs are available for review.
• Screenshots of chat are an acceptable supplement to log files, but due to tabbed chat filtering, are not a substitute for logs in most cases.
• If you have been approached by an officer for logs, you may ask about the nature of the investigation: however, bear in mind that details of matters in open consideration may be kept confidential until a judgment can be rendered. Refusal to cooperate with the officers, obstruction of process, or harassment of ANY players will be considered an admission of guilt to any and all potential offences and may result in severe reprimand or exile.
• The officers of the Vigiles Amicae do not have jurisdiction to reprimand non-members. Documented incidents with a member of another guild may be brought to the officers' attention, and we may conference with the officers of the other player's guild if the situation warrants it, but no particular outcome can be expected from those proceedings.
• If the actions of a player have been deemed severe enough by consensus of the High Council, all known alts of the player in question may be placed on access:none for all guild rp spaces, and an incident report will be prepared and filed for public record. Note: this is our standard process when encountering garden-variety trolls.
• Hearsay is not admissible as evidence in conflict resolution. The report will be noted and shared with other officers, but any such rumor shall remain an unofficial notation until and unless substantiated by logs or evidence of the rumored behavior being repeated.
• Not all requests for logs or screenshots are matters of transgression: on occasion, you may be asked to submit logs for combat analysis (for example, after a spectacular raid fight), rp event archiving, or even to harvest npc or other lore flavor-text.

---

If you've been keeping and organizing logs for a while, you know how big chatlogs can be. When an officer requests logs, they are NOT asking for the entirety of your chatlog archive.

So what are they looking for?

The officer you are talking with will explain in greater detail, but as a general rule, you will be asked to provide a log for roughly the 24-hour period surrounding the incident in question, from logging in to logging out. You may be asked to provide logs from more than one character, and multiple log-in periods, depending on the situation and the stability of your internet connection during the event.

This process does take time, and you will be granted a reasonable period in which to assemble your logs, and during which the incident will remain open.

The first task is to identify when the incident began.

If you are bringing the issue to the officers, you are the best judge of this. You know what was said, and what was done, but how do you isolate that from the mass of your chat? Perhaps at the time it was happening, you had a suspicion that this was going to need further attention, and you took screenshots of the chat. In a perfect world, you might have a screenshot of the problem in action, but even if you don't, you might be able to use the Find feature in any basic word processor to land in the right vicinity of your raw, uncleaned log.

For the purpose of this tutorial, let us say that the problematic lines are as follows*: 

(1385327972)[Sun Nov 24 15:19:32 2013] \aPC -1 Trollbob:Trollbob\/a tells AnOOCChannel (3), "LOL I will steal all ur loots while ur ded"(1385328273) 

[Sun Nov 24 15:19:34 2013] Trollbob looted 71 Copper from the corpse of a party crashing gnoll.(1385328274) 

[Sun Nov 24 15:19:35 2013] You cannot loot while you are dead!

You might remember the phrase "steal ur loots" and search for that, to find these lines in the raw log. Reviewing the log reveals that not only was this a transgression of need-before-greed but a disrespectful comment by Trollbob. Perhaps after this, you broke group, and the incident ended there, or perhaps Trollbob continued giving you trouble afterwards. Now you have enough information to create a preliminary "clean log".

Wait! You said I was supposed to submit raw logs!

This is true: and also, in order to identify the timeframe you need to submit, it may be more efficient for you to create a clean log next, rather than wading through thousands of lines of combat text. From the lines above, we can see that part of the incident occurred at 15:19 on November 24, and the chatter was in both the AnOOCChannel and may have had components in /group chat. In the log cleaner, you would click only the boxes for "channels", "guild", and for "group", and narrow the timeframe to 3:19 November 24 to 3:19 November 25, and name the export file something like, "Trollbob_chatter_Cleancopy.txt".

That clean file might not be very big, and when you look at it, you might decide it doesn't cover enough time. Keep refining the variables in logcleaner until you feel the entire incident is represented in the clean copy of the log. Make special note of the timestamps at the beginning and the end of the clean copy of your log.

