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Screenshot

Demonstration of comment autocomplete and post utility links

About

This userscript adds four main features:

  • Various utility links on posts and in the top bar
  • Inline viewing of post revision source Markdown on the post history page
  • Links on comment timestamps for linking to specific comments (with enhanced "link-ability" for people with this userscript) (natively implemented now)
  • Username autocomplete in comments that's relatively consistent with these notification criteria (natively implemented now)

More information can be found in the SEModifications section of the README.

Updates

  • 2011-09-17: Username autocomplete in comments is now a native feature. As it's currently only available on Meta, the userscript has been updated to check if the feature is enabled on the current site and will disable the userscript support if it is. Once the feature is deployed network-wide, the userscript will be updated to remove that code completely.
  • 2012-07-23: Updates to the share link on posts broke the script, please update to the latest version to resolve the issue.

Download

install / update script – view source

Platform

The script should work under all major userscript-supporting browsers, though the autocomplete is designed with Firefox and Chrome in mind. Please file a bug if you encounter any issues.

Contact

Rebecca Chernoff *, Yi Jiang, and Tim Stone actively maintain this script.

Feedback can be given on GitHub, or by "@lerting" one of the maintainers on Meta Stack Overflow chat.
*This script is in no way associated with Stack Exchange Inc.

Code

To fork the code, please visit the GitHub repository.

Improve this question
27
  • If you're a Firefox user, I've just now pushed an update that works around a Firefox bug that was causing the script to fail. Be sure to update to the latest if the script wasn't working before.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Feb 28, 2011 at 3:48
  • 2
    I LOVE THIS USERSCRIPT!!!!
    – Josh
    Commented Mar 1, 2011 at 21:10
  • @TimStone It is working great, but... could you include the OP in the list of suggestions when typing @...?
    – Oscar Mederos
    Commented Apr 29, 2011 at 14:45
  • @OscarMederos Yeah, this has come up before. It will include the OP, provided that they've commented themselves. It current intentionally excludes the OP otherwise, given that they will be notified of all comments regardless. Still, people seem to be bothered by that, so I'll look into changing it. :)
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Apr 29, 2011 at 15:06
  • @TimStone The thing is that sometimes I want to explicity tell the OP that I'm refering to him ;)
    – Oscar Mederos
    Commented Apr 29, 2011 at 15:11
  • 1
    @OscarMederos This should be done now!
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 2:44
  • I also started work on a way to tab-complete usernames that can't be mapped to ASCII characters, but it's pretty hacky. I'll probably wait until I find a cleaner way to do it before I push the changes.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 2:45
  • @TimStone So the link in the main post is already updated?
    – Oscar Mederos
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 2:52
  • @TimStone Great! :)
    – Oscar Mederos
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 2:53
  • Suggestion: Can you turn the space between "close" and "(2)" into a   please? Otherwise it gets wrapped there. (I suspect the same thing happens when there is an active edit suggestion, but I haven't seen one in a while.)
    – mmyers
    Commented May 19, 2011 at 21:01
  • @mmyers I meant to say before that I'd look into this, and now I have (said it, it's still on my to-do list :P)
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented May 27, 2011 at 3:52
  • 1
    @mmyers Done (for all links there that might contain spaces), pushed in just a bit.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Jun 20, 2011 at 2:24
  • 1
    @mmyers Fixed now.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Jun 21, 2011 at 20:01
  • 1
    The history link is broken again (see my update)
    – ChrisF
    Commented Dec 5, 2011 at 14:53
  • 2
    @AnnaLear Now comment timestamp links are natively supported.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 5:53

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
5

The comment linking isn't working for answers.

On questions it gives links of the form:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/114650/unfair-and-abusive-suspension-because-of-asking-for-help#comment-298448

but on answers it gives links of the form:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/114651/59303

I suspect that the new answer link format is throwing it out.

