In post 30, Psyche wrote:
Yeah a lot of options. I'm kind of skeptical of fully browser-based solutions like browser extensions because I expect they'd all manage the whole "votes are distributed across pages" thing really awkwardly. I'd love to know if I'm wrong!
On the other hand, the biggest downside of colab notebooks will probably be the fact that the entire execution environment has to be set up at each new use, slowing down performance. Also, UX won't quite be seamless, even if we can technically reduce interaction to filling a textbox or two and pressing "run".
This leaves me preferring a backend solution where we find a really cheap way to host a server that monitors various threads and provides an API for retrieving vote counts. From there, any arbitrary frontend UX becomes doable -- chrome extensions, web pages, etc. And these frontends would in turn be compatible with any votecounter implementation that provides the same API.
Considering Tampermonkey allows fetching across the site (which in-page JS rejects), I'm almost certain that it's possible to make a Tampermonkey userscript to integrate it directly into the site itself which would literally be the best user experience we could get here. I'd use a library like Cheerio to parse the data which I'm not sure works in Tampermonkey, but if not a custom browser extension is the next best thing (it's a little awkward for users to set up though).
I am not too experienced with Colab notebooks so I don't have any input on that.
Backend solutions isn't a super long-lasting approach, there's a few issues that come with that including when the site changes and breaks the code etc if the person who manages the server is no longer working on it, the tool is as good as dead.
I do believe we should be focusing on a browser extension (either as a userscript or a whole extension) OR a Java app which users download as both make the user experience simple, and also it should work regardless of the users device or setup