Next, open your raw log, and find the timestamp which matches the beginning of your clean log. Remember the Find feature will make this easier! You might insert a line break or two above this timestamp, possibly with a symbol like # or * for your own reference.

Now, do the same thing for the ending timestamp from the clean log. If there is a camping sequence near this timestamp, make sure to include it, and place your linebreaks and reference symbol after it.

Now, copy the entire section between your reference marks to a new text document. Name this something like, "Joe_Trollbob_chatter_rawcut.txt." The size of this text document should be SUBSTANTIALLY bigger than your clean copy.

Now what do I do with it?

You are now ready to submit logs to your officers. You might wish to write a short letter explaining the nature of the incident you are bringing to their attention, and mention that the heart of the incident occurs around the timestamps you've identified. You may choose to submit your clean log in addition to the raw log for the officer's convenience, but the essential thing is the raw, snipped version.

DO NOT give in to the temptation to edit the raw log any further. Do not remove code, timestamps, combat or loot data, channel chat, or tells. If you are concerned about revealing private conversation in /tell which was going on during the incident but which you believe is unrelated, you may discuss this with your officer. You may be asked to identify the other player(s) involved in those /tell messages so that they may be consulted. Be assured, that all material unrelated to the incident will be kept absolutely confidential between you, the players in question, and the officers analyzing the incident. 
In some cases, you may be given permission to censor those unrelated tells by replacing the text of the tell with a specific phrase: do NOT do this without officer permission. Sometimes conversation which might seem unrelated will have bearing on the case.

Why not delete the whole line?

Tampering with logs in an attempt to sway the council's judgment is a very serious offense. Lies, obfuscation, and other gaslighting are destructive to personal relationships and to group dynamics. In order to assure your officers that the logs you have submitted are genuine and truthful, they need to see the code and the timestamps at the beginning of each line. Remember that your logs are going to be analyzed as part of a body of evidence, and any inconsistencies will draw the officers' attention.

What if the other person tampers with their log to make me look bad?

We've seen it all in the years we've served as officers, and we ask you to trust us that we'll know. Conflict resolution can be a stressful situation, even and perhaps especially when you know that you behaved honorably. It is very important that we have the evidence we need to expose wrongdoing and predation, and your cooperation is essential in maintaining our safe space here in the Vigiles.

I don't want to cause drama, but even though this person was reprimanded and/or exiled I'm worried...

We understand that anxiety. Your officers have your back, and public Council judgments are final, without appeal. Any retaliation in the wake of an incident will be treated as a serious offense. Incidents among us are few and far between: those who cannot abide our rules do not keep their welcome long.
We recommend that any players who have been officially exiled be placed on /ignore by all members, and from time to time our ooc channel will change names to ensure that our ooc space remains exclusive to those who abide by our Writ and Rule.

What if they make an alt?

If you are contacted by a stranger, and you feel anxious about this, one of the best ways to discover whether the stranger is cause for concern is this: bring an officer into group with you, and with them present, invite the stranger. Reply to the stranger that you will not respond to further tells, but only to group chat.
If they will not join the group, you may safely assume they are trouble, and place them on /ignore.
If they join the group and then complain to you in a tell that they will not speak in a public space, tell your officer, then take a screenshot, place the player on /ignore, and kick them from the group. Be prepared to file this screenshot and corresponding logs with your officer for posterity.

I think this one person might be an alt of this other person, and they did this one thing in this other guild and I'm worried it will happen here, and this other person was there when it happened too.

We understand your concern, and we will take every reasonable measure to promote a healthy, fun environment here among the Vigiles. More information is always a benefit to the officers, and even without logs to substantiate that history, the more details we have the better we will be able to watch for patterns. You do not need to roleplay or group with anyone that makes you uncomfortable, and if the person in question earns your trust, more the better. If, however, they live down to your expectation, be assured the officers will take action as soon as there is evidence to work with.

I'm not in your guild, but this person was recently kicked from/left our guild and you shouldn't let them join because...

