Tyranny of Heaven [ToH]

MMO game forums (and news sites) are such cesspools of negativity. I rarely post in them, yet I cannot stop reading them. Now as far as game forums go, it's almost always the case that only a small minority of the player base (the vocal minority) post in them. It's always amusing and facepalm-inducing.

I don't deny that there are constructive people (and constructive posts) — I don't think I would read forums/news sites otherwise. But every once in a while, my troll senses tingle. Some attention whore always starting threads with sensationalist titles/content. Or some idiot always spouting nerd rage in threads/articles, whether on-topic or (most likely) off-. Blah blah, always negative. "X is dying!" "DOOOOM!"

Anyway, one of the news sites I frequent is Massively.com. I'm not sure why I really like them since they seem to have become quite sensationalist recently. But they're always posting news & editorials — on games I'm interested in and games I'm not (and no, I don't begrudge them for that). So it gives me something to read throughout the day.

But the troll infestation is so dire. Take this one user — let's call him Mr. Sakura Park — who's always posting vitriol (or simply the words "Sakura Park") whenever articles about a certain game company come up. That guy really got on my nerves.

But I really must thank him. Because his comments inspired me to install Greasemonkey, a Firefox addon. I managed to find a comment filter script for Joystiq (Massively's sister site) and adapt it for Massively.

I'm a coder at heart though (more than that, I guess, since I get paid for it :P) and while I advocate the reuse of code, I just had to write my own filter. And so I did.

My JavaScript skills are no where near being one of my strengths. In fact, despite being a web application developer, I tend to avoid all matters of user interface — HTML, CSS, JavaScript. But writing my own Greasemonkey script was a nice refresher in JavaScript. (JavaScript is pretty close to C, which I am proficient in, but it's just the whole HTML DOM API that I need constant reference for — Thank you W3Schools!)

And so I wrote something (from scratch) that's a bit more compact and probably slightly more efficient. I may end up donating it to Greasemonkey's UserScripts site, we'll see. It's been a few days now since I've seen Mr. Sakura Park's (or any other troll's) comments. And from the replies I see directed at him, I know I'm not the only one tired of his constant trolling.