Decent Activity November 23, 2015 9:06 PM   Subscribe

Hey, so way back when, I wanted an "LJ friends" sort of view of MetaFilter – something that would let you see all of your "friends'" comments on MetaFilter, regardless of the number of favorites. I remembered that in the last few months and put together a Chrome extension, Decent Activity (thanks to Ian A.T. for the name!) that shows all of your mutual contacts' comment in reverse chronological order. So, if you are also interested in that sort of view, there it is!

It looks like this in action.

Some caveats and details:

– It looks better on the Modern theme than on Classic or Modern Dark right now.

– While the comments will end up in reverse chronological order, it doesn't necessarily receive them that way, so it will end up inserting comments as you read. (It works basically the way one would do this manually – it loads each mutual contact's Recent Activity page, then aggregates the contents. So, if Mutual Contact A's stuff is loaded and rendered first, then Mutual Contact B's stuff is loaded but has comments that are newer than A's, it'll pop B's comments in above A's.)

– If you've got concerns about it sending information about you somewhere or similar concerns, the source is here. You can build the extension from source, then manually install it. Feel free to ask me for help if you try the steps in the README and run into problems.

– Please let me know if you run into any bugs! I'm a little short on time these days, but I'll at least try to address the major stuff!
posted by ignignokt to MetaFilter-Related at 9:06 PM (12 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite

Thanks, this is really neat.

But how will I keep track of my friends' indecent activity?
posted by Toekneesan at 1:57 AM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


Related-ish: should we make some sort of github organization for site members working on code related to the site? Might be fun.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:39 AM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


Bug report: If I click "Next Day" when I'm already on today, nothing happens. My life would be much easier if I could find out what my friends are going to say tomorrow, so could you get on that?

Actually, if you Markov generated each contact's "future comments" from their existing corpus that would be pretty hilarious.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:38 AM on November 24, 2015 [9 favorites]


Patience, patience. We're working on tomorrow's technology today.
posted by maryr at 8:35 AM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


Related-ish: should we make some sort of github organization for site members working on code related to the site? Might be fun.

If anyone else wants this and has a repo to contribute to it, I am totally down for that!
posted by ignignokt at 11:20 AM on November 24, 2015


My life would be much easier if I could find out what my friends are going to say tomorrow, so could you get on that?

I am just now patenting my new forwards time travel technology, known as the Big Exciting Device (or BED). On getting in our prototype BED and lying still for a short while, most users find that they suddenly wake up in tomorrow. At this point users are reporting full unrestricted access to tomorrow and are apparently able to wander around in it freely in order to ascertain what their friends are saying.
posted by emilyw at 5:09 AM on November 25, 2015 [13 favorites]


Hmm, I think we were bandying around the idea of a collective github repo a while back, but I don't remember where we left that conversation. Low priority but something we could get back to thinking about.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:01 AM on November 26, 2015


I wasn't talking about a repo so much as an organization that people could join and then create new repos affiliated with it.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:56 AM on November 26, 2015


Looks like there is an official GitHub organization. What would the organization we're talking about be called?
posted by ignignokt at 12:11 PM on November 26, 2015


I dunno... Mefites for Metafilter?
posted by Going To Maine at 10:43 PM on November 26, 2015


Hey, so it wasn't working for people using the Secure Browsing option in their MeFi profiles. Thanks to grobstein for debugging!

Version 1.0.2 now handles Secure Browsing. It should automatically update at some point, but if you want it sooner, go to chrome://extensions and hit "Update Extensions Now".
posted by ignignokt at 6:03 PM on November 28, 2015


OK, version 1.0.3 makes it work with people who have the 24-hour clock preference. Thanks to WCWedin for generously investigating and providing me with the fix!
posted by ignignokt at 7:32 PM on December 14, 2015


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