We are always happy to talk with the leadership of other guilds, and we firmly believe that a strong community is one with open, respectful, and honest dialogue, no matter what the IC storylines may do. Forewarned is forearmed, of course, and as with internal incidents, the council will make decisions based on hard evidence as detailed above.

Okay - but where do I send the log files and stuff?

We like to keep things simple, so it's a free account with the guild name. Vigiles Amicae at gmail dot com, without the spaces, of course, rather like our little blog here. Sending spam to the guild account will earn you a reprimand, so don't do it.

---

* This is an example created for the purpose of this tutorial. Loot-stealing while a party member is dead is no longer an issue in game, so it works especially well as a neutral example.

How to: Clean logs for RP records

So!

Now you know how to organize your chat text for readability in game, and how to record your chat logs for later. What next? And why keep logs at all?

One reason to keep logs is bound up with what we do as role-players: story.

Every scene you role play in, you are writing. It is a collaborative, improvisational style of writing, which can yield unexpected, humorous, or sublime stories. By nature your logs are going to be full of typos, contradictions, and digressions, as any rough draft in creative writing is bound to be - but they are a record of your part in a collaborative writing session even so.

You might want to forget some scenes, and remember others - keeping logs will allow you to preserve favorite and/or pivotal moments in your role-play adventures.

As you hone your character, so also your writing will improve. Consider for a moment that hardcore role-play is very much like  full-contact improvisational theater, and you are the puppeteer behind one or more of the actors on the stage. Regular and dedicated role-play is a wonderful, lively forum in which to hone essential parts of the writer's craft: well developed characters, solid dialogue, intriguing plot, and your own favorite balance of comedy and tragedy.

If you go on to hone your writing craft further, or compare your role play session to a really good novel, you may cringe at the roughness of your role play logs. Remember to be kind to yourself and your role play partners: improv and role play are more like a rough draft. Rough drafts can contain the seeds of brilliant narratives, but they need much refining and growth to be on the level of finished work.

In role play, the burden of perfection is lifted: you aren't ever going to have a finished product, so there is no pressure** to push for perfection. Your stories are perpetually unfinished, growing, changing.

Neither do you have to fight the daunting Blank Page: you have chosen to site your characters in the world of Norrath. Your page already has a rough sketch on it - a world, and a collection of npc's and quests and challenges to face.

Against this background, you can begin to draft your character - their nature, their history, their mannerisms, and it's easier, because you have something to bounce them off of already in the world itself.

As you explore the world and your own story, you will encounter other players and their characters, and the sketch of the world will start to evolve. Soon, you'll have an ever changing stage you move through - and it will change your character as well.

Keeping and cleaning up your role play logs will fill your digital bookshelves with scripts for short and long plays which record your character's history and parts of others'. You may want to read these later, or share them with others - but they will always, by their very existence, be a reminder. You are a role player. You are a writer. And you're damn good at it.

---

How to clean your log files into a script:

It is entirely possible to tidy up logs by hand, using the ever-helpful find/replace tool in your favorite text editor. I know, I've done it.

Then I was shown a better way.

At the link, you will find a link to download the LogCleaner written by Cliff Stanford. It's fabulous, and the work put into it will make cleaning your old logs a piece of cake compared to the longhand method. I've linked to a screenshot of the program off to the right so you will know what to expect.

As you can see, the Log Cleaner is written to recognize those gobbledegook codes you saw in your raw log files. Chat categories like /say, and /tell, /guild and /group will all be familiar to you from adjusting your chat display settings. Selecting any number of those categories of text will create a final file which contains all of the chat from the raw file which was coded to that channel.

If your rp session largely happened in /say, and you want to create a file which strips out all the ooc chatter in /group and channels, you might select the following channels in the log cleaner: say, tell, guild, and shout. This will collect a majority of what happened in the session, and strip out all the extra code, leaving you with only the timestamp, the command and the chat text.

This is a fairly readable file already, though when you review it, you'll notice there's something missing.

Your emotes.

Emotes are unfortunately coded in a way which is not easily distinguishable from combat. So... your emotes and your combat are both going to be under the heading "Everything Else".

