Update on automatic LOCALS chat archiving progress:
The script I wrote works and is pulling batches of messages and extracting the username, text, and the url of any attachments then putting them into a spreadsheet. Hope to have it up and running this weekend. Going to slice the code up into functions to make the looping for continuous archiving easy, then I plan to post the searchable .xlsx files on the site so that anyone interested can do data mining on them. I have it scraping into individual files per chat and will post complete archives from each individual chat after it ends. Files will contain link text for attachment, so file sizes should be small. If you want to download the actual images in EXCEL there are macros that do that.
I will be optimising, making updates, and accepting suggestions for what features to add next from the community here, but a lot of what I have in mind could be done on the backend with EXCEL (translation: DIY. The EXCEL 'Search' function is a good start, then learn 'vlookup'), and I do not want to make the script slower because his LOCALS chat moves quickly. I might make separate modules to take the data and post-process it offline if there is an important enough feature that is resource heavy.
My next project will likely be an archive extractor for the old streams with the same code base, but radically simplified and only running one extraction loop. This will allow data mining on the old chats and should only take minutes for each.
FYI, this script will work for ANY LOCALS live chat based on their core web architecture.