Free Republic Tree Viewer — Recently, I decided to learn JavaScript, having basically avoided working with it for the longest time. Being the sort of student who doesn't learn just from reading books, I needed a project. So, I decided to try a Greasemonkey script.

I started out to make something that would automatically quote posts. Freepers tend to get lazy about quoting the posts they reply to, making it hard to follow their meaning sometimes without following the To link to see the original. But I find that somewhat inconvenient. Initially, I got it working for targets within the current page. Next, I added the ability to get posts out of previous pages (requires loading the page in the backgound, a bit more advanced).

Then I realized I could use the techniques I'd already developed to turn the whole thread inside out. I added the ability to transform a thread from its usual flat, chronological form to a "tree view", in which replying posts are indented beneath the posts to which they are in reply.

You are welcome to try out the result . You need to be running Chrome or Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed.

2015-11-16 Now updated to clean up the garbage characters we have been seeing lately whenever anybody posts content containing Unicode. Most commonly, this occurs with em-dashes and single- and double-curly quotes. However, any character outside the 7-bit ASCII range will exhibit the problem.

2017-12-14 Now distributed as an extension. No longer dependent on Greasemonkey.

---

Absolutify — A bookmarklet useful for posting HTML from Firefox.

---

Free Republic Posting Form Enhancer — A Greasemonkey script that modifies the posting page to ease the entry of HTML tags and to make better use of your screen real estate. It provides an HTML toolbar to save typing while entering common HTML tags. It also allows you more room to enter your post, and it also shows the post preview at full window width, giving you a better idea of how it will look when posted.

2015-11-04 Now updated to fix the unicode bug that has crept into the FR server. When you Post or Preview, it replaces any Unicode you may have with HTML entities, which the FR server handles correctly. After a preview, it translates the entities back to Unicode (UTF-8), so that you can continue editing your HTML code.

The entity translation is limited to numeric decimal entities (e.g., “). It does not affect symbolic entites, such as & and hex entites, such as “.

2017-12-14 Now distributed as an extension. No longer dependent on Greasemonkey.

hits since 2007-04-15.