Elephant
Elephant
Download
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/elephant
Solution to chat loss annoyance
Elephant logs the chat for you in the background even when you get disconnected. It saves the WHISPER & BATTLE.NET, RAID, INSTANCE & BATTLEGROUND, PARTY, GUILD, SAY, YELL and OFFICER chats separately, but also all general chats (General, Trade, LocalDefense, …), custom chats you are currently on, achievements, loots, pet battles and finally system messages (auctions, rolls, server going down, …). You can easily go through all these logs, thanks to a straightforward interface displaying all the access buttons on the right side of the main window. You can access the options of the addon by typing /elephant and also bind a key to pop up the addon.
Elephant gives you the ability to copy up to 100,000 (yes, 100k) characters of logs to another application. A BBCode feature is even included, letting you copy/paste a chat with colors and links to an item database in a very quick and simple way to your favorite forum.
This is THE addon that you should install if you want to never forget what somebody told you in game. Be a pro of managing hell tells, go peacefully AFK for a few minutes, or be an awesome role player. Elephant is also perfectly designed for Guild Leaders, Officers and Raid Leaders particularly because it restores the chats after you've been disconnected.
Main features
- Logs the chats in the background, with a limit of 10,000 lines for each chat (Blizzard's default is 161 lines for everything).
- Saves the logs when you log out or get disconnected.
- Display the chats with timestamps, or using your Prat settings if you have it installed.
- Copy the chat and paste it in other applications (BBCode supported!), up to 100,000 characters.
- Save the chat and combat log in two different files on your computer (using the default Blizzard logging system).
Other features
- Use filters to avoid logging some of the custom channels you join.
- Enable/disable logging for each chat separately.
- Item links in logs are displayed in their proper color and are clickable.
- Player names in the main window are clickable.
- Customize the font and look of the main window.
- …and much more!
Bug reports
Report an issue (bug & suggestions): https://www.wowace.com/projects/elephant/issues
Comments
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AllInOneMighty Owner
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Posted Mar 23, 2026Is it possible to revert back to when logs were stored in each character's individual folder in WTF? I do not like it being saved all in one file because if the file somehow gets wiped (as it did with me), I can still make copies of the other character's logs since I haven't logged into them, and prevent them from being wiped when logging into my other characters.
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Posted Mar 23, 2026In reply to Darkblizzard960: Or if unable to do that, could you add a daily backup feature that creates one copy of the original file each day/week/month and replaces the previous day’s backup?
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Posted Mar 23, 2026In reply to Darkblizzard960:
Files already have a backup made by the game automatically. That said, it's a single instance, so if you notice the logs are missing, you need to save the backup immediately otherwise it gets overwritten on your next login.
Logs cannot be saved to separate folders because of the dependency on AceDb (https://www.wowace.com/projects/ace3/pages/api/ace-db-3-0). I asked the owner why per-character settings were not saved in their respective folders, and Kaelten justifiably told me that this would make it impossible to copy profiles to different characters. AceDB is a framework that is used by many addons and some support profile copying from one character to another. Elephant doesn't support profiles directly, but because it depends on AceDB, it inherits from this "limitation".
That said, your SavedVariables folder should never be touched directly by Elephant, so your data being deleted comes from the mishandling of your files by something else than WoW or an addon entirely.
There was a single instance of Elephant losing the character logs when I added the dependency on AceDB, but that was a very long time ago (many years), and it highlighted how changing dependencies can have undesired side effects (I tested thoroughly at the time, but the tests still failed to see that case).
The tl;dr is that splitting the logs in different folders for each character is not gonna happen. But the wipe of your logs should also not happen if you're not touching the SavedVariables folder yourself or use a software that mishandles them.
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Posted Mar 24, 2026In reply to AllInOneMighty: I see. I'm not too familiar with the limitations of WoW, but perhaps you can make a little function that displays a red text warning in the chatbox if it detects a discrepancy between what is seen presently and what is in the file so then a player knows not to log out until backing up their 'about to be lost' file? I ask this because I don't think many people consistently check elephant, at least; not until its too late.
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Posted Mar 19, 2026certain messages wont show up in the log (i think /yell and /w). itll say in the chat box in red "Elephant: A restricted message was sent to you during combat. Those cannot be logged due to Blizzard restrictions." so youll hear the mob/boss talking but not be able to see any text from them. this also happens with voidwalker pets that whisper to you in the voidstorm.
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Posted Mar 21, 2026In reply to user_43889963: If you're in combat, those messages cannot be logged by Elephant, as they will not persist after a relog. The warning posted by Elephant explains that: they cannot be logged due to Blizzard restrictions.
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Posted Mar 14, 2026For some reason, all chat logs in guild officer chats become "Unknown". I double-checked the ochat window (from guild chat interface) and the messages are there. However, when I check Elephant the messages all become Unknown. Is this a known issue? Thx!
