I'd like to see the longer vertical message with one message per line with the endless scroll. I have seen a few mainstream roguelike games (dungeons of dredmor, and hell, another dungeon) use this method and it seems to work nicely. I still prefer that the crtl +m feature stays so you can check back to see what happened, or have the ability to scroll up or down on the "message area"

Yes of course :m must stay in which case just removing the (more) prompt should be enough. If the message is very long like when you're being hit by 8 monsters surrounding you, each of which has multiple attacks , then you have to use :m anyway to get the whole picture, no point in having the more prompt there. I guess there's a couple more situations similar to this.
I'd say that more prompt should be a variable that defaults to true so it can be easily disabled permanently.

The annoying part about "more" is being bombarded with "useless" messages. But the thing is, they aren't all that useless. For example, if I'm surrounded by summons, I don't want to have to press "more" just to see that they failed to hurt me 20 times a round. But I want to see if they punch through and damage my armour for example. My personal solution was to take advantage of the adom.msg and replace some messages with very shortened versions. So now I get something like "miss miss miss fth deflect block miss" ;). Also "You hear a distant wind." becomes "vortex" etc. etc. Perhaps something like this could be a toggleable option for experience players who saw these messages thousands of times. From experience, I'd say it reduces the need for "more" by 80-90%. And I only shortened the most common ones.

Following the previous one, shortening creature names could also help. Primary culprit is "writhing mass of primal chaos". Having it shortened to WMoPC would make D:50 so much more pleasant. Also, greater chaos servant -> GCS, etc.

Another idea would be prioritization and/or grouping. Grouping, so, instead of "<foo> misses you" 17 times, make something like "you've been missed 17 times" or "a monster misses you" (x17). Prioritization, so if player gets hit once, hit critically once, and missed 17 times, display both hits, and misses only if there's place left. And things like sounds of creatures ripping through webs would be lowest priority, so messages about them wouldn't be visible during combat, but visible when nothing else is happening.

A vertical scrolling message area would be fine too I guess, but still, scrolling through all the misses to check if something important happened would be annoying, and I'd guess most players wouldn't, therefore potentially losing out on some info. I'd say it could work, but coupled with some other option.

Battle the reason for (more):

No reason to spam us with webs until its on a adjacent tile:
%s spins a large web!
%s seems to get stuck in some webs!
%s is struggling against a large web holding %s!

No reason to monsters to sqeeze with each other like mad (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2908)
%s squeezes past %s.
%s displaces %s.

This alone would drastically reduce spam. Setting normal combat messages to low priority which could be omitted partially without a (more) prompt, except crits - would almost eliminate it.

Also this "low priority messages" list could be expanded later if the problem still persists. However, there _should_ be (more) prompt if there is an important message generated in this turn - be it monster critically striking you, or getting enraged, or successful confusion landed on you, or anything else really. Everything is important until set otherwise.

I think message grouping like Qui suggests would cut down on message spam hugely. There's situations where a message might be important (eg. "You hear a distant 'Harumph'"), but if there's a threat room of Dorn beasts on the level, the game becomes almost unplayable. Having it just say "You hear a distant 'Harumph'" (x26) would be much better.

I would distinguish between high-priority more and low-priority more.

High-priority more would be things like getting a new corruption, "you have just completed your current quest", messengers delivering the Pyramid scroll and the RCT, possibly dialogue text by important characters like Khelavaster... and not much more off the top of my head really. Things that the player shouldn't miss. For those, I would leave the prompt as it is.

Low-priority more would be everything else and I think the prompt could just be removed. Although definitely, increasing the height of the message buffer (at least in NotEye mode where the terminal size is not an issue) wouldn't hurt either.

Message grouping is definitely the best way to do this - for example, getting rid of all the slurping sounds in the big room (PLEASE) by grouping them together. The other thing is to cut down on messages in your line of sight but not of immediate threat, like what asdf posted - I really don't care if a monster is struggling against a web in LOS but not within a couple tiles. Etc.

I vote for both message grouping and an endless scrolling area.
On Message grouping:
I have seen this to good effect where multiple identical lines become: "Foo did bar. x 15" It seems to get most of the same information across in only one line.
On endless scrolling:
-I would like to see the number of lines displayed relatively small, no more than 5 perhaps.
-The ability to go back in the message queue in the same screen would help newer players who are not likely to know about the ":m" command. In NoTEye, rolling the mouse wheel over the message
seems intuitive to me. If I were just playing for the first time, I would try that first. Next I would look for buttons. Last I would look for some kind of key commands.
-I think having a variable scrolling rate would help. As more things happen in one round the scrolling rate increases slightly (up to a comfortably brisk max rate). This gives the player an idea of how much happened last round indirectly and would prevent boredom, I think.

And please add the variable to keep the current system (have it disabled by default if you so want). Many of us have already worked quite a while with adom.msg to get the current system nice for our own gameplay. :)

It is a lot easier to make several common messages low-priority and eliminate 95% of the (more), then find dozens of various important messages, eliminate 100% of the (more), but risk missing something due to forgotten important message.

The two messages that significantly reduce message spam are "-foo- misses you" and "-foo- fails to hurt you". Unfortunately, adding them to suppression fails to remove them all (no idea why) and sometimes does something with (more) prompts _and_ sometimes removes a bunch of other useful messages which followed directly.

i like the idea of having an extra line for messages but as asdf et al have said part of the problem is that there can be far too many messages, most of which aren't wanted. i curse my PCs high perception when i get stuck in a Big Room spider factory! Personally i would want to see any message that involve my character or an adjacent monster. I honestly don't care that a monster i'm nowhere near is stuck in a damn web or that 2 kobolds at the back of a tension room are pushing each other around trying to get to the front. I suppose others would want less, like just crits, special messages like th papyrus scroll, stat changes etc. I think, basically, has anything changed from the last turn? no? then i don't really want to know about it. my character is one turn away from a YASD? thanks for telling me! :)

but really the spiderspam has go to before my sanity for torn through like an orc stuck in a web...

the easiest way to deal with this would be to enable fast_more by default. after that, i think the rest of it (the "useless messages" issue) could be dealt with through adom.msg.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone find the "-foo- swaps places with -foo-" messages useful? I don't, and wouldn't miss them if they were gone completely.

They are the only indication if you already pickpocketed this monster or this is a new monster just swapped with old one. Extrelemly annoying.

This RFE is mainly for noob-friendliness and there's no way noobs are going to edit a text config file.

That's why it would presumably be a default.

There's really no reason anything should be spamming a dozen messages a turn. That should be fixed along with the more prompt. I like the third bullet point for a solution.

Agreed.

Exactly that. I don't see why it is not enabled by default, because not having it makes the game barely playable.