I've thought about this in the past, it's not difficult to do. I've used the Discord API in the past, you can listen to literally all messages that happen in the server. Streaming those into a DB and displaying them in a web-based UI (with Pidgin-like HTML export) would be straightforward. Maybe that'll be my next weekend's project.
Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting users know that their messages will be posted on the web is important, but either way, if it's a public channel of a FOSS project's Discord server, surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?
> surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?
For some reason, this is really hard for people to get. The discord company is super paranoid about scraper bots joining through public links, and people themselves are continuously in awe when someone digs up an old message about whatever, asking the mods to ban them for doxing.
I completely agree with the sentiment, however, and I think it should become more socially acceptable for some chats to be viewable online, like forums used to be back in the day. Even then, people would close certain subforums off from appearing for people without an account (e.g. in public searches). As it stands, however, people are not comfortable with this because nobody is doing it.
It would be wise to disclose that messages are archived publicly. But you also don't need to archive the identity of everyone in the chats, you can replace their usernames with generic identifiers in the public archive.
Well, yeah. I wouldn't do it behind people's backs, but I'm pretty sure people would protest, and new people would miss the message no matter how big you make it in the introduction channel.
Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting users know that their messages will be posted on the web is important, but either way, if it's a public channel of a FOSS project's Discord server, surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?