Traverse Facebook Comments by Time

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.


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Comments

13 responses to “Traverse Facebook Comments by Time”

  1. precatado Avatar
    precatado

    fb video comments wider

    https://jsfiddle.net/hf3z2j9p/

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      A little bit cryptic, but okay.

      1. Zevik Avatar
        Zevik

        Hey Jens-Ingo Farley
        thank you for your amazing script!
        is so helping me!
        I have little question:
        can you please make for us modification for click on all the
        “Remind ‎YYYYY ‎ to answer questions” ?
        I am facebook-group’s admin, and I have to click all this message for a few Member Requests.
        thank you!!!

        Zevik
        my email: aviner.zevik@gmail.com

      2. bigboy Avatar
        bigboy

        pls add translate all comments

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          If “Translate All Comments” didn’t itself depend on user interaction to show or not, I would be more tempted to jump on it. As it is, if this link decides to show itself, it only does the translation that Expand All already triggers (but faster, yes). I might play around with this if I get around to it.

          Edit: I wasn’t paying attention to where this comment was made. If you’re not familiar with my Expand All bookmarklet, see here.

    2. Zevik Avatar
      Zevik

      what this doing?

  2. bob gudgel K7IQ Avatar

    This is WONDERFUL ! I have been wondering how to do this very thing for quite a while now and this works very good ! Thank you !

    I bet this would not be too hard to modify to work in LinkedIn discussion groups.

    Have you ever looked into that application ?

    boB Gudgel

  3. Neri Avatar
    Neri

    Thank you!

  4. Snickel Fritz Avatar
    Snickel Fritz

    In two little bookmarklets you’ve solved a problem I’ve had for years with facebook.
    THANK YOU!

  5. Stu Avatar

    Hi,
    Any chance of sticking a video up showing this in action?

    S

  6. orix Avatar
    orix

    Hi, link stopped working for me 🙁 (chrome 71.0.3578.80)

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      I posted an update today.

  7. David Drascic Avatar
    David Drascic

    I’m VERY happy to have found your update! I recently resurrected a very large 4 year old discussion with some new evidence, and it has burst back into life with new followers. It’s now at almost 400 comments. When things broke last week, I was desperate enough to try to hack your code to try to make it work again, but it was going to take me hours to get up to speed. So then I thought of Googling “facebook expand all 2018”, and found your update! Thank you so much for sharing these with the world!

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