MRD Comment Control (Hackernews & Reddit)

Enhances comment sections on Hacker News and Old Reddit with advanced highlighting, filtering, and tracking.

# MRD Comment Control **MRD Comment Control** is a browser extension that tracks your thread visits on Hacker News and old Reddit, highlighting new comments since your previous visit, offering multi-color keyword filtering, and auto-expanding long discussions. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mrd-comment-control/bmnidhlnhjjcaffjabjfcgkimmjncbpk ## Key Features - **New Comment Highlighting:** Remembers thread visit history and highlights comments posted since your previous visit with customizable colors. - **On-Page Summary Panel:** A draggable floating table showing visit counts, new comment stats, and keyword matches with quick-filter viewing modes. - **Keyword Tracking & Tagging:** Track up to 6 custom keyword lists with case-sensitive or wildcard matching, displayed as inline word highlights or username badges. - **Dim Unfocused Content:** Reduces opacity on non-matching or read comments to bring fresh discussions into focus. - **Keyboard & Shift Shortcuts:** Press Shift to toggle delete mode for individual visits; press Alt to toggle alternate highlight views. - **HN Auto-Expander:** Built-in expander button to uncollapse truncated comment threads on Hacker News. - **Cloud-Synced History:** Thread visit timestamps and settings sync transparently across your browser profile via Chrome storage. ## Feature Guide ### What Comment Control does Comment Control adds a small floating panel to Hacker News and old Reddit comment pages. It remembers every time you have visited a thread, and uses that history to show you **what changed since you were last there**: which comments are new, and which of your keywords appear in them. You click a row in the panel to jump to the moment you care about, and the page highlights or filters comments to match. ### Reading the panel table Each row is one of your past visits, labeled by age (for example "5m", "2h", "3d"). The **NEW** column counts comments posted after that visit. The colored columns each represent one of your keyword lists (words you're watching for); a number there means "this many new comments contain one of these words." The top "ALL" row counts the whole thread — click its × to erase all visit history for this page. ### Two viewing modes The panel has two modes, switched with the toolbar button: - **Since** mode: click a past visit and every comment added from that moment to now is highlighted or (in filter mode) the rest of the page is hidden. - **In-between** mode: a row covers the gap between two visits ("2h–5m" means "after the 2h-ago visit, up to the 5m-ago one"), so you can read just the slice from one specific sitting. Comments newer than one minute aren't listed as their own row. ### Filtering with keywords Type up to six keyword lists in the popup (comma- or space-separated terms; wildcards like `trump*` work). When you click a number in a keyword column, the page hides every comment that doesn't match that keyword since your chosen visit. Click the "ALL" row to un-filter. Matches are painted inside the comment text as small chips; in "prepend" mode the matched words are also listed at the top of the comment. ### Highlight styles In the popup you choose **preset** (each keyword list gets its own translucent color chip that adapts to the page theme) or **black & white** (solid black-on-white or white-on-black chips depending on page darkness). You can also pick "inline" vs "prepend" marking. On HN, if a thread has more comments than the separator limit (default 500), the thin lines marking where each visit's new comments start are turned off to keep the page fast. ### Extra buttons on the panel - **Show parent**: when a comment matches, also reveal the comment it replies to. Hold the Alt key for the same effect temporarily. - **Compact**: hides rows that look identical to the row above them, so a long history collapses to the visits where something actually changed. - **Add visit** (clock icon): type a shorthand like `130` (1 hour 30 minutes ago) or `1230` (1 hour 23 minutes ago — pairs are hours, then minutes, then days) to fake a visit and see history as if you'd been here before. - **Expander** (Reddit only): a play button that auto-clicks "more comments" links, nearest your reading position first. ### Deleting visit history Hover a row's × to delete just that visit (and visits merged into it — visits within your "combine minutes" window count as one). Deleting the × on the ALL row resets the thread to only its most recent visit. These deletions also sync to your other devices. ### The popup The toolbar popup sets colors for HN and Reddit highlighting, the combine window, panel dim-when-unfocused (0–10 scale), the HN separator limit, and the six keyword lists. It shows how many threads are stored locally and in the cloud. "Clear local" erases visit history on this device; "Clear cloud" wipes **everything in Chrome sync for this extension — including your settings, not just visit history** [L-COMMENTCONTROL-01]. ### Recording thread visits Open a comment thread and, after a short delay (5 seconds by default), the extension records one visit for it — but only if your previous visit to that thread was more than a minute ago. Page reloads and quick back-and-forth navigation don't inflate the count. Each thread keeps up to 1,000 visits (default). Visits closer together than your "Combine Visits" setting (in minutes) are merged into one entry, with the number of merged visits kept for display. The current comment total is captured with each visit by reading the thread header, so the panel always knows how the thread grew between your visits. ### New-comment markers on listing pages On Hacker News list pages and Reddit subreddit listings, any thread you have visited before gets a bold red marker like 【12】 next to the comment count — 12 being the comments added since your last recorded visit. Threads you've never opened show nothing, and threads whose recorded visit didn't capture a comment count also show nothing. The marker appears only where a previous visit exists to compare against, so a fresh browser profile starts with a clean listing page. `[L-COMMENTCONTROLB-02]` (duplicate-marker risk on HN) ### Viewing modes and delete mode (Shift) The panel's mode button flips the visit table between two views — "Since" and "Inbetween" — and remembers your choice. Holding **Shift** enters delete mode: delete controls appear on the panel, and if you were in the Inbetween view it temporarily displays as the Since view (the mode icon flips back too), so rows line up for deleting. Release Shift and your previous view returns. Switching tabs or clicking away from the window also safely exits delete mode. ### Alternate highlight view (Alt) While you hold **Alt**, every keyword highlight on the page re-renders in its alternate form; releasing Alt restores the normal view. This lets you compare the two keyword renderings on the live page without opening settings. Pages without keyword highlights show no visible change. Note the page's own Alt-key behaviors (like menu focus) are suppressed while the extension handles the key. ### Panel display toggles Two checkboxes adjust the panel itself. "Show parent" reveals the parent comment each row refers to, directly in the page. "Compact view" shrinks the panel to a denser layout. Both apply immediately and are remembered across sessions. ### Editing your visit history You can fix history by hand: add a custom visit for right now (or any moment you choose), delete a single visit, or wipe all visits for the current thread. After any change the panel rebuilds immediately, so counts of new comments and keyword tallies recompute against the edited history. Custom visits follow the same merge and cap rules as automatic ones, and exact-duplicate timestamps are ignored. ### Keyword lists Six keyword slots, each with its own highlight color (KW1 yellow through KW6 red — matching the tint of its input box in settings). Put one or many keywords in a slot; every match anywhere in a comment is counted and tagged per slot, so the panel can tally hits per list. Matching is word-based. A keyword typed in lowercase matches any capitalization; mixed upper/lowercase matches only that exact spelling. Attach `*` to a keyword's start or end to widen what it matches. When two keywords would match at the same spot, the longer one wins. ### Keyword rendering: Tag or Word, Color or BW Two setting pairs control how matches look on the page. "Keyword Mode" picks between **Tag** (a colored label attached to the comment) and **Word** (the matched text itself is highlighted in place). "Keyword Color" picks between **Color** (each slot uses its preset tint) and **BW** (black-and-white rendering). Both apply to all six slots at once. ### Toolbar icon themes Click the icon in the extension popup's header to cycle the toolbar icon through three looks — default, light, and dark. The choice is saved per browser (not synced across devices), and the popup preview updates immediately. ### Sync across devices Every 30 minutes — and when the browser starts — the extension pushes a copy of your visit history to your Chrome sync so it follows you to other machines. The synced copy is capped: at most 600 threads, and at most 5 visits per thread. The full history stays on this machine; sync carries the trimmed projection. ### Settings popup The popup holds: HN and Reddit highlight colors (hex code, `#` typed for you), the six keyword slots, Keyword Mode (Tag/Word), Keyword Color (Color/BW), Combine Visits in minutes, Unfocused Opacity for the dimmed panel, and HN Max Separator (how large a thread gets before separator lines stop being drawn). A hidden debug area (shift-click the header icon) offers "Clear Local" and "Clear Cloud" buttons that wipe this machine's data or the synced copy. ### Panel theme matching The panel reads the page's own background and switches itself between light and dark styling to match — including following Hacker News' dark mode. Keyword highlights also adapt so they stay readable on dark pages. No setting to change; it just follows the page. ### HN auto-expander button On Hacker News, a toolbar button auto-clicks collapsed "More" links for you. Its badge counts what it can still open, and the button is greyed out when there's nothing left to expand. Click it to pause or resume; the tooltip tells you which state it's in.