2020-03-13 update
On 2020-03-13 or so, Facebook rolled out a brand new look (in beta), which broke this bookmarklet. Timestamps in the HTML are gone. This bookmarklet cannot be repaired.
Original introduction
I have written a JavaScript bookmarklet that facilitates traversing all Facebook comments for a given post in time order. This applies only to the full version of the Facebook website.
Also see my Expand All and Scroll All bookmarklets.
Late 2018 Facebook changes
After 4+ years of no major Facebook HTML changes, Facebook started changing their HTML in September or October 2018. The changes were not rolled out into my (presumed) geographical area until 2018-12-06. There could be some geographical areas that are still on the old HTML; I don’t know.
I have updated the bookmarklet. Unfortunately, I have no way of testing with the old HTML. It now works only with the new HTML.
Things you must know
To use this bookmarklet, you should have a single post isolated to a browser tab or window. To do this, ctrl-click on the timestamp of the post you are interested in. In 2019, I added support for theater mode; we’ll see how that goes.
Next, you most likely will need to run my “Expand All” bookmarklet to expand all comments and replies. The only comments linked are the comments you can see at the time. By the way, this links comments and replies.
Finally, when you run this “Link Comments” bookmarklet, it will jump to and highlight the last comment made on the post. (If you don’t see a highlighted comment, something went wrong.) To traverse, use the keyboard:
- Ctrl+up: jump to previous comment (if any).
- Ctrl+down: jump to next comment (if any).
- Ctrl+home: jump to first comment.
- Ctrl+end: jump to last comment.
- Mouse click on a comment: highlight and make that comment the current comment.
- Ctrl+click: shade all comments newer than the one clicked.
To detach this bookmarklet from the page, click it again. Pressing ESC will also work but conflicts with theater mode.
It’s not recommended, but you can also traverse the comments using the mouse by clicking on the older/newer links generated by the bookmarklet.
What does this [not] help with?
This solves a need I had; maybe others will find it useful. Let me describe example scenarios I wrote this for:
- I care about the post, who comments, and what they say. (It’s not worthless comment bait, or something posted by a public figure with many throw-away comments that I don’t care about.)
- I’ve been following the post but am losing track of all the comment threads emerging like tentacles. I don’t want to read from the beginning each time; I just want to see what’s new, but I don’t want to miss anything.
Let me emphasize: if you are freshly coming to a post with many tentacles, you’ll want to read the post in branch-sequence (i.e., how Facebook presents it to you), not time-sequence. It’s only when you’ve watched comments unfold that time-sequence makes any sense, and that’s what this bookmarklet is intended to help with.
Leave a Reply