It’s been annoying me a bit that the Skype icon on the top of some Dopers’ posts have been broken. (Example) The text makes it take up a lot of space. So I decided to fix them, and thought I’d share.
Not only does it fix the icon, but I also put in some fixes so the popup you get when you click on it works as well as it can. You lose the ability to tell if someone is online (as that information is just not available to browsers anymore, as far as I can tell). But the links should just work if you have Skype installed.
I considered just changing it where you get no popup and it just opens the user’s Skype profile. Let me know if you think that is better.
It’s interesting that no one seems to be interested. That’s fine, but I would have thought that there were other people who find those little things annoying. I mean, we find typos quite annoying.
I didn’t expect a lot of take up, but at least a few. So, just in case, here’s one more shot, at evening time.
It’s not like I put a lot of effort in offering it to everyone, but I did spend a small bit cleaning it up and making sure it would always work.
That’d be strange, unless it’s just still in their cache. Because it links to a non-existent image. Specifically, it links to an image that changes depending on whether the user is online or not. But Skype got rid of any way to tell if a person is online or not via the web.
So, if you see BPC posts, there’s no broken Skype image? I’d love to figure out why.
(Also applies to a few other Dopers who have a Skype name in their profile. I chose BPC only because I see his posts most often.)
That has always been a tiny bit bothersome, so I will gladly install this script. I like any Userscript that fixes broken things, so thanks for that.
I use a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts for the SDMB that are no longer maintained so only half-work sort-of-almost, sadly. I find them indispensable now, though.
Would you mind listing what ones you use? I can’t promise anything, but I might (eventually) look into some of them.
I’ve actually got another script that is about 95% done, but that last 5% is taking a while. The first 95% was done in a couple of days. It’s always the edge cases that take the most work.
Yep, I have this one. Made by user WierdAaron, who hasn’t posted for years. Still works, though not quite as well after various updates have superseded some of his code. He was an excellent coder, fast and clever. I wish he’d stuck around.
I also use the SDMB Highlight Old Threads script by Polerius, to know if a thread is likely a zombie being resurrected. It’s about 90% reliable.
That one is really hard to fix, because we just don’t have the information available–at least, without doing a bunch of HTTP requests–one for every thread. It might be possible that a more accurate prediction can be made, but I think it would require a bunch of us brainstorming to figure it out. I’ve tried a few small tweaks, like throwing out the biggest outliers, but the effects are minimal.
(The issue is that it can get overwhelmed if there are a lot of older posts available. The way it works is to look at the range of posts numbers, and try to predict which ones are at the edges. So too many older posts screws up the range.)
I actually haven’t used the Optifixer script in a long time, so I don’t know its shortcomings. I would need to be PMed the script again, and have a list of issues to look into. And, even then, I still make no promises. I have good days and bad days, and I don’t do this sort of stuff on bad days. Plus I do remember the script being fairly complicated.
If it’s compiled from another framework, I probably won’t be able to do much. I only know pure JavaScript, and am familiar enough with Jquery. But trying to decipher compiled JavaScript code is just beyond my abilities. And even if there’s a decompiler, I don’t know the framework.
I have one that highlights posts within a thread, with varying colors based on age ranges. It doesn’t help identify zombies in the list, but they are immediately apparent when you open a thread. It’s also very nice for quickly finding where the new posts start. Anyone is welcome to grab it if they want.