What to do?

Well, if your rp was in a quiet place, you can probably add "everything else" to your selections, without having to clean out too many extra tags. If you were hungry, or a passive ward refreshed you, you'll see that, but there won't be very much, and you'll be able to use find/replace to strip that out fairly easily.

What if your RP session was in a dungeon? On a hunt?

If you used /guild or /g to roleplay, then just select those channels, and use find/replace to shorten the "so-and-so says to group" to "Character ::".

If, however, you roleplayed in /say and /emote, perhaps in the rest spaces between fights, you do have some work ahead of you. There are two ways to approach the challenge: one, is to create a single cleaned file to work with which has all relevant channels in it. The other involves producing two separate files: one, with your /say, /shout, and so on, and the other, with only one box ticked: "everything else".

In the first method, you will have a very large file, even if your session was only an hour or two. In this method, you can strip out the timestamps before you begin, if you prefer. You can add a line at the top of your file with the linguistic date (ie: Monday February the second from roughly ten in the evening to five in the morning on Tuesday ) if you want to keep that information, and the find/replace won't touch that.

If you clean up your log within a short time of the roleplay, you'll remember about how often you stopped to roleplay, what chatter to look for, and you'll be able to scroll through and isolate the stops and starts of your chatter relatively easily. Even if it's been a while, you'll be able to identify where you "went into battle" and where you "stopped to chat" more and more easily as you scan through the text.

I recommend creating extra line breaks between those sections, and combing over the log more than once before deleting much of the combat text, just in case you missed a section.

You will still have to comb or find/replace for "You are hungry..." and "Your ward of elements refreshes you..." mixed in with the roleplay chatter, but it's easier to pull that out AFTER combing out the larger combat blocks.

Leave several blank lines between your roleplay segments: trust me, it will help.

In the second method, you'll be doing much the same thing in your "everything else" file, but WITHOUT stripping the timestamps out yet, and because you're only looking for emote tags, your rp sections will be shorter, and slightly harder to find.

So what is the advantage to the second method? Well, it allows you to clean the speech records more quickly, for one, and divides a large job into two smaller ones. It's always difficult to find the motivation for tackling a large tasks, even if we really want the result. Having a breakdown of smaller steps helps us mark our accomplishments more easily and encourages us to finish them.

Once you've cleaned the "Everything else" file down to the emotes only, then you can begin the work of splicing the two together. This is where those timestamps come in handy.

In your speech file, look through the isolated roleplay segements, paying attention to the timestamps. Anywhere there appears to be a break of more than 30 seconds or so, add a linebreak. Now, before moving onto the next rp section, flip over to your emote file, and look at the timestamps. Move the entire section of emotes over to your speech file, fitting them into the spaces between your speech as needed.

If you are doing this shortly after the rp in question, this will actually go fairly quickly, as the "holes" will stand out easily and you'll have a fresh memory of what to look for in your emote file.

Now what?

Whatever method you chose, wherever your roleplay happened, you've now got only a few small things to do. Soon, you will have a clean, readable script-like record of the evening's collaborative writing, which you and your friends can re-read or share in the years to come.

Remove time stamps:
The easiest way is to run find/replace on each numeral 0 through 9. Then you will be able to select the remaining time stamp artifact, which will look like [Mon ::: ]. Make sure you select the space between that, and the start of the command line! Leave the replace field blank, and it will strip these things out without leaving anything behind.

Simplify chat attributions:
There's a number of ways to do this, and you may change your style as you build your log collection. The important thing is to make the result more readable. You might choose to use nicknames for the characters, or codes for the kinds of speech.

For example:
Original:
You say, "Hello there, handsome."
Cleaned:
A :: "Hello there, handsome."

Original:
You tell Bob, **a sultry voice touches the edge of your consciousness** "Hello there, handsome."
Cleaned:
A~Bob :: **a sultry voice touches the edge of your consciousness** "Hello there, handsome."

Original:
Guildmate: Bob has logged in.
You say to the guild, "Hello there, handsome."
Cleaned:
Bob logs in.
A ~ VA :: "Hello there, handsome."

