Board Change or am I nuts?

[dhbookds]

This thread:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Calculated-Shipping-Location-Cost-Discrepancy/m-p/28146109#M11...

accepted solutions are now shown under the question...... @partial*eclipse   certainly had a good solution, but I've never noticed the solution moved to the top of other posts........

[readabouthorses]

Thanks! Cool! Let me see if I can find that Add-On and if it works with the newest Firefox.

[loveyourimagination49]

You’re to tech smart for me. 😂
GR:
That being said click for solution would be better then that green box thing, I find it annoying and a bunch are wrong.
The q and a boards are different then the discussion boards.
I could go on but I’m hungry 😂

[berserkerplanet]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

I believe the newest Stylish  3.xx versions work in FF Quantum. I use Win XP and  therefore can not use (and don't want to anyway) anything newer than FF52, normally use FF3.6.24 and FF31, and have not installed Stylish in anything newer than FF31 (thinking about outfitting a FF52 version with Stylish, Noscript, etc at some point but .....)

I can't help with look and feel, user interface, etc for the newer versions, but can help with basic manually written rules (like my post above) if needed.

Basically, Stylish is just a way to add your own styles to a website - to add to or override the CSS style sheets the website used, and change how page elements look (color, font, size, borders, etc), move the elements around, not display them at all (ads, annoying popup alerts, unneeded links, whatever), or add minimal content (that's the technique Lithium uses to add the green checkmarks we are talking about).

Stylish is a GUI interface, interactive version of the functionality the Firefox usercontent.css and userchrome.css files provide. You could add those rules I posted above to your Firefox usercontent.css file without using any addons, and they would work as intended just fine. The drawback to that approach is that you have to restart the browser for them to take effect, and if you want to change something, you have to go find the file, edit it with a text editor, and restart FF again. Makes it tough to play with a page layout, but ok for permanent(ish) fixes.

Stylish has become bloated like Adblock Plus has where it's a sort of easy-button thing that  lets you pick themes and styles from userstyles.org (similar to Adblock Plus provided ad blocking rulesets), autoupdates, etc.

I don't use either Adblock Plus or Stylish that way. I have zero Stylish rules or Adblock Rules provided by them online - I've disabled addon updating, downloading of rulesets, and the only things that run in wither one are my own manually written rules (1000's of lines)

I use both as surgical tools to address specific issues or annoyances, so I know what they are doing, and am not as baffled when a website suddenly breaks as someone who uses the addons like an all in one virus suite would be (because of an addon provided rule they didn't code and don't understand).

The cool thing about Stylish (and Adblock Plus and GreaseMonkey for that matter), is that once you install them and get up to speed, you have the power to fix a lot of annoyances either through your own code tinkering, or by plugging in simple rules like the ones I provide.

See an eBay recommendation popup to sell your items for 99¢ that keeps appearing and grinds your gears? a couple of lines in Stylish or Adblock Plus and it is gone (either one works, but Stylish approach permits finer targeting and control of what specific pages the rule applies to, with a tradeoff of more difficult temporary disabling of a specific rule)

Want a simple navigation menu of links to only the forums you visit here that floats on left side of forum pages? About 15 lines of JavaScript in a GreaseMonkey script. (I actually just did that the last few days along with a big "page reload" button too. Work in progress but quite handy.) JavaScript is required for certain things not possible in CSS which is the realm of Stylish CSS rules  and Adblock Plus element hiding rules)

I guess the TLDNR; is:
Stylish is very useful, I recommend using it in surgical mode with addon and rule updating turned off, only using self created rulesets (or rulesets you add specific snippets to), and once installed and you get the hang of it, it becomes a very powerful tool that allows you to take control back from the website codemonkeys and make webpages look the way you want them to. (same idea applies to Adblock Plus and GreaseMonkey)

[berserkerplanet]

Click for solution. Interesting. That would refer to the actual topic pages though, where the green boxes are my addition (see above).

We have multiple things going on here. topic list pages are now highlighted with green background, and have green checkmarks on left in fron of topic and green triangle/checkmark in upper right of topic block, and the actual thread pages have the solution floated to the top with green checkmarks in OP and solution posts.

I agree that "click for solution" on the topic post pages would be the best approach.

Maybe Lithium will consider it (unlikely).

