Update on June 4, 2014: It’s coming back!

As of today, logstripper is no more. With this post, I’d like to explain why I have decided to pull the plug on it, and what you can do if you were still using it.

Logstripper was an application I built in my spare time more than three years ago, back before display names even existed. The introduction of display names made it less effective by breaking some of the algorithms used to detect people’s names, but despite of that, I’ve kept it running all that time because I know some people continued to use it.

However, maintaining an application, even such a simple one as logstripper, takes time, effort and money. I pay for server costs (and strongly refuse to put up ads as compensation) and every now and again, I have to upgrade the versions of the software used because security vulnerabilities in that software are found. Usually this is a straightforward process of incrementing a version number, but sometimes new versions are not backward-compatible and further changes have to be made.

I’ve now reached the point where, after doing this for quite a while, I no longer find it worth the effort. In all the time of running it, nobody has given me any kind of thank you or even made a small donation, and personally, I’m not happy with some of the technological aspects of how the application was built.

I’ve occasionally considered making a newer version of logstripper, and also toyed with the idea of making it a HUD of some kind that allows for recordings to be started and stopped in-world without having to manually copy-and-paste logs over, but I remain unconvinced it would be worth the effort to write.

If you were one of the people who still used logstripper, and would like to see it return in some form or another, I would be happy to hear from you. Please let me know your thoughts and ideas either in the comments below or by emailing me directly. I make no promises, but if enough people show an interest, I’d be happy to build something new.