Browser extension: Social Notifications

I’ve written a small browser extension that displays an in-game notification when you receive a new invitation to participate in a social action.

I like to be social in Fallen London, but I tend to forget to check the ‘Messages’ tab, so I created an extension to check it for me periodically and let me know if there are any new invitations waiting for me. FBG have whitelisted it and it’s available from the Chrome and Mozilla web stores. Installation details are at the end of this post; I’ll explain how it works first.

When you log in (or refresh the page), and at five-minute intervals after that, the extension makes a behind-the-scenes trip to the ‘Messages’ tab for you. If there are any invitations to social actions that you haven’t seen before, it adds a little badge to the ‘Messages’ tab that looks like this:

By ‘invitations’, I mean essentially anything on the left-hand (‘My Messages’) side of the ‘Messages’ tab that has a white button that requires a response from you. It keeps a list (in your browser’s local storage) of messages you’ve seen before. When you visit the ‘Messages’ tab, the extension assumes that you’ve seen the invitations, and clears the notification badge. It doesn’t do anything beyond that — it won’t respond or dismiss any invitations for you or anything like that.

Also, notably, it doesn’t have anything to do with messages on the right-hand side (‘Recently…’), so it won’t notify you when, for example, your actions are accepted, Time, the Healer visits, or you receive letters. I don’t plan to update the extension to do so, partly for technical reasons — the ‘Recently…’ side of things tends to behave in a rather unpredictable way that’s hard for me to test — but mostly because that’s not the specific itch I wrote the extension to scratch, and I’m lazy.

Not too lazy to fix it if it’s broken, of course, so please let me know of any bugs.

For Chrome users, the Web Store link is here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fallen-london-social-noti/baebnomhiokfcpfadkjpkeoohmogecdb
Firefox users can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fl-social-notifications/
The source code is on Github: https://github.com/sdob/fl-social-notifications
edited by Gallmarch on 6/16/2017

This has been whitelisted (and accepted by Mozilla).

Thank you! The lack of message notification in game has been bugging me ever since I started playing.