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Can’t get enough of the awesome Symphony forum? Obsessively scan through the forum several times a day getting up to speed on discussions happening?

Using Safari as your main browser? Using a MacBook or the Apple touch mouse? (Alright, I’ve probably limited this to just me & myself now, anyhow). Download my friday-night-hacking Safari extension, SymphonyMarkAsRead.

This simply adds some JavaScript-fu to the Symphony discussions page enabling you to hover your mouse over a forum thread and “swipe left” (scroll left, really) and you’ll mark that thread as read.

Backstory: I read through the forum most every day in some periods, but not every thread is interesting (sorry), but I’d like to keep on top of my unread threads. Instead of having to click through to the thread to mark it as read or marking the “left overs” as read in one swipe I wanted some simple “mark this as read” function. Inspired by reading RSS feeds on my iPhone, this was created…

This could probably be ported to a GreaseMonkey script, but I don’t use Firefox as my main browser and haven’t bothered with figuring out GreaseMonkey scripts. I’ll upload the source to github during the weekend if people are interested.

With Firefox unread threads are shown in bold. After reading they are shown in normal font weight. When someone adds a comment to a previously read thread it goes back to bold, moves to the top of the list and shows the number of new comments. Does Safari not behave in this manner?

Hm, I guess I was a bit unclear. What I meant by “keep on top of my unread threads” was more in the sense of “inbox zero”. This marks a thread as read, thereby removing bold styling, by just scrolling left with your cursor over it.

I like to clear all my unread threads, so next time I check the forum I know what’s actually new/unread. But I don’t actually read every thread; I can’t give value to every thread, and not all threads give value to me.

So yes, Safari acts in the same manner as Firefox per your description. This fixes a different need/obsession of mine :)

Thanks, froded, for sharing this! It’s hard to keep pace with the forum, and this Safari extension is a very clever idea!

Thx. Froded. I am personally quite happy to browse and, at some point, ‘mark all as read’, but I was just yesterday thinking about writing something that would display unread/new threads in a tab. Just like a ‘new mail’ notification. In combination with e.g. the Chrome ‘reload every n seconds’ plugin this would save me from obsessively checking the forum ;)

I have no experience with Safari/Chrome plugins but would that be difficult to do?

Some Time ago I created a UserScript for Fluid that checks the forum every two minutes for new posts and displays them in a Growl notification. I stopped using and developing it, but it does a bit what you want @davidhund and could be a good starting point.

@davidhund: You mean having the Symphony Forum open in a browser tab and having the extension modify the page title (thus tab title) with the number of unread threads? That is quite certainly possible. I don’t know anything about Chrome plugins, but I gather that could be done like a UserScript as klaftertief mentions. I’ll have a look at klaftertiefs script and see what I come up with later this weekend — right now I’ll be installing a shiny, new SSD in my MacBook Pro.

Any other suggestions are most welcome :)

klaftertief, I was actually thinking about Fluid as I use it for some other stuff. A userscript for Fluid is quite easy to create (and it would be trivial to check for ‘new items’ because of the classname on table rows, reloading is simple too). I’ll check your userscript out.

Froded: yeah, a Chrome Extension would be nice (and quite simple too, I guess). SSD seems nice! (It will be some time before I feel I can replace my trusty MBP b.t.w. :) )

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