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Features

The TW Power Tools extension offers the following features/options:

Infinite scroll

Thread lists

Option name: Enable infinite scrolling in thread lists.

Enables infinite scroll in thread lists in TW. This feature has already been added to the Community Console by Google.

Inside threads

Option names: Automatically load batches of messages inside threads when scrolling down, Automatically load all messages at once inside threads when scrolling down.

Enables infinite scroll inside threads, both in TW and the Community Console. Both options are mutually exclusive, and depending on which one you choose, the feature will behave differently:

• Load batches of messages: when scrolling to the bottom, some more messages will be loaded. If you scroll to the bottom again, more messages will be loaded, and so on.
• Load all messages at once: when scrolling to the bottom, all the remaining messages will be loaded at once.

Additional enhancements

Community Console toolbar

Option name: Make the toolbar stick at the top of thread lists in the Community Console.

Fixes the toolbar of thread lists in the Community Console so it doesn't disappear when scrolling down.

Redirect to the Community Console

Option name: Redirect all threads opened in TW to the Community Console.

This feature is useful if you want the threads you open from the email notification link directly in the Community Console.

Profile history

Option name: Show a "previous posts" link in user profiles.

Both in TW and the Community Console, show 2 links in user profiles, which link to the list of threads that the user has created/replied to in the current forum, and in all the forums.

Draft messages

Option name: Activate the enableLoadingDraftMessages Community Console flag.

Enables a Community Console flag which, when opening the reply dialog in a thread in the Community Console, if a draft message was saved in the Google servers, it is loaded in the editor.

Draft messages are saved regularly into Google Servers even if the flag is not enabled, so this flag can help you recover your work from a crash, for example.

Contrast between read/unread threads

Option name: Increase contrast between read and unread threads in the Community Console.

In thread lists in the Community Console, the backgrounds for read and unread threads are very similar. This option increases this contrast.

Sticky drawer headers

Option name: Make the headers in the Community Console sidebar stick at the top.

Dark mode

Option name: Enable the dark theme in the Community Console.

This setting lets you load a custom-built dark theme for the Community Console. In the options page there is a selector which lets you choose how the dark theme gets enabled:

• Switch in the Community Console: a button appears at the top of the Community Console, which lets you switch between the light and dark themes.
• OS dark mode settings: when you enable the OS wide dark mode setting (not available in all Operating Systems), the dark theme is enabled in the Community Console. Note that after you change the OS setting, you should reload the Community Console in order to load the corresponding theme.

Hide the Community Console drawer

Option name: Always hide the drawer (left column) in the Community Console.

When opening the Community Console, the sidebar which shows the forums, filters, etc. will be hidden/closed by default. Useful if your screen is small.

Drag and drop links to the text editor (Chrome-only)

Option name: Allow to drag and drop links to the Community Console text editor while preserving the text.

In Chrome, when drag and dropping bookmarks or Omnibox links to the Community Console rich text editor, the bookmark/link title gets replaced by the URL. This option reverses this so the text gets preserved.

Batch lock

Option name: Add the option to lock multiple threads from the Community Console thread list.

More prominent announcements dot

Option name: Show the announcements notification dot more prominently in the Community Console.

When this option is enabled, the "Alpha" banner in the upper-left corner of the Community Console is removed, and the notification dot which appears in the hamburger menu when there's a new announcement is enlarged and animated so you don't miss it.

Reposition the expand thread button

Option name: Place the "expand thread" button all the way to the left in the Community Console thread lists.

Avatars in thread lists

Option name: Show avatars in thread lists in the Community Console.

When this option is enabled, in thread lists in the Community Console avatars will be shown next to each thread to show the avatars of the people who have participated in the thread.

The extension retrieves the main message and the first 15 replies, and shows the avatars in order (the first avatar corresponds to the first person who joined the thread). If a user hasn't set an avatar, it is skipped, and only up to 3 avatars are shown.

