Personally I also liked the old option of one big file (email addey as file name) for each contact with the entire history of chats in it. I don't see why everything needs to be micro sorted, it's logged in chronological order anyway, and doing it this way means I can use any basic text editor to search, instead of the built in functions, or some more complicated multi-file / multi-directory search. I'm sure any computer today can handle the measly few megabytes that my longest running logs have grown to.
This topic is also discussed here:
http://shoutbox.menthix.net/showthread.php?tid=61080&page=1
From reading the above thread and by doing some experimenting, my solution is:
Plus! -> preferences -> conversations -> chat logging ->
select "save by date"
select "save as plain text files"
add the string:
"LogsDateDirFormat"
to the the reg key:
"HKCU\Software\Patchou\Messenger Plus! Live\you@email.com\Preferences"
with the value of two single quotes: ''
edit: actually use the value: '.'
(<single quote><period><single quote>)
ie. single dot means "current dir", and this will allow the chat logs to be opened through Plus! (the other way produces an error due to the double slash in the called filename)
This will do what you want, but new chats may not merge with the old files of the same name. I think this has todo with the new logs being in unicode?? (this also doubles the size of the logs, big woop
) I was previously using Plus2 so you may not have this problem.
To solve, I moved all my old logs out of my logging directory and let Plus! create all its new logs, then manually merged all the old logs back in (simple copy-paste). If you have a decent text editor there's probably a better way todo this
Hope this helps.