Complexity and feasibility of a GM script: opinions sought

[Trevor Jenkins]

The British broadsheet newspaper The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk is currently testing a replacement for its current online readers' comment system. A bunch of problems with it. Firstly the replacement fundamentally changes the style of presentation. At the moment it gives a purely chronological display of messages. The new version is trying to give threaded comments; like Disqus, which is what other British broadsheets use, but worse. If you know Disqus style threaded commenting them you know how bad that "worse" actually is. They appear to have deliberately ignored a large group of users during requirements elicitation, namely their existing user bade!

Secondly the interactivity is "pants". There are basic design flaws that make the threaded stuff difficult to use. Real stupid errors are being encounted in use; it beggars belief that this replacement system ever went through unit testing, alpha- or beta-testing in house. Thirdly the dynamic display of comments doesn't always work. It also affects scrolling (keyboard and mouse) within the comment section.

The heart of their replacement system seems to be a single JavaScript script embedded in the page that fiddles with the page's DOM to displays the messages/comments in their half-arsed format. Wondering if a GM script coud unravel much of the junk and return local display to a chronological form. Unlike the other papers there is no real-time update of messages/comments so any GM script only needs to run when the associated page(s) are loaded or manually refreshed.

Would the complexity of writing such a defeat-threading GM script be too great to make the script's use on the site feasible and practical? Anyone got a feeling for whether such a script would be achievable? Primarily I'm only concerned with creating a script for my own personal use rather than making anything generally available. My own alpha-test code would be acceptable to me even in production mode. Mind you nothing could ever be as bad as the junk the paper are rolling out and forcing reader/commenters to use in the very near future. a roll out that continues despite serious critical technical comments from its online reader community.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!

[mike cupcake]

On Friday, 16 November 2012 00:23:06 UTC, (Trevor Jenkins) wrote:

The British broadsheet newspaper The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk is currently testing a replacement for its current online readers' comment system.

suggest you crosspost this to  http://userscripts.org/forums/1

[Trevor Jenkins]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll apologise now to any one who is subscribe here and there for the duplication.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!