Comments on: MeFi Scroll Tag Being Flaky

MeFi Scroll Tag Being Flaky

briank — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:03:28 -0800

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.

By: pb

pb — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:53:12 -0800

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.

By: briank

briank — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 16:02:11 -0800

Yeah, I was just wondering if anyone else had seen it, not expecting you to fix it, thanks. I will also contact him directly.

By: that possible maker of pork sausages

that possible maker of pork sausages — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 18:13:20 -0800

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.

By: cj_

cj_ — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 19:40:10 -0800

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.

By: Chrysostom

Chrysostom — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 22:02:49 -0800

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.

By: briank

briank — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 08:11:24 -0800

Yes, clearing the cookies worked. Thanks!

By: deborah

deborah — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:33:24 -0800

I still have to delete cookies every few weeks, but after that it works fine.

By: reprise the theme song and roll the credits

reprise the theme song and roll the credits — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 17:09:30 -0800

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?

By: wcfields

wcfields — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 01:55:44 -0800

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!)

By: team lowkey

team lowkey — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:17:21 -0800

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.

By: pupdog

pupdog — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:07:56 -0800

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 :(

By: pb

pb — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:45:07 -0800

pupdog, you can get Tampermonkey from the Chrome store. That will let you install user scripts.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 10:41:31 -0800

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!