I've now got all the pieces in place to start thinking about a new Skype idea.

Skype Group Chat web archives.

The idea is that one person in a bookmarked Skype Group chat runs a program on their desktop that reports every message up to a web application. That web application then stores the messages and provides a web archive view of the conversations. The web application could have a simple API so people could write other client add-ons to report up the same data.

Would this be useful?

Does it makes sense to make it wide open and run it as a service to the Skype community?

One of the pieces I'm puzzling over is the best way to present the web UI. The equivalent apps in IRC tend to be very calendar oriented with static files holding the messages for each day. I'd prefer to use a database approach but navigating months worth of an active chat might be difficult.

I dont want to plug my own stuff but since youre asking - I did this as an experiment and its here. The collector works fine, web presentation is really basic but easy to build upon.

I had basically the same idea and approach but my favourite programming languages are different. I also want the desktop collector to do other interesting stuff, like run a bot in the group chat.

I figured:-
- A desktop client. I'm swinging back and forth between delphi and php but both using the Skype4Com COM control[1].
- An API based on POST. Using POST gets round any problems of having to urlencode the data as well as anyone posting a *long* message.
- A Server side app written in PHP and Mysql that receives the POSTs and stores them in the database.
- A Server PHP-Mysql program to read the data out again into web pages.

I figure the API would receive
- Message ID
- ChatName
- Timestamp
- FromHandle
- FromDisplayName
- Body
All of which are easy to get from the COM controls OnMessageStatus event.

I also plan on using the chat itself to turn this on and off. Because we're already capturing messages I'd just parse them out and look for /archiveon or /archiveoff messages. When I get /archiveon, I'd store the ChatName and any new messages from the list of ChatNames would trigger calls to the web archiver.

[1]Delphi vs PHP. PHP is a lot easier to code, comes with lots of libraries but it's harder to interact with the user. It's also harder to hide completely. Delphi is better for windows programming and makes it easier to create things like trayicon apps. But it's harder work and missing all the web and text management utilities. If it wasn't for my zero python knowledge I'd probably use that.

jbond,

Have you tried the COM control in Delphi? I used Delphi's TypeLib import to create a VCL wrapper for it. When I tried to draw an instance of the control on a form, I got a dialog box reminding me to buy a license for commercial use, and then the Delphi 6 IDE completely locked up. I posted a thread about this but never got an answer:

http://forum.skype.com/viewtopic.php?t=47073

Thanks.

There's now 3 COM controls. Which one are you talking about?

I've now switched to the Beta Skype4Com from Skype themselves. I did some testing with the ActiveS control from Khaos which doesn't require an additional license. It sounds like you're using the third one.

jbond,

I'll have to check, I didn't know there was more than one. Just to be sure, would you mind posting a link to the Download page you used?

Thanks.

In this forum
http://forum.skype.com/viewtopic.php?t=46396

http://share.skype.com/sites/devzone/2006/...ype_contac.html

jbond,

Thanks!