Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Korussian]

I've been writing scripts that aim to improve Dave's ESL Cafe for users of Firefox/Greasemonkey and posting them for others to try and hopefully benefit from.

This final time, partially by request and partially from reading gripes, I've written a script that fixes three things:

1. For those of you without avatar capability, it adds your specified avatar under your posts on any forum on Dave's ESL Cafe Forums. As with any Greasemonkey script, this only affects your browser's display, so other people will still see no avatar for you.

2. This script also comes with a loosely-related but perhaps more useful feature: image links in any post are automatically displayed as largish-thumbnails in the bottom of that post. This works especially great on the Dave's buy/sell/trade forums.

3. Finally, this script also fixes the profile link for any poster, so that clicking on their name or avatar takes you properly to their profile instead of to an error page. Maybe I'm the only one who was experiencing that error page - I don't know - but this fixes it for me.

A link to the script and full installation instructions can be found here on my website.

This now addresses all of the issues I meant to address when I started with ESL Cafe, so I don't intend to make any posts for a long while on the subject of userscripts. In all, I've posted thrice about 5 userscripts that apply to this site - that's too often.

As always, please remember that the standard disclaimer applies, as I am a fake programmer, and just because these scripts seem to work for me does not mean they will work for you. In either case, please comment to let me know.

[Tony Blair]

you lost me at point 1. English please...

[Teelo]

[nakamurahikaru]

Korussian,

Thankyou for the information.

[Korussian]

Tony Blair:

Firefox is a web browser, like Internet Explorer is a web browser, but with the capability to be extended in many more flexible ways, like a gymnast with a Master's Degree. One of those ways of extending Firefox is by adding in a piece called Greasemonkey, which has less to do with Grease and Monkeys than it has to do with awesomeness. It has a lot to do with awesomeness.

Greasemonkey is Deborah, the roomate/mutual friend of you and your spouse when you're trying to get back into each other's hearts after a long rough patch. As we all know, there's nothing wrong with you or your worldview, but your spouse has had issues in the past. Deborah, your mutual friend, softens these issues in order to make you think your spouse has changed. When your spouse leaves the butter on the kitchen table all day, Deborah cleans it up before you get home to see it. When your spouse tells you that you have control/boundary issues, Deborah coughs loudly right on the word "boundary", and, if properly configured, also right on the word "issues".

However, Deborah is secretly in love with and unhealthily attached to you and only you. Your other friends don't benefit from Deborah's presence, so to them your spouse seems just as vaguely disappointing and perpetually conniving as ever.

Primary Cast of Characters
You as yourself
Dave's ESL Cafe as Your Spouse
Greasemonkey as Deborah

Supporting Characters
Firefox as Gymnast With Master's Degree
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So that's where we can step away from the analogy, and tell you about all of the stuff that Dave's ESL Cafe does that we don't like and try to get Greasemonkey to fix for us.

1. An "avatar" is the picture associated with your username. Some new users don't seem to have the capability to associate pictures with their usernames. I'm not sure why that's so desirable for them, but someone mentioned that it would be nice if there were a way to see a specific picture under their username everytime, even if no one else can see that picture. With this thing I wrote, the first time you run it you tell it your username and picture location, and then it always displays that picture under your username.

2. You used to be able to embed an image right into your post so that anyone who is reading your post could see the image without having to click on any link to go to it. That got pretty handy when people were trying to sell stuff, and you could just look at a long string of photos of the stuff they were trying to sell. These days, that no longer works, but this thing I wrote brings it back. Anybody who references an image in their post will have that image display at the bottom of their post. If they reference several images, those images will display in a string of images below their post.

3. Normally, clicking on someone's username should take you to their profile page. For me, it takes me to an error page instead. I'm not sure if that's how it goes for you, but, in any case, this thing I wrote should fix it if it's broken.

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I hope this clarifies things a bit better :)

[Korussian]

[EuroFunk]

it works, thank you!

[Teelo]

[Thorn]