LWN Comment Features [LWN.net]

From:		Jason Smith <jhs-AT-proven-corporation.com>
To:		letters-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		LWN Comment Features
Date:		Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:55:19 +0700
Message-ID:		<46EE7937.8010009@proven-corporation.com>

I wrote a couple of Greasemonkey scripts to do interesting things with 
the LWN comments.  I don't know if "improvement" is the right word, so 
I'll say that I implemented features that people seem to talk about a 
lot in the threads.

The first script makes subscriber comments more prominent than those 
from guests.  Guest comments are a dull color and only the subject and 
author are visible by default (collapsed view).

The next script collapses guest comments and also previously-seen 
comments.  When you load an article, Firefox remembers every comment ID. 
  When you come back tomorrow, you will see only the comments posted 
since then.

In all cases, you can click a View/Hide button to toggle visibility on 
individual comments.

See http://www.proven-corporation.com/~jhs/lwn/ for screenshots and 
downloads.

-- 
Jason Smith
Proven Corporation
Bangkok, Thailand
http://www.proven-corporation.com

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LWN Comment Features

Posted Sep 20, 2007 7:31 UTC (Thu) by jbw (subscriber, #5689) [Link]

Sounds great! I hope more things like this are done.

I'm personally not interested in distinguishing between subscribers
and guests. So for me it would be nice to be able to completely turn
that portion of the scripts off.

Something I think would be really lovely would be a way to see a
collapsed title-and-author-only tree view of the comment threads for
each article directly in the weekly edition. That is, it would be
nice to see this without needing to visit a separate web page for the
comments of an article.

Is it possible that LWN could somehow turn these Greasemonkey scripts
into ordinary web page scripts that come with the web page whenever it
is viewed?

Joe