Absolutely; the in-game chat offered on this site for correspondence games seems rather primitive compared to the format featured in the forums, as well as the similar chat layouts on other sites. I think the primary reason is likely the developers' underestimation of the frequency of its use. For me, it's been much more convenient than the email-style personal messaging system when playing against friends, as it accommodates both short-term and long-term conversation threads while keeping a private atmosphere. I'm sure I'm not the only one who uses it for these purposes, as casual correspondence games between friends are quite common.
I agree, the timestamps would be greatly beneficial to the conversations with longer or more sporadic timeframes. It seems like this would be the easiest feature to implement, and I can't think of any possible downsides.
In addition, although a littleunusual for the format, I believe a "delete" option would greatly improve the quality of the conversations as well. The linear nature of the text box often results in stringy or disconnected prose, as well as unintentional spelling or grammar mistakes, that might not be apparent until after the paragraph is submitted to the chat. If we are permitted to delete a post, then we could copy the text beforehand, paste it into the text box, edit it, and then resubmit it, thereby creating a way to circumvent a blatant "edit" function if it is indeed too difficult to add to the current layout. A record of the original posts can be stored and archived elsewhere in case a dispute arises over an alleged violation of the site's user agreement, for example.
Either of these could easily be added to the in-game chat application without needing to restructure its current format, right?
The ability to use the chat box for online Chess games is both a convenient and flexible way of communicating with both friends and other members of the community about pretty much anything that may come to mind. Despite all this the chat function in online chess looks quite bareboned and provisional in its current state and therefore is one detail which more work could be put into in my opinion. One extremely simple, yet helpful, addition which I can imagine could be added to even the very simplistic looking chat box of today, without much work, is the addition of a timestamp, at the user's will, and this is what I am currently most interested in seeing added. This could facilitate both long term communication, to maintain a time perspective of the conversation, and also help users identify when messages where specific times could be of relevace were sent. The latter is in particular true for longer time control games where uncertainty of time can exceed a week's time, which obviously could lead to confusion.
Timestamps are quite common in chat applications anyway, so I am not mistaken in believing this would be an easy fix, am I?
Thank you.