Chrome: Comments on YouTube videos and Flickr photos are highly variable in quality, and finding the gems amongst the dross can be tricky. Chrome extension OpinionCloud summarises the comments so you can get a quick overall feeling. More »
Dear Lifehacker, I really like reading your blog and others around the net, but I’m getting really sick and tired of all the trolls. Is there any way to easily block all the offensive comments that seem to swarm blogs these days? More »
In what’s presumably an attempt to curb the comment cesspool at YouTube, the popular video sharing site has added an Audio Preview button to the comment section. Inspired by web comic xkcd, the positive effect of the audio preview seems questionable. Until audio previews prove their efficacy, we’ll stick with the previously mentioned YouTube Comment Snob extension, thankyouverymuch. [via]
Free web service BackType aggregates all the comments you make on various blogs and web sites. The site uses the URLs entered in commenter forms or in the posts themselves to track a person’s musings, or can combine URLs under a single account URL. It’s a great tool for those who want to catch up on discussions they left behind, but the site also provides a search engine of its indexed comments and links to see another social-browser’s comments. This type of URL tracking would normally leave the door open for comment impersonators, so BackType offers a moderation option to have you approve any comments posted under your name. BackType is a free service, requires a sign-up to use. BackType [via Download Squad]
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension YouTube Comment Snob filters comments on YouTube videos that don’t meet your snobbish standards. It does so using a combination of criteria, like a user-defined threshold of spelling errors (using Firefox’s spell-checker), excessive punctuation, and excessive capitalisation. You can enable or disable any of the filter options if you don’t mind capital letters, for example, and you can view any hidden comment by simply clicking Show. It’s a pretty saucy little extension, but now it’s hard not to want a full-on Internet Comment Snob. YouTube Comment Snob [Firefox Add-ons]
US-centric: Firefox with Greasemonkey only: Two of the Lifehacker editors may reside on the West coast of the US, but a lot of the US readers are on Eastern time, and that means you’d probably like to see our posts timestamped that way. Now you can—with a Greasemonkey user script I just threw together. With Greasemonkey installed, using Firefox, install the Lifehacker on Eastern Time user script.
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