Discussion Quickly find all Frontier Developer posts

Changes:
  • 2.4.4 Bugfix, script was completely broken.
  • 2.4.3 updates of the script will now be automatic, by having moved the source and update location to github.
  • 2.4.2 fix initial sorting order (ascending) when clicking a new column.
  • 2.4.0 changes the ugly button into one that melds with the theme, placed right of the New Posts button at the top of the page. See pic. below.
  • 2.3.1 adds filtering by shift- or alt-clicking on a column header. Press escape or enter in the filter field to close it.
  • 2.2.0 adds sorting by clicking on the column headers.
  • 2.1.1 internal optimization (that only concerns fdev sysop): avoids redundant fetching of not needed images, when getting the thread page from which the post content is extracted.
  • 2.1.0 shows the dev's post when hovering over the thread title (see screenshot).
  • 2.0.2 fixes an issue where sorting was chronological in Chrome.
  • 2.0.0 adds context sensitive filtering of which posts to show.
  • 2.0.0 works again.
Release notes
I've finally gotten around to updating my little dev tracker
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Hovering over a thread title shows what the author wrote in that post.

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This time it includes some additional smarts, in that it is able to filter the developer posts depending on where you are browsing in the forum.

For example, if you're at the Elite Dangerous root forum, you will see a huuuuge list of all the dev posts posted in any of the sub forums.
If you navigate to a particular forum, you will only see dev posts for that forum, and if you start reading a thread, you will only see the dev posts in that thread (if any).

This context sensitive filtering was a feature request for the old version, but before I got a chance to implement it, Frontier changed the entire forum which broke everything. Thus this change got put on the back-burner.

The previous script was very uncivilized and aggressive on Frontier's backend servers and that has been remedied as well. This version gets its data from a cloud server that I host elsewhere. That data is scraped off the forum. Well actually, only "metadata" is being scraped (to borrow some NSA parlance), not the actual post content, as I don't need it for this feature.

The scraping happens slowly and civilized roughly every 15 minutes, so there may be a 15 minute gap in the accuracy. I hope you guys can live with that, since I don't want to put undue pressure on the forum servers (you seem to manage that by yourselves).

Oh, one last thing, if anyone else would like the data itself for some other community tool..
  • The data the userscript uses is a JSON document available here.
  • I'm also providing an RSS feed for those that like staying up-to-date via feed readers, available here.
Note: if you want to use the data, I ask only that you respect the Last-Modified & ETag headers. I don't want to start banning and throttling, but I will if people use stupid tools like curl or wget without respecting the update frequency the server announces. Or if that's too sophisticated, then just don't fetch more frequently than once every 15 minutes.
 
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I only tested this on FF & Win7, so I'm glad it worked in Chrome as well.

Noticed the button placement was off on my Mac tho, so made a small update to it (same link). No change in functionality, just cosmetics.
 
I have something similar, I'm using the following IDs if you like.

Code:
var userIds = new int[] { 2, 6, 7, 14349, 15645, 15655, 22712, 24222, 25094, 25095, 26549, 26755, 26966, 27895, 31348, 32310, 14849, 17666, 31484, 32348, 31252, 32574 };

IIRC Correctly they relate to:

Michael Brookes, David Walsh, David Braben, Adam Woods, Simon Brewer, Ashley Barley, Sandro Sammarco, Sarah Jane Avory, Mike Evans, Greg Ryder, Dan Davies, Tom Kewell, Mark Allen, Barry Clark, Chris Gregory, Ben Parry, hchalkley, Kenny Wildman, Richard Benton, Mark Boss, Jon Pace, Matt inson.

Not sure if there's any extra there or whether that's just a subset.
 
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Given that the UIDs will be unlikely to change you could just static them?;)

Good point, but I was considering that Frontier do have some turnover in employees and project members come and go. The thinking was that if the referenced post is being kept up-to-date in the same manner of style used so far, then my maintenance would be zilch.

Someone else maintains the data, and I just provide a small window into it.

EDIT, I've now taken a snapshot of the available IDs, so if the dev-post was to change and break the "scraping", the tool would just fall back to those old IDs. Better having most dev posts available than none in that scenario.
 
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I have something similar, I'm using the following IDs ...

Not sure if there's any extra there or whether that's just a subset.

There are, Nagual's post contains 32 IDs as of now, which are these
Code:
[1, 2, 6, 7, 119, 1110, 1388, 1890, 2017, 2323, 14349, 14849, 15645, 15655, 17666, 19388, 22712, 24222, 24659, 25094, 25095, 25591, 26549, 26755, 26966, 27713, 27895, 31252, 31348, 31484, 32310, 32352]

Btw, in this post you mentioned that you were looking into adding a dev-tracker to the forums server code itself. Did you ever get around to it? If not, why?

It seemed like the best option, so people could avoid having to create their own tools for the purpose, or go through the chore of downloading and installing additional stuff such as this one. Also it'd make the feature available to the less technically adept members as well.
 
Some are old in that Nagul's post.

One people to add is Eddie Symons id 33396 (ED Producer who specialises in art and localisation).

Right, but even if those people have moved on, I assume their IDs are still registered on this forum and their posts still residing in the archive. If so, it makes sense to have old Frontier employees on that list, since the material they once posted were statements from Frontier the company, and thus relevant and perhaps still interesting for folk to locate.

Thanks for the additional Dev. I've asked Nagual to add him to his list.
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
After having had a hard time to find authoritative comments from the dev team, I created a [greasemonkey] user script for Firefox to ease the task.

Example of how it looks
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Iv just installed it and restarted Firefox, but no new button appears on my forum page. Anything I need to activate?

EDIT: Argh just realized this was for the old forum.
 
Was using this also.

Any ways to get it work in new forum? I think user IDs and post IDs are same as old forum.
 
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