There is a long standing bug which has been present since I first tried Spark nearly a year ago: Chat history is only saved when the window is closed.
There are several posts covering this issue, several of which I started or participated in:
Chat history not saved
Posted: Feb 28, 2006 11:50 AM
Contact History Behaviour
Posted: Aug 21, 2006 1:47 PM
Issues still present in 2.0.1 (mixed win32 & linux)
Posted: Sep 12, 2006 7:26 PM
Chat history and boomarks not saved on disconnect or windows shutdown
Posted: Oct 19, 2006 5:14 AM
This last post finally seems to bring up some resolution but I would like to question why a timer is being used instead of merely saving the information as it comes in and as it goes out. In some of the above threads I mention that I thought it should be saved as it occurs, then there is never “lost” information and everything is in sync. I never saw any reasons against this nor can I think of any myself so I would like to explore why there is a need to setup a timer, which I see as just another thing which can fail or go wrong instead of:
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As information arrives it goes to the history and to your chat window.
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When you type something and hit send it goes to your chat history and gets sent through the server (or waits for the confirmation or whatever else needs to be done in this case).
There are two other things worth mentioning here:
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Broadcast messages do not appear to be saved
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The date format in the chat history does not follow ISO standards (or any other standard for that matter RFC 3339, ISO 8601, FIPS Pub 4-1, ANSI X3.30-1985 (R1991) etc… ).
Thanks for exploring the other possibilities to resolve this long standing bug and I would be happy to further elaborate my ideas of it would be of any help.
Cheers, RioGD