Show HN: HN Unread Comments v1.1 released (chrome extension) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HN Unread Comments v1.1 released (chrome extension)

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20 pointsCWIZO22 comments

Interesting.

Looking at the source I see that you calculate and store an md5 hash for each comment:

    var commentContentMd5 = md5($this.find('table td:eq(2) span.comment').text());

However each comment on HN has a unique id, that can be found on the links of the up and down keys:

    <a id="up_1943152" href="vote?for=1943152&...

Wouldn't it be easier (and maybe faster) to use these ids to identify comments?

The hash approach has the advantage of marking edited comments as unread?

Perhaps you could do both and mark edited comments with a different color.

Cool idea! I'd just have to figure out where to get that new colour, since now it's the same as the one you defined in your settings.

Calculate a complementary color to the color in the settings :)

That is how it was done in the v1.0, but once you vote on a comment that id is gone. Or maybe I missed something :) Will have a look if I can use the IDs instead.

edit: bonus "feature" of md5-ing the comments is, that if a comment changes it is marked as unread again ...

> but once you vote on a comment that id is gone

The score is in a span that has the same id:

    <span id="score_1944875">3 points</span>

> if a comment changes it is marked as unread again

But identical comments in different conversations are marked as read... ;-)

I guess I really did miss something then :) HN's markup is really a mess ...

>But identical comments in different conversations are marked as read... ;-)

true, but that seems highly unlikely here on HN, where you don't have comments like "lol :)" everywhere.

If one person writes LOL and another repeats it, I consider it a feature that the second one is also marked as read.

YMMV ;-)

Two thoughts:

1) If you've already read a comment you've already read it regardless of where you read it, and if the comments are exactly the same they are probably not terribly context sensitive.

2) I believe that if a submitted comment is exactly the same as one in memory than it is auto-killed so in general this is a moot point anyway.

Unless I've missed something, the ID can be found in the 'link' link URL for that comment.

I like the idea of this, but I find the red outline to be jarring and well quite frankly ugly. I think a more visually pleasing way of showing new vs old comments would be to make the text of old comments a light shade of grey, and the new comments normal black. Similar to how a link will have a different color once it has been visited.

The colour is actually the same as your HN colour that you can set in your settings page.

Making read comments a lighter shade of grey would, unfortunately, not go well with how HN handles comments with <= 0 score.

If you have any more ideas please share them, I know this isn't the optimal solution right now, but I can't find anything better ...

I would just make it a lighter shade, but not as light as a <= 0 score comment. Those happen to be hard to read.

Maybe you could give the option for the user to set their own CSS values for read and unread.

Maybe I'll make it so that you can configure it, yes. So you'll be able to set the colour of the font and select whether you wish for a box to appear around unread comments.

I've been using a simple left border to highlight new comments in my extension (http://hckrnews.com/about.html), and I've found it works pretty well at highlighting new comments without being too obtrusive.

This functionality has been available in my hckrnews extension for a while. It works only for individual item pages, since it tracks (in localstorage) the last comment id for each page. It uses a simple left border to highlight new omments, which I think is a little less intrusive (yet easy to spot) than the screenshot for this extension.

It's available here:

http://hckrnews.com/about.html

How does it work in the long run? Am I going to store the entire HN database in Chrome, until my computer slows down to a crawl?

Otherwise, pretty cool. Installed.

I've got plans to address this issue in the next release. I've been using this for more than 2 months now, and I haven't noticed any slow down, but I will do something about this never the less.

You can store the highest comment id for each article: any comment with an (id > stored highest id for the current article) is new.

The hash thing is interesting for detecting edits, but since comments can be edited only for a limited amount of time (an hour maybe?) it doesn't need to be stored for a long time.

Therefore maybe you could do:

- hash => sessionStorage

- article_id;highest_comment_id => localStorage

That seems like a very smart approach.

Thank you!

If I haven't read any of the comments on a post, there is no need to show me that they are new. The entire thread is new, I know that. In essence, the extension gives comments two states: new or old. I perceive that there are three states: new, old, and new-since-last-viewed.

I am only interested in special highlighting for the third state, new for threads I have visited before.

Love it... but it'd be much less intrusive if you displayed the red border around new comments the second time you visit a comment thread. So the extensions would only change the screen if you visit a comment page more than once.

The red border is unbearable.

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