MeFi Scroll Tag Being Flaky

October 27, 2012 3:03 PM

I know that Plutor's MeFi ScrollTag extension is a 3rd party thing and not officially supported here, but..has anyone else found that it has stopped working correctly on the Blue, and only on the Blue? (relevant info: Mac, Snow Leopard, Chrome Version 22.0.1229.94)

Because it only seems to fail there, I wonder if it's something that has been changed on MeFi rather than something that is wrong with the extension. It works fine on MeTa and Ask.

posted by briank to Bugs at 3:03 PM (13 comments total)

Sorry, we can't suport browser extensions like this. I can't think of anything we've changed recently that would be causing problems, but it's possible. You might have better luck contacting Plutor directly.

You also might make sure you have the latest version. I think he fixed some things last February.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:53 PM on October 27, 2012

Yeah, I was just wondering if anyone else had seen it, not expecting you to fix it, thanks. I will also contact him directly.
posted by briank at 4:02 PM on October 27, 2012

Last week this happened to me, but in my case, the Scroll Tag script stopped working solely on AskMe, while it worked correctly on the Blue and MeTa (I'm using FireFox 15.0.1 on WinXP).

Ultimately deleting all MetaFilter cookies from Firefox seemed to fix the problem, and the script is working for me on all sites again.
posted by that possible maker of pork sausages at 6:13 PM on October 27, 2012

My scroll tag still works on OSX+chrome, but it's pretty old. It's the "Apr 17, 2011 19:16" release on the revisions page.
posted by cj_ at 7:40 PM on October 27, 2012

It's working fine for me now, but have had sporadic issues in the past. Deleting all Metafilter cookies from Firefox has always solved it.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:02 PM on October 27, 2012

Yes, clearing the cookies worked. Thanks!
posted by briank at 8:11 AM on October 28, 2012

I still have to delete cookies every few weeks, but after that it works fine.
posted by deborah at 4:33 PM on October 28, 2012

Speaking of userscripts, I've always wondered why HowlsOfOutrage is called that. Is it just to remind people that favorites don't always mean what you think they mean?
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 5:09 PM on October 28, 2012

Justed wanted to chime in and thank plutor for multiwidth favorite script. Really makes reading comments a lot better.

(when is greasemonkey coming to ios!)
posted by wcfields at 1:55 AM on October 29, 2012

Don't know if you've got a hold of Plutor, but I was sending him bug reports the last time he was working on the script, and got pretty familiar with it. The older script used to create a new cookie for each thread you visited, which would eventually be too many cookies for firefox to store, so it would randomly delete one (sometimes the cookie that kept you logged into metafilter). To get around that (and other issues), he changed it so that it stored every thread's info in a single cookie.

What you're describing is what happens when that cookie gets too large... there is one cookie for each metafilter subsite (www, ask, meta, etc.), and the script adds 10 characters to the cookie every time you open a new thread. There is a 4096 byte limit on cookies in Firefox. Once you go over that limit, the script can't add any new threads to the subsite's cookie.

To deal with this, the script checks the cookie size and removes the oldest thread from the cookie when you reach the limit. So you don't lose everything, like you would when deleting the cookie completely. You just swap an old thread for a new thread and the cookie stays the same size.

But to try and store as many threads as possible, he's got it set to go right up to that 4096 limit. The last I talked to him, it looked like there was extra data in the cookie not being taken into consideration, so he needed to lower the limit in the script. I don't think he ever got to figuring out exactly what that number should be, and it's still set at 4096.

TL;DR: Edit the script and change this:

var cookie_limit = 4096;

To this:

var cookie_limit = 4016;

...and it should work without having to flush the cookies, remembering the last 400 threads you visited on each subsite.
posted by team lowkey at 6:17 PM on November 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

I was just looking for info on this, but in my case I had a new OS load and reinstalled Chrome - Chrome now won't allow extension installation if they don't come from the Chrome Web Store. Can't add the extension in :(
posted by pupdog at 10:07 AM on November 2, 2012

pupdog, you can get Tampermonkey from the Chrome store. That will let you install user scripts.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:45 AM on November 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

Team lowkey notified me about this thread. He's right that what you describe sounds like you're running an old version. But just to be safe, I've updated the official newest version on userscripts to have the reduced cookie limit that team lowkey suggests.

Sorry about the bug!
posted by Plutor at 10:41 AM on November 3, 2012