Rossotron.com

Ever since Papi Chulo (formerly Pants Party) first pointed it out to me, I've been both happy and frustrated with the Vox Recent Activity page.  On one hand, it does provide an "easy" way to keep track of follow-up comments and favorites on posts you or someone in your neighborhood.  On the other hand, it can bulky with 30+ posts on the page, each with its own set of comments.  Scrolling down to older posts can put a serious case of carpal tunnel on your mouse-wheel finger, and if you have a couple of really popular threads going, you might not even know that one of the older posts has had a follow-up.  (I've also heard some people can't even load the page in their browsers, but I'm not sure this will fix that issue.)

I decided to jump on the Greasemonkey bandwagon and write a GM script to help out with this issue.  I came up with a solution that, while quick-and-dirty, does a good job of streamlining the Vox Recent Activity page: the script creates links in each post to show/hide the comments, with the default setting of all comments being hidden on initial page load.  That means your page that used to look like this:

Recent Activity Page – Normal

now looks like this:

Recent Activity Page – After Script

All you have to do to view the comments for an individual post is click on the [+/-] link, and they'll toggle from hidden to shown.  Click it again and they go back to being hidden!  Pretty cool, huh?

Example of Expanded Thread

Now your recent activity page is a lot slimmer, easier to navigate, and you can click on just the posts that you want to follow up on to see the most recent activity.

Want to install this script for your own use?  First install Greasemonkey, and then get the script here.
(Instructions to install Greasemonkey can be found here.)

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions on how to improve this script, please leave a comment here or send me an email.

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