How To Use the Chat Filter

Chat filter icon

## Introduction

Often people mention that they wish the game had tools to read logs more efficiently, or to see voting history. The truth is, these tools do exist, but they might be not be as obvious at first glance.

Learning how to use the chat filter will help you log dive more quickly and efficiently, especially if you have some recollection of what you are looking for. This will in turn help you recall and investigate finer details of past days, and/or surface relevant quotes to support ongoing discussion.

Prior to the chat filter, you would have had to rely on the browser's built-in search ([CTRL] + [F]), and fortunately the same basic ideas/functionality applies to the chat filter.

## Chat Filter Location

In case you don't know where the chat filter is, it is located in the top right corner of the screen. This is true at time of writing for both mobile and desktop. See the yellow arrow below if you are having trouble locating the icon to open the chat filter.

## Basic Usage

Clicking the icon will open a small dialog with a few options to filter the current day or night phase's messages.

Then general capabilities are as such:

* Filtering on Text
* Filtering by Player
* Fade Out Unmatched

### Filtering on Text

You can enter any arbitrary string in the "Text" field at the top of the dialog. All messages (including player names) that **include** the specified text will remain. The filtered text is case-insensitive, but respects whitespace and punctuation. In fact, the "Text" filter functionality behaves *exactly* as a browser's built-in search would.

In the example, the text "Umi" is used as the "Text" filter, which results in the filtered chat showing only messages from the player "Umi" or including "Umi" in the message content.

### Filtering by Player

While you can type a player's name in the "Text" field, that does give false positives in the form of messages authored by other players which mention the specified player's name. If your goal is to find all messages and actions performed by a single player, then you can click on the "Player" dropdown and select the player whose logs you want to filter to.

In the example, the player "Purple Heart" is used as the "Player" filter, showing only messages from the player "Purple Heart".

### Filtering with Context

The final option for filtering text is a toggle to completely exclude all non-matching messages, or to fade them out to retain context. This option is very helpful if you roughly recall a specific message, but not the entire context of it, and wish to revisit it. Rather than finding the message directly, exiting the filter, and then scrolling back up to the target message, you can turn this on, and just keep scrolling until you find the highlighted message you are interested in.

In the example, the player "Purple Heart" is used as the "Player" filter with "Fade out unmatched" enabled, which results in all messages from the player "Purple Heart" becoming highlighted, and all *other* messages from other players faded out, but still readable.

## Advanced Usage

Through some clever usage and/or combinations of the above, you can achieve more powerful searches.

### Filtering on Text and by Player

Combining both the Text and Player filter can allow you to look for all messages authored by a single player, containing a given word.

In the example, the text "Umi" is used as the "Text" filter, but "Maki" is used as the "Player" filter, which results in the filtered chat showing only messages from the player "Maki" **and** including "Umi" in the message content. In other words, all messages from Maki that mention "Umi".

### Vote History

Using the chat filter, it is possible to get a quick overview of player voting history. This works because the chat filter **also applies to system messages**.

Timing, order, and finalization are all important aspects of vote analysis, which can all be shown by filtering for vote history.

In the first example, "votes" is used as the "Text" filter which results in a voting history (albeit with some noise).

In the second example, "vote" is used as the "Text" filter, which will include the previous examples results, but also include the system "<Player> has unvoted" message.

## Original Text

Fortunately, some of our friends from μ's showcased how to use the chat filter in-game. This is also the source of the above filters to show what the original text is before applying any chat filters.