Known issues

• Avatars aren't shown for threads in private forums, due to technical reasons.
• Only the main message and the first 15 replies are considered in each thread, so if someone joins the thread after this limit, their avatar won't appear.
• When going back from a thread to the thread list by clicking the "back" button, avatars take some seconds to appear.
• If more than 3 people with avatar have posted a message, the extension will not indicate this in any way, it will just show the first 3 avatars.
• Even if a PE is not badged in a forum, their avatar will be shown in the thread list (this is actually a feature, not an issue). The avatar won't show however inside the thread.
• If a PE changes their avatar, you might still see the old one in the thread list, due to the fact that avatars are stored in a cache, and are only updated when a new reply is posted in the thread.

Notification when a thread list receives updates

Option name: Show a notification in the Community Console when a thread list has new updates.

This feature checks whether there are new threads in the current thread list every 3 minutes, and notifies you when there are new threads at the top of the list. The notification is a "soft notification": it notifies you by adding some exclamation marks ([!!!]) at the beginning of the tab title, and by showing a snackbar in the page, as you can see in the following screenshot:

It notifies you with a soft notification instead of an actual notification because this way you can control when you want to participate in the forums or not. If you're not paying attention to the Community Console tab, you won't be bothered.

This feature only works in the Community Console, not in the public forums, and only when the sort settings are set to "Sort by: Last Updated" and descending order. The bell icon next to the sort settings will indicate whether the sort settings are correct (and thus this feature is working) or not.

Limit the height of inline images

Option name: Prevent inline images in messages from being taller than the current window.

It is a common case that users upload high resolution screenshots of their phone, which results in a very tall image being shown in the forum. This feature adds a custom style to set a maximum height for images inside forum messages, so they aren't taller than the current viewport.

Block draft messages from being saved in Google servers

Option name: Block the sending of your replies as you type to Google servers in the Community Console.

The Community Console has a feature which lets users save in Google servers regular drafts of the message they're typing in a reply box, so they can recover it later on (for instance if their computer crashes).

In theory, this feature is controlled by the flag called enableLoadingDraftMessages, which is disabled by default. However, even if this flag is disabled, the Community Console keeps saving (and deleting) the draft message (see this video). Thus, the only thing that changes the flag is whether the saved draft message is attempted to be recovered or not.

This option blocks all these requests to save/delete/retrieve draft messages, so the feature is effectively disabled.

Per-forum activity in profiles

Option name: Show per-forum activity in profiles in the Community Console.

An image is worth a thousand words:

Thread page design in the Community Console

Option name: Show the old/new thread page design in the Community Console.

This option lets you force the old or new thread page design in the Community Console. The old thread page design was exclusive to the Console, while the new one has the same design of the public TW thread pages.

Known issues

The TW team is currently testing the new nested replies feature in some threads/forums. However, the way how threads with nested replies are represented internally is different than before, and this causes the old design to not load these type of threads correctly.

This is why when the user chooses the old UI, the extension now shows a warning banner in these threads to make them aware of why the thread doesn't look right.

A possible way to work around this is to load these affected threads via TW Basic instead of the Community Console. Otherwise, you might have to disable the old UI temporarily from the options page and reload the Community Console to view them via the new UI.

Reduce whitespace

Option name: Reduce the whitespace in the Community Console and TW.

This option reduces excessive whitespace throughout the Community Console and TW Basic, as shown in the screenshots below:

It also reduces whitespace in thread lists in small screens so the titles fit better and can be read:

Flatten threads

Option name: Show a toggle to enable/disable nested view in threads.

This option shows a toggle in threads just below the main post which lets you switch between the vanilla nested view and a new view which shows all replies in a linear non-nested view, just like before.

Indicator dot

Option names: Show whether the OP has participated in other threads, Show the number of questions and replies written by the OP within the last n months next to their username.

This section includes options which are useful to determine whether an OP is a newcomer or has posted in the forums before. A full description of what each option does can be found at docs/op_indicator.md.

These are the possible combinations of both options:

• 1st option enabled, 2nd option disabled.

• 1st option disabled, 2nd option enabled.

• Both options enabled.