Sunday, April 1, 2007

CommentCollapser

What it's For: Large lists of comments on WordPress-based blogs.

What it Does: After a blog page finishes loading, this GreaseMonkey script collapses all comments, showing only each commenter's name.
You can then easily scan the names, looking for your favorite commenters.
  • Jump to the next comment by the same author with "(next by same)".
  • If you previously clicked on "(next by same)" or a comment's date stamp, you can jump back up to that comment with your browser's "Back" button.
  • Expand or collapse a single comment using "[+]" or "[-]".
  • Expand all comments by shutting off GreaseMonkey (single click the monkey head on the lower right) and then refreshing the page. (This completely disables CommentCollapser)
Install Link: CommentCollapser (v1.0 - released 2007-05-21)

Possible Future Improvements:
1. Collapse Threshold: Don't auto-collapse unless there are over X number of comments.
(Currently, if a "WordPress..." meta tag is detected, it will try to collapse all comments automatically, no matter how few or many.)

2. Improve performance: It takes a second or two to expand comments on large pages.
(Or add a "progress notification" on top left so users don't think it's broken.)

3. Brief Excerpts: Add the option to show one-line excerpt of each post (and/or comment word count).

4. Visual Feedback: Add an initial "blink" to the entry jumped to by "(next by same)"
(Will this degrade performance further?)

Other Ideas? Bugs? Add them below...

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