The general recommended approach we have is quoting, select N chat messages and then quote them in the topic.
We are also thinking of adding a discourse-ai transformation that would convert N selected messages into a nice summary so you can include in a topic.
Mapping chat message → post is very very expensive and can result in extremely noisy topics.
I understand what you mean. On the other hand, the “quality” of chat messages is usually inferior to forum posts. By converting them totally, you may be creating “chat messages quality” posts and this isn’t necessarily good going forward. It may have an effect of setting the bar lower.
Quoting has the advantage of making very clear the beginning comes from a chat discussion. With the messages form and quality being what’s done in chats. That’s probably good, IMHO.
This would be pretty nice. In addition to the quote, ideally. Or by keeping the quote available, even if masked by default.
We reserve our “permanent” chat channels for TL_3, but I just had a temporary forum-wide chat event which worked well, and I was able to close the channel and archive to a topic - which is actually extremely handy and I’d love to do that without ending a channel.
[TL;DR: humble suggestion]
That would do the same thing as archiving a channel, except for a limited range of dates, without removing the messages from the channel, and wouldn’t close the topic. That way if someone’s trying to recall something that was discussed last week, or if we’re needing to mod something someone saw but didn’t flag, we could pull a limited archive from specific dates to a public or Staff topic and search it with the normal forum tools (or even CTRL-F in the browser) or PM it to someone who’d like to do that without the need to manually scan the timeline for which chat messages or dates we’re looking for.
I haven’t thought about it deeply, but on the surface I like the idea. I am kind of interested in taking it a step further and enabling a channel to be archived on a rolling basis to a topic automatically.
Yeah, I like the idea of having the summary followed by the transcript (maybe in [details/]) together.
I think one small improvement we can and should prioritize is making it so that quoting a chat quote retains attribution to the original author (as we do with posts). That’d allow chat transcripts to be in a single post, while still allowing conversations to flow more naturally from that point on in topics. I’ll try to get that on our list soon-ish.