Q&A on Non-Moderation Matters (Mechanics, How-To, etc.)

It’s gotten to the point where I rarely look at the FPPs at all. I just review them in my RSS feed, note the headlines that interest me, and then go right to the comments and read the FPP (using the “Show Full Post” button) before proceeding to the comments. It’s a bit of a pain, but at least I don’t get the cavalcade of garbage ads and clickbait cruft.

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Hmm - is there a setting on the BBS that orders the threads in the same order as the FPP? Can’t see one…but if there is, I think I might adopt your workflow and never go back to the front page.

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There isn’t. That’s why I use RSS as a first sort, and then go to the “There are X unread and Y new topics remaining, or browse other topics in boing” at the bottom of any comments page. The new topics link generally shows the most recently added,

It’s a bit of a pain, but it works better than having to deal with the broken and ad-infested mess that FPPs have become. The other downside is that you don’t get the video links in the “Show Full Post”, but very often someone provides the link in a comment.

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As I understand the root cause is that when someone posts it creates a post in discourse and then updates the bb post with the link. Sometimes there is a timeout and the link is never updated. My workaround uses the post url and title to decide where the comments should be and takes you there.

I’m suggesting to BB that the default comment link uses the approach I do to guess where the comments will be in discourse or just links to the main forum page so if there is a timeout, it doesn’t matter.

If you don’t like having the bookmark toolbar, I can build something that uses Tampermonkey to automatically fix the comments link if it’s broken. Let me know if you’d prefer that.

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I don’t even understand what you are suggesting! :wink:

But I suspect it may involve me adding something customised, to my browser?

TBH I can live with a bookmark bar for now and maybe BB will finally try to fix this.

Maybe you should offer Orenwolf and CodingHorror your services with Tampermonkey. :man_shrugging: :wink:

Thanks for being a helpful mutant though. If enough other people chime in, the Tampermonkey thing may be worth your effort.

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It was easy enough so I just built the Tampermonkey script. Tampermonkey lets you run small scripts to modify web pages when they load. In this case, I check if the comments link doesn’t point to the forum and attempt to fix it. Both the bookmarklet and new approach are here. Tampermonkey is only for desktop browsers and Firefox for Android, but I hope it makes this problem just go away for those who can use it. Let me know if you have any issues.

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For what it is worth, as a User, if I click on the comments button and (for any reason) it can’t give me that page’s comments it would at least default to the BBS.

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That has never happened to me before. And then, this morning, it did! (ETA - twice now!)

I suspect someone is tweaking/testing?

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This is now the way it works, at least until we find a more permanent fix.

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Thanks, Ken. I think that is an improvement, pro tem.

But my mental workflow now needs to remember a key search word from the article’s headline before I click on Comments. :wink:

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Well I did install the browser extension and the script and it seems to work, so far. Two posts that I previously had to search for on the BBS yesterday, went straight to the Comments this time.

Again, thx muchly for your skill and effort.

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[OBJ] would like to respond to an old notification.

Perhaps a Leader could unlock this topic?

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/tracking-the-mysterious-obj/222457?u=obj

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@leaders

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as you wish the princess bride GIF

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Well now [OBJ] just feels silly.

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How does one comment with strikethrough text?

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~~strike~~” → strike

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<s> and </s> also work.

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testing

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testing

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