FireFox/Greasemonkey: Quick reply box

[sine nomine]

This is one of a series of posts on how to use FireFox to make reading bus easier and more fun.

FireFox is an awesome browser -- you'll forget why you ever wanted to use IE (or Opera or Safari). Go ahead, <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/">get it now</a>. I'll wait.

Okay, good. The beauty of Firefox is that <a href="http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/">you can install extensions</a>. Ever use a program and wish it had that one nifty feature that would make it absolutely perfect? With FireFox, there's a good chance someone else has had the same thought and written a little add-on to make the feature happen.

Using FireFox and an extension called Greasemonkey plus on user script, you can add a quick reply box to the bottom of threads. (the screenshots are horrible, but they'll have to do until I have time to make better ones)

When you're reading the thread, the bottom of it will look like this:

<img src="http://buslist.org/quickrep.png">

You type your reply in the box and hit the quick reply button, and you'll see this:

<img src="http://buslist.org/post.png">

and once it's finished you'll see this:

<img src="http://buslist.org/postpost.png">

You'll stay on the same page in the browser the whole time, and you won't get the usual screen offering to take you to your post or to the forum.

One warning: using this script adds a little to the load time for the page, because it has to add the quick-reply box at the end. You'll have to decide how much you mind the second or two delay.

<hr width="65%" align="center">

This one also takes a couple of steps to install. It requires an extension called Greasemonkey to be installed first, so go <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/748/">install it</a> now. Then restart FireFox and come back here.

After that, you have to install the actual Quick Reply script. That's also simple -- just <a href="http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/1 ... ight-click here</a> and choose "install user script."

That's it. Reload the page and you'll see the quick-reply box at the bottom. If you don't, right-click on the monkey icon in the browser bottom status bar, choose manage user scripts, and then click on the Quick Edit script. It should look like this:

<img src="http://buslist.org/gmqe.jpg">

And now that you've got Greasemonkey installed, you can add all kinds of nifty phpBB-related scripts. I'll be posting about more of those in <a href="http://buslist.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=101261">this thread</a>.

Deb

[Paradoxis]

Most excellent!!

[Milvus]

hee :3

awesome, thanks Deb ^_^

[Milvus]

*tests that emoties still work*

[Milvus]

hmm...does the quick reply box not support bb code?

[sine nomine]

i thought it worked with bbcode. i've used bbcode in it before. if you have your defaults set to not use bbcode, though, it will go with your defaults.

[Milvus]

I can live without the for a quick reply box [s]*randomly tests bbcode*[/s]

[Milvus]

I have bbcode set as on, but it looks like strikethrough doesn't work.

it is not a problem, just something for people to be aware of when using it ^.^ it is still made of awesome

[ChaseThisLight]

For whatever reason strike through has never worked using bbcode. <s>however with html it works just fine </s>

[Milvus]

ahh *stupid*

[Priceless]

It6 dont work you you have the gmail delete button installed, that have to be deacy´tivated, but i really cant see what im writing here grrrr its all white

[Quiet little Angel]

thadaaaa... now testing bbcode... thadaa

[Quiet little Angel]

this so totally rocks!!!