Metafilter Greasemonkey script diediedead major update

A new, enhanced, version of the diediedead Greasemonkey script to filter out users on Metafilter is available for download at http://www.devoresoftware.com/gm/dddead/diediedead.user.js. The script was updated to work with the current version of Metafilter, as well as Greasemonkey and Firefox. It works for both registered and unregistered users, with any Firefox platform that supports Greasemonkey scripts, e.g. Windows, OS X, and Linux.

There are two methods to use the script, and both are active only while the browser location is a Metafilter site. First, you can use the browser menu pulldown Tools/Greasemonkey/User Script Commands.../Configure filters, as shown:

to bring up the configuration dialog box, as show in this example from a MetaTalk topic:

You may also use the context menu (right-click), to bring up a menu that will look similar to this:

Choose diediedead! and you will see a submenu:

 

If you select the last entry, Configure filters, the configuration dialog box will be displayed.

The configuration is, hopefully, reasonably self-explanatory. Place users whose posts you want filtered in the filter users text box, the text of posts you want filtered in the second text box, and posts containing sites you want filtered in the third box. Note that the user must be an exact match. Text filters are are not case sensitive and considered to be a whole word or set of words, e.g. cow will not match cows, but BIG COWS will match big cows. Sites match any part of a link.

The next grouping determines how filters work. If you want to temporarily turn off filters, choose the Show all content radio button. If filters should apply to both posts and comments to posts, choose Filter posts & comments. If you want your filters to apply only to posts, and not in comments to posts, choose posts only. For the reverse, choose comments only.

To streamline this process, the context menu can be used to quickly create filters and to choose filter actions. If you right click on a user in a post or comment, diediedead's context menu will have an entry Filter for user <username>. If you highlight text, and activate diediedead's context menu, the entry will show Filter for text <selected text>. Right clicking on a link will show Filter for site <base URL of site>. All filters will be added to the main configuration dialog box.

Context menus clicks are typically faster and more accurate than manual entry via the configure dialog. However, filters can only be edited or deleted via the configuration dialog box.

Because the entry fields on the configuration dialog box are HTML textareas, you can use the standard editing command Ctrl-Z to undo any changes to any of the three fields before saving. Ctrl-Shift-Z will redo any undo made before saving, as well.

User feedback on diediedead's context menu indicates it does not work properly with TamperMonkey and the Chrome browser, crippling its usability on that platform. This issue will be addressed by a native Chrome extension, available in the next 2-4 weeks.

Howls of Outrage Greasemonkey script updated

By user request, the Howls Of Outrage Greasemonkey script for Metafilter, which shows a popup window of all users who have favorited a post or comment on mouse hover, is updated to version 4.2. The download link is sited on my original devoresoftware.com domain, because the userscripts.org Greasemonkey scripts repository has been down or very unreliable for many months.

Previous version of the script, using the latest versions of Greasemonkey and the Firefox browser, were unable to get past the "loading…" part of the popup box. This was due to permission problems with the GM_xmlhttpRequest function, at least while running Firefox under Windows 7. Curiously, a Mac using the latest Firefox with script version 4.1 still worked OK. Regardless, the Howls Of Outrage script should work for all supported Firefox platforms now.

If you use the Chrome browser and read the Metafilter site, I recommend installing the Howls Of Outrage extension from the Chrome Web Store.

Wikipedia sorting Greasemonkey script updated

The Greasemonkey script wiksort,  aka "Wikipedia Sorting", was updated and uploaded to the userscripts site. Version 2.0 adds support for https links and automatically set focus to the article word list, so that you don't have to click in the box to highlight any misspelled words. It has been tested with the English Wikipedia Cologne Blue skin, as well as the default Vector skin.

For those unfamiliar with wiksort, following is a description of what it does and how it is used.

wiksort is a script that sorts unique words in an English Wikipedia article to a separate browser page. All words over six characters are alphabetically listed in a text box of the new page as a single entry, followed by the usage count.

wiksort works quite well with the Firefox browser because Firefox's built-in spell checker can help one quickly locate misspelled words and inconsistent spelling within the word list. I find the alphabetically sorted word list very useful in rooting out typographical errors and inconsistent spelling, although one should always double-check that a possible misspelling is really incorrect in the article's context.

Once installed, the script will add a link titled "Sort words" to either the ''toolbox'' section (default Vector skin) or the ''Edit'' section (Cologne Blue skin). Click on the "Sort words" link to generate a page with the sorted word list. After a short delay while the page is processed, the page will either display in a new tab or a separate browser window, depending on the user-selected browser options.

You must enable popups for the Wikipedia site, because the newly generated page is considered a popup. Since Wikipedia does not use advertising popups, this permission should not be too onerous.

Please post here if you have any questions about using wiksort.