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Posted Mar 15, 2026In reply to eiy711: Interesting; it shouldn't, but I haven't tried the Officer chat in a while. When does this happen? Can you take a screenshot?
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Posted Mar 16, 2026In reply to AllInOneMighty: Here you go. I redacted the names, hopefully that won't impact your debugging. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oeffqkMrsysSqSU9LBtk_5xhSQhumNaS/view?usp=drive_link.
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Posted Mar 18, 2026In reply to eiy711: Thank you! Anonymizing is fine. That said the document is not public. Please make it so!
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Posted Mar 19, 2026In reply to AllInOneMighty: Apologies. The folder permission was changed by mistake. I've fixed it. Please try again.
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Posted Mar 23, 2026In reply to eiy711: Thank you! Is it still happening after the last update?
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Posted Mar 24, 2026In reply to AllInOneMighty: Just downloaded the latest update and did a quick test w. a bunch of test officer messages. 2 of the earlier ones turned into Unknown but latter ones did not. I will test more tomorrow and let you know. thx!
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Posted Jan 26, 2026Would it be possible to update on wowinterface as well please? Or Wago, or Github (so that WowUp can update it). Thank you xx
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Posted Jan 26, 2026In reply to Poisonenvy: It is updated on GitHub, but it does not include libraries directly: https://github.com/AllInOneMighty/Elephant
After trying it multiple times, I must say that I *hate* the WoWInterface upload page. I can't figure out how they handle multiple versions of the API with different WoW releases (retail, classic, classic_era and anniversary). It's always confusing as hell.
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Posted Jan 30, 2026In reply to AllInOneMighty: Yeah wowinterface seems rather old fashioned and I tend to use it as a last resort if I can't find addons on Wago or via Github, as I use the wowup addon manager (without CF). There are guides on how to set up uploads to Github (so that we can download from there), Wago and even Wowuphub on their discord here: https://discord.gg/DGsyTNtHt5 #addon-authors-faqs - I'm not an addon author myself but I'm sure I saw someone say they had something that automated uploading addon updates to both CF and Wago at the same time, but I'd have to do a fuller search to turn up that snippet of info :P
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Posted Jan 30, 2026In reply to Poisonenvy: I've updated the main version on Wowinterface. They do not list version 2.5.5, 5.5.3 or 1.15.8 so for those you'll have to download them from here.
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Posted Jan 24, 2026Hi!
So a recent change Blizz made to the API was to restrict addons that interact with the chat in ways other than reskinning, during instanced encounters as well as (probably) world bosses.
When trying to chat during a boss encounter, you receive this error upon opening the edit box:
16x Elephant/Event.lua:9: attempt to compare local 'guid' (a secret value)
[Elephant/Event.lua]:9: in function <Elephant/Event.lua:8>
[Elephant/Event.lua]:177: in function <Elephant/Event.lua:53>
[BlizzMove/Libs/CallbackHandler-1.0-8/CallbackHandler-1.0.lua]:119: in function <...ove/Libs/CallbackHandler-1.0/CallbackHandler-1.0.lua:119>
[C]: ?
[BlizzMove/Libs/CallbackHandler-1.0-8/CallbackHandler-1.0.lua]:19: in function <...ove/Libs/CallbackHandler-1.0/CallbackHandler-1.0.lua:15>
[BlizzMove/Libs/CallbackHandler-1.0-8/CallbackHandler-1.0.lua]:54: in function 'Fire'
[BlizzMove/Libs/AceEvent-3.0-4/AceEvent-3.0.lua]:120: in function <BlizzMove/Libs/AceEvent-3.0/AceEvent-3.0.lua:119>
Locals:
guid = <no value>
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = nil
(*temporary) = "attempt to compare local 'guid' (a secret value)"
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This is of course only exposed via BugSack and doesn't show up for normal users, but it's still an error and potentially worth handling gracefully; it doesn't actually stop you chatting.
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Posted Jan 26, 2026In reply to Symphicat: Thank you for the report!
When you say edit box... what do you mean? No event should be triggered when one opens the normal chat edit box.
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Posted Jan 29, 2026In reply to AllInOneMighty: Hi, sorry it's been slow, I don't get notifications for these. I haven't looked at the code, but presumably Elephant records chat when it's received (in response to an event) and I'd assume in order to actually display the chat history, you have to either hook into it or set a script to populate it before it before the chatbox (the display area) loads?
Either way, chats are completely locked down during encounters now as of 12.0.0; they're secret values. When IsEncounterInProgress() == true, add-ons cannot interact with the chats in any way beyond reskinning. I'm having to solve for this particular problem with my own addon I'm working on and it's a pain in the rear.