Chrome plugin to deal with Hacker News ‘unknown or expired link’
Hacker news has one minor irritation - The ‘unknown or expired link’ thing. Happens when
- You spend some time on a page checking out the links and then click the “more” link at the bottom of the page. By then fnid has expired and you have to go back to homepage, refresh it and start from there
- You write a thought-out comment(taking enough time) and then press the “comment” button only to see a ‘unknown or expired link’. Then you have to hit the back button, copy the text, hit refresh, paste the text and then “comment” again.
Here’s a chrome plugin I just wrote that’ll automate these two
Here’s what it looks like
For fixing “more” pages, the plugin adds an anchor #n to the link that tells us the page’s location from homepage. When a page gets loaded with “unknown or expired link”, the plugin goes back to the homepage and fetches until the nth page. (Note: Due to the way voting works links are constantly rearranged and for example the 3rd page now might have links you have just read in the 2nd page)
For the comment page, it adds one more “comment” button
The new comment button refreshes this page in background, fetches the new fnid , updates the current page’s form, then submits the comment. Since this is a little slower, you can always try the regular “comment” button first and if it doesn’t work, hit back button and then hit the new comment button.