UPDATE

The history link isn't working either. It's giving:

http://diy.stackexchange.com/posts/a/6371/194/revisions

which includes my user id. It should be:

http://diy.stackexchange.com/posts/6371/revisions
Improve this answer
6
  • 1
    Both of these should be fixed now.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Dec 5, 2011 at 16:00
  • @TimStone - do I have to do anything to get the latest version? It's still showing the incorrect link for both the comments and the history.
    – ChrisF
    Commented Dec 6, 2011 at 9:29
  • Click the install link in the question again and it should replace your current version with the most recent on next page load.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Dec 6, 2011 at 12:45
  • @TimStone - yep - that seems to have done it. Just have to remember to do it home as well :)
    – ChrisF
    Commented Dec 6, 2011 at 12:46
  • Awesome. :) And yeah, it'd be nice if browsers had a way of syncing userscripts, but even Chrome's syncing feature doesn't handle that as a result of its implementation. We are hoping to make the update process a bit more apparent though, so at least the script will remind you when it's out of date.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Dec 6, 2011 at 12:53
  • @TimStone - superuser.com/questions/301333/… - private extensions etc. don't auto sync.
    – ChrisF
    Commented Dec 6, 2011 at 12:55
2

When you use a wildcard to search for tags, the tags which were found appear in the sidebar. For example, I searched for

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xcode-*

(prompted by this question), which resulted in , , , and . While clicking through these tags (and checking whether the hover tooltip would tell me the number of questions with the tag, it didn't, call that a [meta-tag:feature-request]) to check the distribution, I found a tool whcih seems to be generated by this script.

The UI

enter image description here

Note the vaporous and ephemeral little red circles. These appear when you mouse over the tag (bringing up the tag subscribers tooltip, which annoyingly hangs off the right side of the page) and then slide the mouse off the right side. They disappear after a few seconds; it was hard to get the above screenshot.

The functionality

The tooltip for the " button says "change into search term". Clicking it sends me to https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=, which could be accomplished instead by clicking on the page, which seems like a rather useless feature.

The tooltip for the x button says "remove from search", which would be a useful feature. Change a search for, say, javascript-* into all but one of the resulting 20 tags would be very useful. Unfortunately, it too sends me to https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=.

Summary

The UI is difficult to use. The "change into search term" feature is unnecessary; just click the tag. The "remove from search" could be useful, but currently doesn't work.

I suggest removing the 'appear on hover' functionality, the "change into search term" functionality and replacing the transient and inconsistently-styled remove button with a permanent tag/comment delete button from http://sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/sprites.png.

Improve this answer
2
  • The "change into search term" feature quotes the tag term in the current search query, which is a different behaviour than you'd get from clicking the tag. It's primarily useful if the term is automatically converted to a tag by search, but in your particular example it's clearly just broken. I'll fix that and address the UI concerns that you mentioned, thanks for the report!
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Nov 29, 2011 at 17:03
  • I haven't had a chance to properly fix this yet, but I've gone ahead and disabled it for now while I'm working on it.
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Dec 5, 2011 at 16:01
2

I seem to have the perfect storm of a UI at the moment:

As a ♦ mod on a site, the combination of the new Beta theme, mod links and the very handy utility links results in a bit of a UI mess in Firefox and Chrome for me when a question's been edited:

Too Many Links!
Taken from this question

I can see that if a question is ownedByMe, you move these links onto a new line - but I'm not sure how this is working - a question I asked that hasn't been edited shows this behaviour, while another question of mine that isn't edited doesn't, neither does the example question where I've edited someone else's question...

Would it make more sense to just drop these links on to a new line consistently?

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2
  • 2
    The only issue with moving them to the next line was that I felt it was a bit ugly...but clearly this is no better. Part of the problem is that the HTML there makes me sad, but there's only so much to be done about it. I'll work on it some and see what sort of solution I can come up with, thanks for the report!
    – Tim Stone ♦
    Commented Apr 5, 2012 at 13:25
  • No problems @TimStone thanks for taking a look. For myself, I've tried hardcoding ownedByMe to true, and that seemed to work for most - it looks a little light on sites like this one where I don't have close rights either, but in general it's not too bad ;)
    – Zhaph - Ben Duguid
    Commented Apr 5, 2012 at 13:40

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