I had a few interesting chats years ago, and I remember some dates. I tried to trace them, but the full transcript can be scrolled back only one day at a time.
Is there a reasonable way to read the chat transcript of, say, Jan 31 2018?
There is no functionality for this exposed in the UI, but it's pretty easy to do by writing the URL manually. The current URL pattern for chat transcripts is
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/<room-number>/<year>/<month>/<day>
, so for example the URL for the h-bar transcript from Jan 31 2018 would be https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/71/2018/1/31.