Proven Corporation

This is a Greasemonkey script to improve the LWN comment system. First, install Greasemonkey, and then install the script below.

Advanced Comment Tracking

Bringing LWN’s comment system into the ‘90s, this script makes comment threads a bit more pleasant. The idea here is to make some comments less important than others in terms of screen real estate. Comments you have seen already or comments from guests can be minimized so that you scan right over them.

• Collapse comments to save screen space (only subject and author visible).
• Optionally hide comments you have seen already.
• Optionally hide comments from guest accounts.
• Color coding for quick scanning of the thread

If you track LWN threads often and you want to see only the new stuff, then this is the script for you. Personally, I rather like the simplicity of LWN, but it can get a bit hard to follow the busy threads.

Download

Click to install into Greasemonkey.

Important, please contact me if you notice a problem with this plugin, perhaps due to a change in the LWN site, or if you have a feature request. Thanks.

Changelog

• September 17, 2007: Initial release.
• July 17, 2008: Update to new LWN presentation and changed to Git for the source code.

You can also follow commits to the commit log via the Git RSS feed. It is very low volume but it should serve as a decent way to be notified of new features.

Screenshots

• A typical comment page: A few comments are collapsed manually, and guest posts are highlighted.
• Hidden guest comments: Guest posts are less prominent upon page load.
• Hidden old comments: Coming back to a thread later, you see only the comment which is new.
• Full highlighting: For the brave, the color scheme is emphasized to help distinguish what kind of comments are in the thread at a glance.

Notes

I’ve tested on Firefox 2 and 3, on Fedora Core 6, Fedora 8, and Windows.

If you remove this script, remember to check “Uninstall associated preferences” so it will clear out the list of read comments.

I have some other features I’d like to do. So feel free to send feature requests or patches.

• Improve the colors, perhaps using the colors from CSS (which come from LWN preferences)
• Always show your comments
• Hilight comments mentioning your LWN username
• Always show comments from your friends (AKA “whitelist”)
• Keep a list of well-known developers and their user names, so their comments will be hilighted.
• Keep a general username-to-website mapping which people can submit. When an article loads, the mapping loads via AJAX and links all registered usernames to their web sites.

Source

You can check out the Git repository like so:

$ git clone git://proven-corporation.com/lwn/