Endless Forum Pages user script

The Endless Forum Pages user script makes phpBB forum pages infinitely long instead of limited to 15 posts per page. It loads the next page into a hidden iframe when you scroll to near the bottom of the page, and then it moves the posts from the iframe into the main page when the iframe finishes loading. If you hate clicking the tiny "Next" link on MozillaZine Forums topic pages (example) as much as I do, please try this script.

If you use this script, it is best to scroll using pgup/pgdn. If you scroll by dragging the scrollbar, your position will jump when the page gets longer.

Using this script shouldn't affect the load on forum servers much, because it only activates when you scroll to near the bottom of the page, which indicates that you're likely to continue reading.

This script works at MozillaZine Forums and The Blue Gryphon. You can try using it with other phpBB forums using Greasemonkey's "included pages" feature. Don't expect it to work at all phpBB forums, though, because phpBB forums are often customized a lot and the script is somewhat fragile.

19 Responses to “Endless Forum Pages user script”

  1. anon Says:

    Can you make it work with the topic lists too?

  2. Rory Parle Says:

    That’s just… ridiculously useful. I hate having to hit the little ‘next’ button, but I never would have thought about this solution. Very elegant. Thank you.

  3. MC Says:

    It does not work at either forum using Greasemonkey 0.5.1.
    User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050828 Firefox/1.0+

    Neither does Autolink, btw

  4. Olive Says:

    WOW that’s a great script! It’s even 56k friendly as the iframe loads ‘in the background’, while you’re reading the last posts of the page.

    GM 0.5.1
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050827 Firefox/1.0+

  5. Greg K Nicholson Says:

    Hey, could you do that for Google (particularly Image Search) results as well?

  6. Wonko The Sane » Stuff I been stubling upon. Says:

    […] Endless forum script – A greasemonkey script to automatically load each next page on a phpBB forum and append it to the end of what your looking at. […]

  7. OvB Says:

    Cheers!

    As I’m from a german speaking part of the world, I’ve extended the script somewhat to include the german version of the “Next” detection. If anybody else needs that (or you’d like to include it in your script), here’s the new version of the findNextLink (duplication of the if-clause in the for look):

    function findNextLink(doc)
    {
    for (var link,i=0; link=doc.links[i]; ++i) {

    if (link.innerHTML == “Next” && link.getAttribute(“href”).substr(0,10) == “viewtopic.”)
    return link;

    if (link.innerHTML == “Weiter” && link.getAttribute(“href”).substr(0,10) == “viewtopic.”)
    return link;

    }

    return null;
    }

    Works For Me!

    Oliver

  8. Olive Says:

    It seems to break quickreply.

  9. alon r Says:

    i’m using this on another forum system (SMF), and it only works when i REFRESH the page i’m viewing, when i’m going to it from a link (of the forum list or so) it dosnt work, and i have to hit F5, why is that?

  10. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    Alon, I’ve seen that too. I think it’s a bug in Greasemonkey.

  11. Party online poker reviews Says:

    Hi – big thanks (great site!).

  12. Hank Roberts Says:

    I’ve been wanting this for a long time.

    I don’t find ‘user script’ in the Firefox help. How do I add this, into
    Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050909 Firefox/1.4?

  13. Hank Roberts Says:

    Oops. Duh. Nevermind. I see it’s a script for Greasemonkey, which isn’t working with the 1.5 beta yet — and that there’s an updated 0.6.1 version available via a link on the mailing list. I’ll wait til it’s released as something I can install into the OSX Firefox.

  14. Alex Yule Says:

    Too bad greasemonkey isn’t updated to work with 1.5b1 or 1.6a1… as Hank said…

  15. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    A version of Greasemonkey that works with Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is available: http://greaseblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/firefox-15-compatible-greasemonkey.html

  16. Olive Says:

    quote from me: “It seems to break quickreply.”

    Jesse, I wasn’t really expecting a reply, but since you seem to keep reading this post, could you tell me if quickreply works for you? If no I could live with it or have a look at your script, if yes I’d investigate what’s wrong with my settings.

  17. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    It breaks quickreply because of the invalid tag nesting in the original document. The original document tries to nest things as TABLE – FORM – TR – TD. Firefox’s DOM Inspector doesn’t even show the textarea as being a descendant of the form element in the original document! I can think of several ways to work around this, but none of them satisfy me yet.

    I wonder why MozillaZine doesn’t just put the FORM outside that table. I don’t think that table “contains” any other forms.

  18. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    Is quickreply a part of phpBB or is a custom MozillaZine feature?

  19. Olive Says:

    Thanks! It indeed makes sense to have the form enclosing the 3 table tags.
    I think it’s an add-on, there’s a big handful of them on phpbbhacks.com