#greasemonkey

I think anyone who has ever used AO3 drafts for a work or chapter (even just to finish posting the next day) has been bitten by the long-standing bug where works/chapters started as drafts keep the draft creation date as the publication date unless you (remember to) manually change it before publication, often resulting in a work or chapter being published several days in the past 😳 (Not great in active fandoms/tags!)

Having stumbled across this bug once again recently, I asked escctrl (the author of the other AO3 userscripts I raved about recently) if it was possible to do anything via userscript to help us avoid falling victim to this bug.

escctrl responded with AO3: Warn for Old Publication Date on Drafts, which places a warning next to the Post button on work/chapter drafts and includes a button to automatically update the old date to today’s date. It feels so slick!

Big thanks to escctrl for making this possible! 🙏

Uncle Asad, this sounds useful, but what’s a userscript?!

More info under the cut if you’re not familiar with userscripts…

For a long time, I’ve thought it would be nice to have two “features” on AO3 (which AO3 has good reason not to add themselves):

A way to add formatting buttons to the comment box (mostly on mobile, where typing HTML is very awkward)

Some way to “take notes” on a fic/chapter as I’m reading, so I don’t constantly forget things I want to comment on 😂 (just ask @persevereforahappyending)

Writing both of these things are (in theory) within the outer edges of my capabilities, but in practice they’d require so much brushing up and research that they’d be 20+ hour projects each, not an effective use of my limited time 😭 (I did eventually write myself a little HTML tags helper Shortcut a couple years ago that made inserting tags on my phone…less painful…but not painless enough that I’d even use it every time.)

Eventually I remembered userscripts, and I found a "floating comment box" script…that I couldn’t get to even load…and gave up and moved on.

Today, while searching for something else, I discovered a pair of scripts from the same person that added both of these features and worked (to the extent they actually loaded; I’ve yet to submit any comments using them) not only on desktop (Safari with the open-source userscripts extension) and on my phone (with the same combo)!

Obligatory Warning

Userscripts are third-party JavaScripts that have access to anything on a given web page, can load other JavaScripts, steal your information, and so forth. Never install a userscript you don’t trust.

I Understand the Danger; Tell Me What Userscripts You Found!

First, make sure you have a “userscript manager” extension installed in your browser.

The original userscript extension, Greasemonkey, is available for Firefox and derivatives.

Tampermonkey is available for multiple browsers on multiple desktop and mobiles OSes.

userscripts is available for Safari on Mac and iOS.

There are others, too.

After you’ve installed your userscript manager extension, hop on over to greasyfork.org and add these scripts:

AO3: Comment Formatting and Preview

AO3: Sticky Comment Box

Both by escctrl, who has an extensive list of other AO3 scripts you might like (that tag reordering script also caught my eye!).

My JavaScript knowledge is both weak and rusty, but nothing in these two scripts seemed untoward.

I’m not sure how well the floating comment box will end up working on the small screen of the phone—between it and the keyboard it obscures 90% of the screen—but it still might be useful enough.