Virtual world-obsessed site TerraNova has an opinion piece about something that haunts most of us who were raised in a computer tower: persistant records of our teenage exploits online. A great many of us have ridiculous Geocities pages, embarassing Usenet posts, idiotic forum flames and other errata that comes up when our names or aliases are fed into a search engine.

That low humming is the sound of one thousand Kotaku readers simultaneously typing "Brian Ashcraft" into Booble.

As to persisting public chat, I'm actually rather dumbfounded that Google is currently aware of zero occurrences of "WoWChatLog.txt" on the net. And one could even make an argument that post-WoW games may not provide the convenient chat logging or game API that Blizzard has provided, but if the player is able to access the information on his game screen, eventually there will be enough reason to scrape and persist the data.

There are already tons of WoW mods that turn on logging, and the harder-core guilds use them to parse for stats about the usefulness of each guildmember during instances. It's a short step from that, to publically humiliating that bitch Night Elf girlfriend of yours for cheating on you with that well-hung Gnome.

Confessions of a Virtual Transient [TerraNova]

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