I’d just put in the author’s name or some name other than my own.
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That presumes that the player already knows that a transcript is being recorded.
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I hope you’re right! But sitting here in 2026, I’m less blasé about assuming that norms that aren’t actively reinforced will stick around (and I’m thinking more of the norm and community sentiment than the possibility that the Comp will just drop the feature, which I agree is unlikely).
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What I am specifically addressing is:
…and that there may be identifying information in the transcripts, particularly if generating and storing those transcripts was not what the player expected to happen.
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i had deleted my post. the polite thing is to not acknowledge deleted posts.
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Re: opting in vs. opting out of transcripts, maybe there are data collection laws that would affect how consent is handled for something like transcript recording.
One reason I usually don’t play parser games online is because I’m not sure how to find or restore a saved game in a browser, and I’d be a little concerned that if some glitch happened with online play or the game got updated or something, I’d lose my progress or my saved games wouldn’t work.
In non-browser interpreters, I know how saving and restoring works.
It hadn’t occured to me to me to download a browser version of a parser game.
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I just wanted to clarify that my initial post was intended to be a direct reply. (Discourse seems to remove the reply reference when the next post is the reply, so in hindsight I probably should have clarified exactly what I meant.)
Apologies for replying to your message if that isn’t the done thing, I presumed it would be polite to reference it but not quote it. I did so to clarify the context of what I had written rather than directly address the specifics of what you had written.
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I kind of agree with the sentiment. Transcripts are incredibly useful to authors, and many players (including me) forget to start them. I believe the auto transcripts for IFComp was put in place with genuinely good intentions before internet privacy was such an alarming thing in the forefront of people’s minds.
I don’t ever enter my real name into a game - ideally if it asks that, you’re creating a character so I’m ShimBob FweedlyPants or whatever. Most people nowadays know you don’t give any info other than official sites your personal credentials, but it would be good to remind new players and make this transparent.
It might be simple as online play for IFComp pops a dialog: “Please check this box if you’d like to create an automatic transcript of your play session that can only be read by the author of this game.” and make it opt-in.
In my brain, I’ve always thought an offline interpreter that automatically transcripts every play session and continues the session on restore would be awesome. If it put them in tabs kind of like Notepad++ and had a “global search” so you could find “ATTACK GOBLIN” in multiple transcripts and compare responses side-by-side would be really useful in development.
That’s normal - if you’re quoting the entirety of the immediately preceding post Discourse removes it due to redundancy. If you quote only a part of the preceding post it should work.
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This is why I think…
…that Parchment should implement something like this. I believe Lectrote already does. The Dialog[1] web interpreter does this and it’s incredibly convenient. If everyone always had access to their transcripts without needing to explicitly start, stop, and download them, I think this would be less of an issue.
Back in the 80s, it made sense not to create a multi-kilobyte text file without explicit prompting from the user. Nowadays, not so much. The average website probably uses more than that for cookie storage!
by which I mean Å-machine ↩︎
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I knew about IFComp’s automatic recording of transcripts, without being closely involved, so it isn’t too well hidden, but it did put me off playing anything online. I prefer an interpreter or emulator application anyway. Having said all that, I’m pretty sure that an opt-out (rather than opt-in) toggle would be fine, certainly if it’s with a warning not to type any personal information. Some really clear and positive information about how useful transcripts are might make wary people reconsider for each game.
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I had no clue that IFComp parser transcripts were sent to authors! Whether the player is automatically opted-in or opted-out, they should definitely be allowed to have that choice of sharing. I agree that a notice or warning about it should be more in-your-face too.
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This is honestly somewhat depressing to me. Even when I’m playing offline, I’m still being recorded? I wish that, just for one second, not every single element of my life was being documented. I have not been in the best mental place lately, so no doubt this conversation is hitting me with unreasonable force, but it doesn’t feel good.
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Well, technically yes, but the transcript is never sent anywhere (it never leaves your local computer), and the reason is to support the autosave/autorestore system. When you reopen a game you’ve played before, Lectrote tries to restore its last autosave if possible, and uses the transcript to fill in the last things you saw in the game (so you don’t need to immediately start with LOOK, INVENTORY, etc every time). They’re also deleted automatically after a certain amount of time or a certain number of transcripts saved.
If that’s an issue, though, you can turn it off in the options.
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An offline transcript is probably about as private as a saved game: it exists, as a feature, and only gets public if it’s actively made public.
Having said that, I fully understand the feeling of ‘crap, not even this is private?!’. Thankfully, apparently this offline script is, indeed, private. 
[quote=“Daniel Stelzer, post:76, topic:79562, username:Draconis”]
When you reopen a game you’ve played before, Lectrote tries to restore its last autosave if possible, and uses the transcript to fill in the last things you saw in the game (so you don’t need to immediately start with LOOK, INVENTORY, etc every time).
[/quote]
How nifty!
…and copy/quote often fails like this for me, and I don’t have the time to fix it right now. 
Specifically, if you want to turn it off, go to Edit > Preferences, then:
Choose either of the bottom options and set it to “0”, and transcripts will be deleted whenever you close the window.
Personally, I don’t care if an interpreter saves information about the game to my local machine as I’m playing; to me, whether the game’s output is stored in RAM or on disk is an implementation detail that doesn’t really matter. Either way, I’m the only one who will ever see it. (It’s always stored somewhere while you’re playing, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see it on the screen.) But this is only meant to explain my perspective on this, not to tell you that yours is wrong or invalid.
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Thanks. I appreciate the mini tutorial! I had no idea this was a thing. Of course some amount of save/retrieve is baked into the concept of gaming itself, but I don’t want my transcripts saved indefinitely in a cache somewhere, even a local cache, for anyone to potentially rummage through in the future.
Even decades in the future. Say I’m dead, and someone accesses these saved transcripts. I don’t want that! I’m admittedly extreme in this stance, but I’m just so, so weary of the endless documentation of life nowadays.
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Very fair!
For completeness, the Dialog (Å-machine) web interpreter doesn’t have a specific setting to get rid of transcripts, because it saves them to your browser’s local storage. So it will be deleted periodically along with the rest of your web data (history of visited sites, cookies, etc) if you’ve set your browser to do that. On Firefox, you can see what any particular site currently has stored by pressing F12 and going to the “Storage” tab; in Chrome, press F12 and then go to “Application”. (You can also delete the data there, or block the site from ever storing anything again.)
That one also only saves its data to your local computer by default. I’m working on adding a way it can send telemetry data to IFComp or elsewhere, but once that’s implemented, there will always be a checkbox to turn it off (for a particular game or for every game). (It saves local copies of transcripts for the same reason as Lectrote—so that if you close and reopen the window, you can see what you were doing before. That’s how the newer generations expect websites to behave, so we try to make the web interpreter line up with their expectations.)
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I note that this year, IFComp games that can record transcripts ask the player up-front whether they’re OK with that. Simple and effective. Thanks!
(GitHub issue where this was added)
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I’m curious to hear from any authors who’ve entered the comp previously whether this feels like it’s made a difference to the number of transcripts you’ve received?
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