UserColor

A Greasemonkey script to let you colorize users on the SA forums

What does it do?

UserColor adds a little strip of colored buttons to each post, right under the avatar. When clicked, the background of that cell is changed to that color in every post that user makes.

Why would I want that?

You can use it to mark shit posters without ignoring them, or to mark "no avatar" people that are actually worth listening to.

Also, it's useful in a thread in which you only care about a limited number of users. For example, if there is a small band of folks fleeing to Mexico to escape a large purple dildo, it's nice to mark just those users, and skim over everyone else is replying with ":f5::f5::f5:", "LOL", etc.

Finally, you can use it to mark people who have been helpful in the past, such as reasonable posters in D&D, proficient experts in SHSC, and especially talented MSPainters in BYOB.

What's the catch?

Will this slow down the forums or piss off radium GENERIC ADMINISTRATOR?
No - this is entirely client-side. Nothing extra gets sent or received, and all your color settings are stored locally (as greasemonkey settings). The only slowdown you could see is the small bit of added computation that the script does after the page is loaded. The only way you can screw up is if you're a moron and post bugs about the script as if they were forum bugs.

Does this work with SALR?
Yes.

Any other problems?
Threads open in other tabs/windows won't be re-colored until you reload them. Also, FYAD isn't supported.

I want this thing.

You'll need:

I've heard that you might be able to get Greasemonkey scripts going in Safari and such, but I don't know anything about that.

Who did it?

UserColor was originally written by "Stabby McDamage". If you have trouble, PM me or email tkbletsc AT eml.cc.

The hide/show feature and corrected cursor were added by Alex Vidal ("avidal", alex.vidal AT gmail.com).

W. T. Snacks (of horrible internet fame) rewrote the search loop with compact, efficient XPath, thus creating revision 3. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work right, but thanks anyway!

Advanced issues

Can I have different colors?
Yes - just modify your script and change the "var colors" line. There are two other color schemes commented out already.

Why didn't you use XPath?
I couldn't get it working for what I needed (regex matching on tag attributes, etc.). It's probably feasible, but I couldn't figure it out before losing interest.

EDIT: W. T. Snacks fixed it and made it clean, but that didn't work, so we went back to revision 2. :(

I can fix/improve this.
If you fix or improve the script, let me know and I'll credit you and put it on the site.