CoH Forum Greasemonkey Mod

I have two beefs with the new forums, one of which I know it shared by at least some others:
1) You must click a small linked image to get to the newest unread post in a thread
2) The "Forum Tools" popup menu (required to mark a forum as read) is painfully slow to animate

So, I have created a Greasemonkey script to alleviate my issues.

If you've already got Greasemonkey installed (requires restarting Firefox), you can get the script from here:
CoH Forum Mod
(Just click the "Install" link, and the Greasemonkey install dialog will open for you)

What the script does:
- The "Forum Tools" button is removed. It gets replaced by a "Mark Forum Read" link.*
- The "Mark Forum Read" link will mark all posts in the forum as read, and move you to the parent forum.**
- Any thread links which follow a new post arrow, which shares the post ID with the new post arrow, will have its link modified to go to the new post. Threads without new posts will remain unchanged (thread link takes you to the first post in the thread)
- The forum skin remains unmodified

I've tested this with both Hero and Villain skin. The only problem I can foresee occurring would be caused by catastrophic errors in the forum layout, which is far beyond my control.

Here's an example: The thread title with new posts in it is being hovered over with my mouse, and the url at the bottom will take me to the new post:


Note that the script will only be active while you're viewing a forum on these boards. It will also work on the search page, as well as on subscribed threads in your user CP.


* Yes, this does remove a handful of things you can do in a forum, like subscribe/unsubscribe to the whole forum. But I don't think there's anything in the popup that is both used frequently and not found elsewhere. For the things used infrequently (eg, subscribe to forum), you can temporarily disable the script. For things found elsewhere (eg, New Post), you can access them elsewhere anyway.
** This behavior is slightly different from the Mark Forum Read option in the Forum Tools popup, in that the Forum Tools version keeps you in the same forum. However, this is apparently accomplished with a redirect in the PHP code, which I cannot prevent. Besides, if you're marking the forum read, you're probably not going to be reading more threads there.

Lovely! I love to grease my monkeys.

Also I suggest adding this: "http://boards.cityofheroes.com/search.php?searchid=*" to the script's included pages. that way when you click new posts it works

Done

Works a treat,thank you.

Could you modify this to mark the forum as read and then go to the user control panel instead of the parent forum?
The Subscribed forums in the CP is how I'm getting my "Favorite Forums" like from the old boards.

Just a thought, but...
With clicking the thread name taking you to the first unread post, it might be nice to also have an alternate way to reach the first post in the thread.

Since the little arrow is now redundant, it could be used to house this function.

(i.e. a reversal of the default behavior. Clicking the arrow would take you to the first post of the thread, and clicking the thread title would take you to the first unread post)

Adding
links[i].href='showthread.php?t'+links[i].href.substring(links[i].href.lastIndexOf('='));

directly after
lastNewpost = id.substring(id.lastIndexOf('_') + 1);

should do the trick.
(I suppose that since the substring index will be static you could just replace it with the appropriate integer, but the above makes it a bit more clear what it does)

It might then be appropriate to change the arrow icon to something else (like an upwards pointing arrow), using something like Stylish.

Another tweak I'd love if you could add is removing the Announcements at the top of the search.php results page.

The best way I can think of with my limited knowledge of greasemonkey would be to remove any td containing an image with alt "Announcement" as well as the td immediately following it.

I've been on other forums with the feature (including ones in which the entire table cell is linked via JavaScript, rather than just the actual text), but most forums have a larger image to click to reach the newest unread post.