It could be done in the usual annoyance fixing fashion using a GreaseMonkey script (and maybe with Stylish rules to handle the parts that are a pain in JavaScript) but it wouldn't be 10 lines of code. All the need info exists on the page, it would be a matter of hiding the floated solution post, inserting an "Unhide Solution" button in the OP somewhere, and unhiding the previously hidden solution when the button is clickulated (and then rehiding the solution when the original OP button is clicked again, or another hide button inserted in the solution post.

That actually just gave me an idea. The above is too much work that I don't want to do (because no one else will use it, and I just don't care myself), but it may be trivial to just hide that new floated post entirely and put things back the way they were.....

(wandering off to look at the page code....)

[berserkerplanet]

It occurred to me that the 2 solved checkmark disappearing rules in my previous post CAN be implemented in Adblock Plus as element hiding rules, but the first "green background highlight" changing rule can not as it changes element styling (Adblock can only hide elements entirely) which only Stylish (or a usercontent.css file or a GreaseMonkey script) can do.

Adblock Plus version of the rules to hide the green solved checkmarks on forum topic list pages:

community.ebay.com##body#lia-body.lia-body>div.lia-page>center>div.MinimumWidthContainer>
div.min-width-wrapper>div.min-width>div.lia-content>div.lia-quilt>div.lia-quilt-row-main>
div.lia-quilt-column-main-content>div.lia-quilt-column-alley-left>div#messageList>
div.t-data-grid.thread-list>table.lia-list-slim>tbody>tr.lia-list-row-thread-solved>
td.cThreadInfoColumn>div.block-messages-wrapper>div.message-blocks-community>
div.message-block-body>div.message-block-subject-date>div.subject>a.message-solved:before

community.ebay.com##body#lia-body.lia-body>div.lia-page>center>div.MinimumWidthContainer>
div.min-width-wrapper>div.min-width>div.lia-content>div.lia-quilt>div.lia-quilt-row-main>
div.lia-quilt-column-main-content>div.lia-quilt-column-alley-left>div#messageList>
div.t-data-grid.thread-list>table.lia-list-slim>tbody>tr.lia-list-row-thread-solved>
td.triangletop.lia-data-cell-secondary.lia-data-cell-icon

[berserkerplanet]

Things can be as they were.  This Stylish (or usercontent.css or Adblock Plus) rule, along with the previous 2 or 3 rules, can make it the way it was in the before times.

This rule disappears the floated solved solution post, and the "1 Accepted Solution" banner line above it on post pages and restores the reading flow to the previous state:

@-moz-document url-prefix('https://community.ebay.com/t5/'){
/* Kill floated solution post on post pages */
body#lia-body.lia-body>div.lia-page>center>div.MinimumWidthContainer>div.min-width-wrapper>
 div.min-width>div.lia-content>div.lia-quilt>div.lia-quilt-row-main>
 div.lia-quilt-column-main-content>div.lia-quilt-column-alley-left>
 div.lia-component-solution-list,

/* Kill "1 accepted solution" banner over floated solution post on post pages */
body#lia-body.lia-body>div.lia-page>center>div.MinimumWidthContainer>div.min-width-wrapper>
 div.min-width>div.lia-content>div.lia-quilt>div.lia-quilt-row-main>
 div.lia-quilt-column-main-content>div.lia-quilt-column-alley-left>
 div.lia-text.lia-forum-topic-page-solution-count.lia-component-solution-count-conditional

 {display:none !important;}

}/*end @-moz-document url-prefix('https://community.ebay.com/t5/')*/

If you don't want to hide the "1 accepted solution" banner, you can delete/omit that second selector chain, but easiest way is just to **bleep** the leading selector by adding an X or ZZ or DIAG (or whatever) to it so that it never matches any element on the page. (I usually use XXX in my code).

  ie:  instead of
     body#lia-body.lia-body>div...     change it to    XXXbody#lia-body.lia-body>div...
  it won't match anything, won't throw errors, and won't apply the action, but will still be there if you want to use it later (by just removing the XXX).

