Friday, December 19, 2008

Filter by ID giving dividends

A spammer has posted a large number of useless comments in one of the DefenceWire posts. All these comments were posted using the same blogger profile, but with different nicks. This was an ideal scenario to use the 'filter by ID' feature of CollapseComments. I've attached several screen shots depicting its use. Note how the original bloggers' comments were left untouched while collapsing unwanted comments. Spammers can avoid this only by creating new profiles, which would be too much of an effort. Even if someone creates a new profile, all that is required to avoid them would be to open up the preferences and add their id/nick to the list.

Check the sidebar to the right for useful links.

I know that having to crate an AMO (addons.mozilla.org) account is a pain. Its because of the way FF extensions are developed and released to the general public.

Every new extension as well as new versions of old extensions have to go through a review process, after which they are placed in the public section of the AMO. Extensions remain in a sandbox during the review process and requires logging in to AMO to install it.

There are over 500 extensions to be reviewed, in the public nomination queue, by the reviewers at AMO. Even though its called a queue, it doesn't seem to operate in the FIFO manner. On top of that many addons/extensions are added to the queue, daily, which make the matters worse. Most of the reviewers are volunteers and extensions vary on their code size and complexity. So there's nothing much that can be done to speed this up.

Anyone interested can have a look at the source.

Also, having review comments at the extension page helps very much to get through the review process . I would appreciate if some of you can add some review comments, noting whether the extension works/does not work/useless/ has some erroneous behavior/etc. over there. More descriptive the review comments are, the better.

2 comments:

soorapappa...සූරපප්පා said...

Well done machan. I'm currently using IE. So cannot use. But greately appriciate your effort and hope it'll help others a lot who use mozilla.

Sithsala said...

soorapappa,

thanks machan. you can install (will need admin privileges, though) and run FF alongside IE.