It may seem like a small change, but over the course of a 20k word role play scene, it will make reading far easier. Once you get into the thread of the scene's plot, the smaller attribution tags will start to "disappear", as they would if you were reading the script for a play.

Clean up errors:
This step is entirely optional, but many times in role play we catch our errors after they've posted to chat-bubbles, and so in your logs you'll have many corrections and clarifications. Streamlining these into the dialogue as if they'd posted correctly the first time may be less "accurate" to the original experience, but it will make a more pleasant reading experience later. While you're at it, you might choose to correct other minor errors of grammar, punctuation, or spelling, especially in your own lines. It is excellent practice for the future writing, revision, and proofreading.

---

** Your mileage may vary. The Perfection Monster is one we all fight to some degree, and you may need different tools to fight yours. I invite you to try out some of the tools that have worked for me, and for friends of mine. May you find victory in all your creative endeavors!

How to: Keep logs

It wouldn't be long among the Vigiles before you started hearing about "logs" in the ooc channels. What the heck are logs, you might ask, and why do we use them? What are they for? Why do we bother?

I've been using and teaching people about logs for years, and it wasn't until I sat down to write this up for the blog that I realized this is actually a pretty broad topic. In the interest of brevity and clarity, I've broken it up over three separate posts. It seems to me the most sensible beginning is the what, and the how of their existence, and we'll get to the whys and what-fors in a little bit.

The Everquest2 game comes with the ability to log your chat history built-in. It's as simple as typing /log or selecting Menu --> Options --> User Interface --> Chat Window --> Log Chat text .
This means that whenever logs are active, the game will be writing ALL your chat to a separate .txt file under Sony Online Entertainment --> Installed Games --> Everquest2 --> logs --> [servername] with a name like  eq2log_charactername.txt .

But what goes in the log?

The game considers all text you encounter as "chat", but even at default settings you are presented with some visual distinctions, which reflect the kinds of text which are coded differently in the engine.

You can change the visual settings in EQ2 Menu --> Options --> User Interface. Once you have a setup you like on one character, you can easily copy the same settings to all your characters by typing the command /load_uisettings , which will pull up a dialog box with the names of all your characters. Select the one you've tweaked, and everything will adjust as you've designed it already.

You can also change what chat shows up in your log and on your screen by right-clicking your chat tab and selecting chat options.

You can also find these UI settings in the file system of your computer under Sony Online Entertainment --> Installed Games --> Everquest2 .
The file-name will be in this format: Server_Character_eq2_UIsettings.xml. Backing this small file up to an external or cloud storage system will make switching computers much easier, because tweaking your settings to suit your playstyle is always an investment of time.

The default settings for the chat which is "on" in each tab seem to be:

1. Main chat
1. Game Text
1. Default
2. Error
3. Status
4. MOTD
2. Chat Text
1. Nearby
1. Say
2. Shout
3. Emote
4. Yell
5. Narrative
6. NPCSay
2. Group
1. Group say
2. Raid say
3. Arena say
3. Guild
1. Guild say
2. Guild officer
3. Guild MOTD
4. Guild member online
5. Guild Event
6. Guild recruiting page
7. Guild recruiting page (other)
4. Private
1. Tell
2. Customer Service
5. Chat channel
1. Out of Character
2. Auction
3. Tradeskills
1. Harvesting
2. Harvesting Warnings
4. Voice Chat
2. Combat
1. Spells
1. (many kinds of combat)
2. Combat
1. (many kinds of spells)
3. Tab 1
1. Chat text
1. Non-Player Tell
2. Object Tell
3. Spam
2. Character Text
1. Reward
2. Death
3. Pet
4. Skill
5. Faction
3. Other
1. Money split
2. Loot
3. Loot rolls
4. Command 
1. Broadcast
2. Who
3. Commands
5. Merchant
1. Merchant Buy/Sell
6. Consider
1. Con -2
2. Con -1
3. Con 0
4. Con 1
5. Con 2
4. Tab 2
1. Any chat channels you have selected

A screenshot of the chat and menu windows,
with the Status/Narrative tab selected.

