Enhancing Twitter experience - When everybody is verified, no-one is.

[Crad]

I've never created a Chrome Extension before. Nor am I a JS developer. I just figured that this would be a fun little project, and maybe someone will like it or fiddle with it on their own.

 

With the most recent events, especially adding buy-able verification checkmarks and sudden influx of impersonation accounts, I've decided that by getting rid of the checkmarks completely (or by giving them to everyone), the experience would be much better and nobody would feel left out by not shelling out 8 bucks for stupid blue checkmark.

 

I've made this initially to completely remove them, but later on decided that it would be funnier to make every account verified. Unfortunately, Elon has announced that they'll be implementing new colours for government entities and media people. I'll hold off with adding any new features until those are added - there already is this damn "Official" note as "Verifiedest person" and I have yet to figure out how to mess around with this - I'm most inclined to just get rid of it completely, but who knows.

 

Whole thing is completely open source (under WTFPL) so feel free to modify it however you want and install it as a developer. I found this to be quite an enjoyable entry project since it's rather small.

Link to source code: https://github.com/rgryta/Verified-Bird

 

If you think you would like it, but don't really want to mess with manual installation, I also published it on Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verified-bird/ljmlgobgmbddpldljkhejpcpjimmhjoc

 

I'm open to any ideas to make Twitter more enjoyable. I've never really used Twitter before these recent events, but it has been tons of fun so far watching everything being lit on fire.

[shadow_ray]

cool and pretty cool license too! if I were a heavy twitter user I would definitely modify this to restore twitters original functionality

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, shadow_ray said:

cool and pretty cool license too! if I were a heavy twitter user I would definitely modify this to restore twitters original functionality

 

How would you know what accounts were originally verified? 

[Crad]

2 hours ago, fpo said:

How would you know what accounts were originally verified? 

This was honestly a bit of a pain to figure out.

Originally, I was scanning the page for SVG path - Twitter verification checkmark is always a path and support for images would be.... eh.

 

Then I wanted to add option to ADD verification to unverified users. And so I decided to try finding it based on the classes of div container that has verification mark inside of it.

This container has about 7-8 different classes at the same time. Twitter is reusing them a lot for different things, but in different combinations, which makes sense ofc.

 

After that I noticed another problem. These class combinations are different even among verification checkmarks - for example on pages that embed tweets (like news articles) have slightly different sets of classes for that container.

 

So I basically cross-checked all those different sets that I could find and it "somehow" works

 

Edit: To add. The whole extension basically listens to Mutations on the page and checks if newly loaded tweets contain any verification checkmarks. Once those are found - it applies the chosen logic and adds a custom tag to the container called "verified-bird". That's because I don't want to perform logic on the same element twice - sometimes there are multiple mutations on the same element so it's to mitigate any "unverify verified and then reverify it again"-like behavior.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Crad