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Quick tutorial:

@-moz-document url-prefix('https://community.ebay.com/t5/')

is a site specifier that restricts application of the rules to matching sites. This one matches only pages with URLs that begin with 'https://community.ebay.com/t5/' which are eBay community forum pages.

body#lia-body.lia-body>div.lia-page>center>div.MinimumWidthContainer>div.min-width-wrapper>
 div.min-width>div.lia-content>div.lia-quilt>div.lia-quilt-row-main>
 div.lia-quilt-column-main-content>div.lia-quilt-column-alley-left>
 div.lia-component-solution-list

is a selector chain - a very specific pointer to a specific div element in the page structure (in this case is nails down the "div.lia-component-solution-list" element that is the accepted solution post on the page) That is a "div" element with a "lia-component-solution-list" class attribute which identifies it. Using that long chain ensures no false matches (but can cause failure of rule to apply if things change)

display:none !important;

is the CSS property to apply to any element that the selector chain matches, which should be only one in our case due to selector specificity, and should even be specific only to forum post pages if the site specifiers (@-moz-document domain... ) are sloppy or non-specific*.

display:none !important;  is the property that hides an element along with its space. If we used visibility: hidden !important;  then the solution post content would disappear, but the big, empty spot where it was would remain.

*non-specific site specifiers are not much of a problem in Stylish (newer versions can even use complex RegEx rules to nail down certain pages), but AdblockPlus element hiding rules suffer from allowing only specifiers like www.ebay.com, community.ebay.com, ebay.com, etc with no substructure, which make it impossible to narrow a rule down to only, for example, a forum reply page, while ignoring thread list pages or user profile pages. Thus the use of the very specific, long, chained selectors - it is very unlikely that the structure of a reply page will be the same as that of a user profile page, so even if an element with the same class was targeted on both, the ancestor element chain on each would differ, and the rule would not apply to the wrong element on the wrong page.

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Adblock Plus version of the above in 2 rules (has to be 2 rules, Adblock Plus can't apply a hide to elements via multiple selectors in a single rule):

community.ebay.com##body#lia-body.lia-body>div.lia-page>center>
div.MinimumWidthContainer>div.min-width-wrapper>div.min-width>div.lia-content>
div.lia-quilt>div.lia-quilt-row-main>div.lia-quilt-column-main-content>
div.lia-quilt-column-alley-left>div.lia-component-solution-list

community.ebay.com##body#lia-body.lia-body>div.lia-page>center>
div.MinimumWidthContainer>div.min-width-wrapper>div.min-width>div.lia-content>
div.lia-quilt>div.lia-quilt-row-main>div.lia-quilt-column-main-content>
div.lia-quilt-column-alley-left>
div.lia-text.lia-forum-topic-page-solution-count.lia-component-solution-count-conditional

[dhbookds]

1. Personally, don't know if anyone else would like it, but I would like the Ebay Blue answer, if there is one, highlighted or floated to the top.  Hard to find it in long threads, that I don't want to read all the answers to........

[hidy-hoo]

@dhbookds wrote:

1. Personally, don't know if anyone else would like it, but I would like the Ebay Blue answer, if there is one, highlighted or floated to the top.  Hard to find it in long threads, that I don't want to read all the answers to........

---

Great suggestion considering that I made the same one a while ago! ...although your idea of having the eBay staff answers float to the top is great addition.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Community-Platform-Feedback/eBay-Employee-Designation/m-p/27253861#M42...

[berserkerplanet]

That would be better than floating the others to the top.

I still don't like it though. I pretty much read (or at least skim) all the posts (unless it's a 12 page feedback, or ebay stock is .... thread), and it is jarring to read an out of order, usually out of context "solution" that requires the posts that came before it to be understood, and then slamming into the original copy down further.

In some rare cases, a "solution" is a solution and it does work, but for most I've seen, floating doesn't float my boat.

After a bit of thought, I enabled all but the triangle/checkmark rules I posted here and returned things mostly to how they were before. On the thread pages only the green triangle/checkmark in the corner remains to indicate a solution - the green highlight is gone, and on post pages, the floated solution and banner are disappeared, and the real solution post is left where it belongs and is given a light green highlight to make it easy to find when paging down.

(I can't float employee solutions to the top - it would work on single page threads, but there is no way for a script to find a solution on page 4 when sitting on page 1 - the info just isn't available in the fist page (yeah, might be some way for it to load all the pages in the background, scan through them, and rework the first page, but, meh. Way, too much work for no reward.

That is something that would take Lithium 5 minutes to do by targeting their existing "solution float" code at eBay employee responses. Problem with that is that rarely are those the chosen solution, and often there are multiple back and forth responses by eBay folk - they would all float to the top and really hose the context flow.

[berserkerplanet]

Well, I thought of it when I was 4 in a fever dream

I read you old post and agree that some sort of click to see/filter just eBay response could be useful. Floating all eBay blue responses to the top would make most threads unreadable (except that many of them quote the whole thread in each post so....)