By default, you are subscribed to General, Auction, and your class channel. You may also be subscribed to any other default channels you may have chosen before, such as Crafting, or LFG, or any user-created chat channels which you've been in before, such as rplfg or homeshow.

Sometimes, on fresh installations of the game, everything in Tab 1 is also open in Main chat. As you can tell, it very quickly gets crowded, and difficult to follow.

In the Main User Interface settings, you can color code all these different kinds of text so they display

Another screenshot of the options and menu windows,
with the combat tab selected.

distinctly - by default most channels are dark green, chat text is white and/or yellow, group chatter is light blue, and so on. You can code each possible chat channel number to a different color, so that it's possible to follow conversations in multiple channels more easily... but even so, your chat window will fill up very quickly.

I recommend the following settings as a starting place for your chat windows:

1. Main chat
1. Game Text
1. MOTD
2. Chat Text
1. Nearby
1. Say
2. Shout
3. Emote
4. Yell
2. Group
1. Group say
2. Raid say
3. Arena say
3. Guild
1. Guild say
2. Guild officer
3. Guild MOTD
4. Guild member online
5. Guild Event
6. Guild recruiting page
7. Guild recruiting page (other)
4. Private
1. Tell
2. Customer Service
5. Chat channel
1. Very important User-created channels, turned off when in intense RP or combat
2. Combat
1. Spells
1. (many kinds of spells)
2. Combat
1. (many kinds of combat
3. Status or Narrative 
1. Game Text
1. Error
2. Status
3. Default
2. Chat text
1. Non-Player Tell
2. Object Tell
3. Spam
4. Narrative
5. NPCSay
3. Character Text
1. Reward
2. Death
3. Pet
4. Skill
5. Faction
4. Other
1. Money split
2. Loot
3. Loot rolls
5. Command 
1. Broadcast
2. Who
3. Commands
6. Merchant
1. Merchant Buy/sell
7. Tradeskills
1. Harvesting
2. Harvesting warnings
8. Consider
1. Con -2
2. Con -1
3. Con 0
4. Con 1
5. Con 2
6. Voice Chat
4. Channels
1. Any default channels you've selected, color coded in shades of green
2. Any user-created channels you've selected, coded in warm colors, bright for the main chat, and dark for the echo of what you said to them

Now, any and all chat you have selected to show in ANY tab is going to be written to your log file, without any of the helpful color-coding we use in the game window, and with a great deal of hidden code. As you might imagine, log files get very big, very fast, no matter your settings. Even simple .txt files tend to get corrupted and difficult to open at large sizes. 

So how do you organize all those piles of information?

It is recommended, therefore, that if you run logs, you regularly rename and/or move old logs to a new folder. Ideally, back these text files up in an external or cloud based storage system, as you would any other writing - both in their raw and their cleaned form. (I'll write about cleaning logs in the next article.)

For example, on the first of every month you might add the name of the previous month to the end of the log file names. For example: eq2log_charactername_month_year.txt , or you could rename the file entirely: Month_Bob_the_SK.The next time you load into the game, the program will be looking for the old filename - and since it doesn't exist, it will write a new one in the default format.

You might also start a special log when you know you're going into a long RP scene or intense combat, by typing /log filename such as "councilmeeting_march". You might consider turning your logs off when heading into a raid, or again, starting a different log such as "venekor_raid", simply because combat logs are enormous.

Don't forget to turn your logs back on, or back to default when you're done, by typing /log and watching your status test for the confirmation, which will look like:

Logging to 'logs/Server/eq2log_charactername.txt' is now *OFF*

or

Logging to 'logs/Server/eq2log_charactername.txt' is now *ON*

If you've ever played a PnP RPG, and spent several sessions on rolling your way through a single fight, you can imagine how much data is in a combat log. All that data makes the end log result almost impossible to read... so why do it?

I'll explain more in later articles, but the short answer is: to have your old RP's to look back on fondly, and to support a just and safe environment with the records of what you experience in the world.