[JDEV] Server-based History

[Thomas Muldowney]

I was thinking of doing a hack on my personal server to do this, and then
save them to an area I can search and browse via the web.  The searching would
all be done with PHP scripts.  I later wanted to expand it to be a real DB for
it all, so I could run queries more powerfully.  The only reason I personally
accpet this is because I have server control, not a scare factor there.  For
the primary distribution of Jabber, I don't know where we lean on this subject,
I guess it's really up to you all to decide.

--temas

On Fri, Oct 13, 2000 at 12:02:51PM +1000, Michael Brown wrote:
> I am just wanting to get the thoughts from people on if it makes sense to
> store Jabber message history on the server.  I believe that this has been
> looked at in the past, but I am unsure if it is still being considered or
> worked on.
> 
> The main reason to store history on the server is that when you change
> clients you don't loose access to all the history that has been sent to your
> other resources.  The other advantage is that is would simplify all the
> clients very much and decrease their memory footprint since they would not
> need some sort of database engine to store/search message history.
> 
> The disadvantages of course are...
> 
> You have all your personal conversations sitting on the server and you have
> to trust the admin of that server to keep your data safe and confidential.
> I would hope there would be some type of encryption that could help out
> here.  I suspect that there is no absolute method of  preventing the person
> who is running your server from being able to access your message history if
> they really wanted to, but considering that all the messages are going
> through that server anyway (at present in plain-text) I can't really see it
> being much of an issue.
> 
> This is going to put a larger load on the servers and take much more disk
> resources.  To give you some idea, I have been using ICQ for years now, and
> never delete history.  My history file is 8.5MB with a 13MB index.  Does
> anyone know how much space companies like Hotmail give you for email
> accounts?  The obvious solution here is to let the admins set a file limit
> and have messages over a certain date expire once that limit is reached.
> This could perhaps be used to an ISP's advantage - they give you a free
> Jabber account with 5MB of space, but for $50/year they will increase it to
> 20MB.
> 
> Speed.  Every time you browse the message history, it has to be fetched from
> the server.  Of course this will be less of an issue as bandwidth increases,
> and it could be offset a bit by all the searches etc being done on the
> (faster?) server.
> 
> You don't have access to your history if you are not connected to the
> server.  (But then you don't have access to your roster either)
> 
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Michael.
> 
> 
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