01 August 2018

Tampermonkey scripts update

Overview

The Tampermonkey scripts "Hackernews collapsible comments" and "Stackoverflow hot block" have received some much needed updates with version 1.32 and 0.6 respectively. The former has finally received various fixes for bugs caused by changes in the Hackernews website. Additionally, both scripts have been made compatible with Firefox's Greasemonkey. Firefox-specific bugs were fixed and the scripts are tested and running on Firefox now. If you find a bug, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Hackernews collapsible comments

A while ago, Hackernews has introduced their own collapsible comments. While it does work, it has various flaws: First and foremost, comments are not retracted by default. This may seem like a small thing but that's actually the entire point of collapsible comments. You first want to get an overview of the comments and then dive into a comment tree if something interesting pops up. You generally don't read responses to comments you didn't at least skim to get some context. The second problem is that you cannot expand or retract a single level of comments. Again, it seems like a small issue, but I don't want to expand the entire tree below a comment, I just want to see the direct responses so I can go down the branches that interest me. The next issue is that the button to expand or retract comment trees is really small. You don't want buttons that are only a few pixels in size. And lastly, you cannot expand or retract all comments at once.

All these problems are rectified by the collapsible comments Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey script injection. The following things are new in version 1.31:

• Increased performance, even with thousands of comments, the script execution time is now barely noticeable
• Hide all visible elements of Hackernews' own collapsible comments
• Expand downvoted and flagged comment trees with Hackernews' mechanism, then retract them with own mechanism
• Added button to expand or retract all comments in the orange Hackernews bar

Version 1.32 fixes the following problem which was found after a friend tested the script:

• Fixed comment expanding on Firefox, which did not work because Firefox does not know window.event
• Made compatible with Greasemonkey and tested on Firefox

Stackoverflow hot block

Version 0.6 change list:

• Fixed broken @match rules
• Made compatible with Greasemonkey and tested on Firefox
• Added https://*.superuser.com/* to the match list