Update: Ok, so this is more of an issue than I originally surmised – apparently it violates the Terms of Service on a couple sites, especially Digg. I’ve removed Digg support and may have to take the script down at some point. Sorry everyone!
Last weekend I decided to play around with the new Ubiquity extension for Firefox, building a command.
The command is called ‘vote’ and it gives you the ability to bulk vote on links and comments on Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News.
I’ve created a short screencast that shows it in use:
Ubiquity Vote Command
- Install Command
- View Source (Github) – Note: While functional, the code is highly unoptimized at this point.
Here are the commands available on the sites that it supports:
- vote up – Works on stories and comments that haven’t been voted on.
- vote down – Works on comments that haven’t been voted down.
- vote fave – Works on stories that you’ve already voted up.
- vote bury – Works on all stories.
- vote up – Works on stories and comments that aren’t already voted up.
- vote down – Works on stories and comments that aren’t already voted down.
- vote none – Resets the vote of stories and comments that have already been voted on.
- vote hide – Hides stories from view.
- vote up – Works on stories and comments that aren’t already voted up.
Each of the commands have a number of filtering aspects that can be used:
- vote up WORD – Performs the vote on all stories or comments that match WORD (comments will also match the name of the comment author). For example: vote up google
- vote up REGEXP – Performs the vote on all stories or comments that match the REGEXP regular expression. For example: vote up hadron|youtube
- vote up WORD not OTHER – Performs the vote on all stories or comments that match WORD and does not match the word OTHER. For example: vote up google not chrome
Ubiquity is a lot of fun to develop for. There’s a real-time command editor (run the command ‘command-editor’ to bring it up) which makes development quite fast. It also includes native jQuery support (which is a huge plus for me).
In a lot of ways I see Ubiquity as being a solid replacement for Greasemonkey and bookmarklets. It’s far simpler and will make their execution much more flexible. I’ll be curious to see what people end up doing with it, in the upcoming months.
Scott Fitchet (September 4, 2008 at 11:35 am)
Would that work with something like yubnub?
Abi (September 4, 2008 at 11:37 am)
Nice command! I’m hoping more people will write commands like this rather than just site-specific searches.
All the Apple fanboys are going to go crazy over this (“vote up apple” & “vote bury microsoft”. ;-)
Bertrand Le Roy (September 4, 2008 at 11:52 am)
It’s interesting to see how this is very appealing to the developer community because of the cool text interface, whereas there is comparably little buzz around the somehow similar IE8 Accelerators. The problem is, my mother (who is very smart but is not a computer person, not being condescendant here) won’t think a text interface is cool and she will always go for the more discoverable mouse-based solution. So while very cool, this would probably need some work to not only appeal to extension developers but also to the general public. I’m sure the smart people at Mozilla will have some great ideas on how to do that. Also, as that stuff is JS-based, wouldn’t it be cool to standardize and have this available cross-browsers?
John Resig (September 4, 2008 at 12:18 pm)
@Scott: I don’t think my command would work from yubnub, but yubnub could definitely be replaced by Ubiquity, no doubt.
@Abi: Haha, yeah – we’ll have to see what people do with this command.
@Bertrand: I definitely agree that it’s not going to escape into the general audience at this point. As I mentioned above, Ubiquity is a solid replacement for Greasemonkey and bookmarklets – two, very, developer/power-user-centric tools.
Scott Fitchet (September 4, 2008 at 1:17 pm)
Ahh … just noticing there is more to this than I thought ….
https://labs.toolness.com/ubiquity-herd
Thanks for bubbling this back up.
Ashley Williams (September 4, 2008 at 5:26 pm)
Very cool! Shame the Digg support is out, if anyone wanted to abuse Digg they would create their own tools and not use this. :(
But also, on Hacker News, you can down vote comments as soon as you hit enough karma, something you may want to integrate… :)
Zak (September 5, 2008 at 5:37 pm)
I’m generally opposed to things like this, but I could see myself using it on Youtube comments. A few people doing “vote down fag” and the like could improve comment quality considerably.