Brief summary: I need a script/plugin for Firefox that selects the “load next 25 comments” link at the bottom of a web page, until that link is no longer on the page. As you click that link – you get more comments – eventually all of them on the same page. See this web page for an example (there are 1,852 comments): http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/16/gulf.oil.spill/index.html#comment-50598247
I have a regular problem with CNN.com. I post comments there. People sometimes reply to them. I check my profile, and see the number of replies, but I can’t read them there. I have to follow the link to the original article. The fist set of comments are at the bottom, with a ‘load next 25’ link at the bottom. There are often hundreds of comments, and sometimes a few thousand. There is no practical way for me to read the replies to my comments. If there’s under around 300 hundred, I’ll just click that link enough times to see what the replies to my comments are. I need a script/plugin to select that ‘load next 25’ link until that link is no longer present on the page. Then I could just search for my userid and read the responses.
The Firefox extension “iMacros for Firefox” does this. It’s very popular, with more than 30,000 downloads per week, and it’s marked as “recommended” by the Firefox team. I thought I had searched the add-ons page for anything relevant, but I missed it. I’m surprised nobody here has heard of it. Then again, this page has only been viewed 9 times in the 2 days since I posted it, and 3 of those are mine, from different computers.