queer-as-folk-punk

Eternally listening to midwest emo

  • he/they

Queer Adult | POC | Anarchist | Gay Vampire |
They call me a "writer", I guess. Sure.
Multi-Fandom Enjoyer. I have succumbed to the 'tism.
Live fast, die young, punch fascists.
If you see me posting at 2AM when I should be asleep, no you didn't.


surasshu
@surasshu

i wonder if someone already suggested this, but it would be so useful to be able to see the number of new posts from each person since last visit on the following view. sometimes someone posts 1 new thing but sometimes its 7 things and currently there's no way to tell... so despite being much easier to see new posts (especially by infrequent posters) its also easy to miss something

is that something that could be done with third party tools (tampermonkey or w/e) or would it be a full-on feature request?


flurry
@flurry

I wrote this specifically looking to avoid making API calls, so there are a few caveats:

  • All it does is detect that there's at least one new post using the information available. So no way to show how many posts have existed since then :<
  • If the script has never "seen" the user you're following before, it avoids putting a dot next to them.1 As a result, people who you newly followed or who weren't loaded into the list previously won't show an unread dot.
  • Detecting unread posts on refresh is liable to break if @staff sneezes in the "refresh" button's general direction. This isn't something that could be solved with the API, so much as React being React.

  1. It's either this or every "new" user has a dot. Maybe it'd be worth having that be an option? I'm not sure how (or if) Greasemonkey et al support that sort of thing.


surasshu
@surasshu

haven't installed this yet (I'm on my phone) but OMG 😍


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in reply to @surasshu's post:

I decided to see how far I'd get, since something like that would make the following view more useful for me too.

Short answer: theoretically doable with a userscript, but it'd be susceptible to breaking on site updates and would be relatively slow.

Long answer: the internal state provided by each followed-page "entry" (for those interested: <li element>.__reactProps$abcd1234.children.props in JS) only gives general profile info along with the latest post, presumably so you can see that post preview in the list. One could stuff the latest post ID into local storage and cross-check that against whatever's there when you (re)open the Following page, but the most that'd get you is "what was once the latest post when you looked at it last, is no longer the latest post now." (I'm hoping that sentence makes any sense :eggbug-tuesday:) Namely, it wouldn't account for a post that was deleted; i.e. "-1 new posts."

To work around that, you could probably get a userscript to request each user's post list and determine how many posts ago it was. But that's gonna mean a couple-second (at least!) delay before you see anything. If this were to be fully built out, maybe just show dots for those with non-matching posts until the API calls are returned, then update with numbers? Either way: technically possible!

ooh i see! i'm quite hesitant to ask for features from staff knowing they're working full time on all kinds of stuff (and possibly this is not even something they'd want), if its possible at all with a userscript i'd be happy for it. honestly just dots to indicate a person has new posts would already be a nice QoL improvement

(also yes that sentence made sense to me lol)

in reply to @flurry's post:

its so goodd!!!! i think you can make the behavior be that dots appear on ppl that havent showed up before, i think that makes sense (an option to do either behavior is fine too ofc). but yeah otherwise this is super cool, the only thing better would be to see the number of new posts since last visit, but from what you said it may not be feasible. but yeah this is a pretty significant improvement, thank you so much!

yeah, after using it for a bit I updated it to default to unread. it felt a bit overwhelming at first, but now it's confusing to have people's posts appear who i didn't read, but show as "read".

in theory it can be an option (for now I just provided an "escape hatch" of sorts to get the old behavior), but unfortunately userscript runtimes don't provide a great route for user configuration :\