LWN Comment Features Update [LWN.net]

LWN Comment Features Update

Posted Jul 21, 2008 0:03 UTC (Mon) by mrons (subscriber, #1751)
Parent article: LWN Comment Features Update

Thanks for this script. It's working very well for me.

I don't know if it's doable but an extra feature I'd like to see is a filter for the front
page that changes the "comments (10 posted)" to something like "comments (10 posted, 5
unread)"

If the number of unread comments is hard to track, is it possible to just change the colour,
say, of "comment" if there are unread comments?

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LWN Comment Features Update

Posted Jul 21, 2008 4:15 UTC (Mon) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link]

The script only works within the /Articles subdirectory of the site. I suspect, however that I could activate it for the entire LWN site and have it fix the "comments: XX" text in the article summaries as well as the color-coding within the articles themselves. That is probably not too difficult, although I'm a bit of a Greasemonkey noob.

More importantly, since each comment has an ID (which it extracts from the "[Link]" anchor), the script only keeps a record of seen IDs. Without visiting the page and building a list of post IDs, the script has no idea what is seen and unseen yet. A solution is to maintain an additional mapping from article IDs to the number of seen articles, and just compare the number we store locally vs. the total number of comments LWN counts. Yes, I think that could work.

This is an interesting idea. I will add it to the TODO list. At the moment, the only way to keep track of the progress is to track the Git RSS feed directly.