(Replying to PARENT post)
I don't know a way to export logs, but I am in some Discord channels which have a bot joined to connect them to an IRC channel in a 2-way echo. The IRC side of that could be logging everything from that channel with standard IRC logs.
> "The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images and voice chat."
Inline code blocks with syntax highlighting using ```python markdown syntax; replying to a message brings a clickable line of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous line in the chat.
👤jodrellblank🕑3y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
I remember their official twitter responding to someone that exporting logs wasn't something they could/wanted to do for whatever reason so I wrote a content dumper super quickly https://github.com/IceFlinger/discord-server-dump
But its a big shame that they don't wanna include this as a built in feature since yeah exported logs are very useful.
👤iceflinger🕑3y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord, nor to log to an external text file.
That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through text to try to find what I'm interested in.
Discord's scrollback is slow and painful.
By contrast, IRC logs are just plain text files, so I can use powerful regexes or a plethora of text search/manipulation tools to work with them, and scrolling back through text logs is super fast... especially in a decent editor like vim or emacs.
I also own my own logs, and don't need to be connected to any server to read them. Reading/searching through logs can be done completely offline.
If Discord decides to ban you or some channel/server you're interested in goes down (permanently or even temporarily), you're completely screwed. You'll never get the information you're interested in out of it.
The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images (which are often just an annoyance, but can sometimes be useful) and voice chat.
Other than that it's bloated, opaque, and a worse experience for me than IRC.