I fired up Trillian this morning, as I usually do once we’re out of the morning meeting or huddle at work, and immediately for every contact I chat with using Google’s system I started getting a slew of “error” messages, several at once every couple of minutes:
“This conversation is no longer off the record.”
That’s funny, I don’t remember ever going off the record to begin with… let alone several times per second.
It took some digging around Trillian’s forums, but I found the problem: Did you know that, by default, Google Talk chats are logged by Google?
No, I didn’t either. And I don’t want them logged.
If you feel the same way, go into your GMail web interface, click Settings, then go to the Chat settings and select “Never save chat history,” and Save Changes. This will also keep 3rd party chat clients from going nuts from time to time, apparently…
UPDATE: As the lovely Kylanath points out, you then probably want to go to the Chat “folder” in GMail and blow out everything in there. You may be amazed at how many are in there. Then, empty your Trash.
Comments
20 responses to “Google Talk Chat Logs”
Hum… same problem here :\
What if I want to save these conversations? Am I doomed to be notified that I do?
It looks that way. I’m not sure why Trillian and Google decided to start fighting today, though, so maybe there’s something that one or the other of them can figure out and resolve.
it happens when the person you’re chatting with hits backspace.
Interesting!
However: Today it was happening with every GTalk person I had a tab open with, and one of them I know for a fact wasn’t touching their keyboard when I was getting the “error” messages. So… that might be one cause, but it’s not the only possible one.
Actually, one of the “This conversation is no longer off the record.” comes in when the person you’re chatting with starts typing, the other two “This conversation is no longer off the record.”s come in when they have sent their message. so basically every time gtalk on trillian has an XMPP update, you get an error. I think it’s a new version of trillian that came out this morning, or otherwise some google update that they did server-side.
Thanks for posting this. I had almost resigned myself to living with it… Glad I checked.
No problem!
Looks like Trillian put out an update this morning to remedy the “error” messages anyway, but I still don’t want Google keeping my chat logs on their servers, so… *shrug*
thx for the post, here the same error msg’s
That was really so helpful 🙂 But I guess trillian will have to go now..No point in using something like this. If I can’t log my chats.
Don’t delete Trillian just yet! One, you can log locally, and two, they’ve put out an update to remedy this particular problem.
(I left my logging off, but that’s a matter of preference.)
Thanks GreyDuck, been wondering about this. I have stopped Google from saving my chats. @ptival you can have trillian save all your chats, that way you are in control.
And if are feeling ambitious, install Dropbox, you can have all your chat logs in a folder there, instead of your computer, and have it synced and accessible across all your machines and via their secure site. Obviously you can sync the rest of your computer as well, and it’s all seemless, no clicks…oh and 2 gigs for free…w00t!
http://smal.in/DropBox – a link that gets you 250megs more space, and a bonus 250megs for me as well.
Rock on guys,
Mike
I’m having the same issue but I’m running Trillian 5 Beta for Windows and the latest update on the website as of today appears to be 5.0.0.29 (December 14, 2010). This is what I’ve been running. Was the update fix only made to 4.x?
Man, I have no idea. I only found out about the fix because the day after I made this post Trillian popped up with the auto update notification.
Info here: http://forums.ceruleanstudios.com/showthread.php?t=102622&highlight=conversation+longer+record
Looks like it will be in the next 5.x build.
Thank you! That line got really annoying, gone now.
Just stumbled across this blog post while investigating Gtalk privacy, and one thing that I’ve noticed is that “off the record” and “never save chat history” are not necessarily the same thing.
When you’re off-the-record, then neither Google nor you nor anyone you’re talking to will save the chat history. “Never save chat history” simply means that you will not fill up your Gmail account with chat logs — the other people you’re chatting with might be doing that.
Now that’s interesting! Thanks for dropping by with that info.
Google seems bent on taking over the world. Really. The Chinese recognize this and restrict it but they get blown off as repressive. I went to download some innocuous app and got the agreement from google that promised them my firstborn (well, not literally, but they wanted more info than I was willing to give) who happens to be greyduck. Didn’t get the app. You younger people really have to watch this!
Hey there, Dad. 🙂
I use Google for very specific things, and don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because they have a “don’t be evil” slogan that the organization or its individual members are particularly trustworthy. All of the important stuff I keep under my own umbrella. They’re useful, but like any useful thing you have to set parameters on how it’s used and what NOT to use it for…
Thanks for the info, looked this up and found your post or what not about it. Again thanks for the help it was really annoying.