How Do The “More Stories” Options Work In Social Fixer?

After the release of version 7.701 of Social Fixer, there seems to be some confusion and frustration about the options to auto-click More Stories and control the auto-loading as you scroll down. I hope this helps clear things up.

First, a note: Customizing Facebook and making it work in different browsers is a very difficult task. I’m going to explain why things work how they do, but it’s probably more complicated than you realize. There is just no super-simple way to explain it, because it’s not an easy problem. So…

Summary

• Changes in the Chrome browser forced me to change how this works
• Two options control all behavior
• Messages are shown to tell you what is happening
• If you have problems, make sure you only have Social Fixer installed once, and clearing your cache and restarting your browser may fix it.

Facebook’s Auto-Loading Works Fine. Why Mess With It?

It works fine in some cases, but not all. Here’s the problem – their code detects when you have scrolled near the bottom of the page, and automatically loads more posts for you. Convenient. The problem is – if a lot of posts in your news feed have been tabbed or all of them have been marked as read, then the bottom of the feed is visible, and Facebook thinks you have scrolled all the way down and you want more posts! Their code will continue to load posts forever, because it keeps thinking you are at the bottom, and this causes the browser to slow down and in some cases lock up.

Facebook doesn’t expect the news feed stories to be filtered, tabbed, or hidden, so its code breaks in these cases. That’s why I need to patch in a fix, so it doesn’t behave that way.

Chrome Makes Life Difficult

Recent changes to the Chrome browser (beyond my control) have changed how I need to write some of the code in Social Fixer. (Read the technical details here).  Because of this, I had to take away some features, like the display of load count and the checkbox to toggle auto-loading of more stories in the control panel. I hope to put them back, but right now that was too big of a task to tackle.

So in some cases, changes in one browser force a change for all browsers. I can’t maintain multiple code branches separately for each browser, I have to code to the lowest common denominator. It’s a bummer.

How Do The New Options Work?

It’s actually quite simple. There are now just two checkboxes in the Popular tab of Social Fixer options to control this behavior:

Auto-click “More Stories” ___ times

If this checkbox is checked, and the input box has a number greater than 0, then Social Fixer will click for “More Stories” that number of times. This lets you load up, say, 10 pages of older posts each time, so your news feed is fuller and you might see posts you missed from earlier.

When this option runs, it puts a box at the bottom of the news feed that tells you what it is doing:

Many people (myself included) find it more convenient to have this information at the top, in the control panel. But as I described above, that’s not as simple as it seems, for technical reasons. I had to change that for now, until I can find a way around it.

Auto-load more posts when scrolled to the bottom

By default, Social Fixer removes Facebook’s code that automatically loads more posts when you scroll to the bottom, for the reasons mentioned above. This is the option that puts that functionality back in. It’s enabled by default, so everyone should have their news feed load more posts when they scroll, just like before.

But I have to do things a bit differently than Facebook. They have code that detects when the 4th-from-last story is visible, and that’s when they trigger the load. But I need to make sure that you are actually scrolling, otherwise I will run into the same problems as above with an empty feed. So I detect the scroll, and check to see if you are within 100 pixels of the bottom. If you are, then I trigger the loading of more posts.

There is a chance that some browsers or some situations may cause this scroll detection to not work correctly. I am looking into that.

When you have this option enabled, a message will be shown at the bottom of the feed telling you that auto-loading of posts won’t happen until the feed is scrolled:

This message is here so users aren’t confused about why they are at the bottom of the feed, but new posts aren’t loading. You have to scroll down! Once you actually scroll down, more posts will be loaded.

Why Is There An Annoying Message?

When both options are off, and Social Fixer is not doing any auto-clicking for you or auto-loading when you scroll to the bottom, a message is shown:

Some users have complained that this is annoying, but I think it’s necessary because many users will not understand why more posts aren’t being loaded when they scroll to the bottom and these options are off. This message appears to let you know that the code is working correctly, and this is why you aren’t seeing more posts appear.

Manually Clicking “More Stories” Should Always Work

You should always be able to click the More Stories link at the bottom to load more. If this isn’t happening, then there is a bug and I need to figure out why it’s happening.

It’s Broken!!!

Some users are reporting that the features do not actually work as described above. I’m hoping that this is just a case of not understanding how it works, which is why I wrote this blog post. But if there are real problems, I want to know about them!

First, there are a few things you should check if you’re having problems:

• Make sure Social Fixer only installed once in your extensions list. Some users have reported it showing up twice after the latest update. I don’t know why this happens.
• Try clearing your browser cache and restarting your browser.
• Double-check your options to make sure they are set how you think they are.

There are a few cases where the code may not function correctly, according to user reports:

• When viewing the feed for a custom friend List.
• When navigating around, and going “back” to the home page.

I am investigating these cases as well, to figure out if a real problem exists and how to fix it.

Let Me Know What You Are Seeing

Please comment on this post and let me know if you are experiencing problems, or if this blog post cleared up any confusion. I hope it’s the latter