ernestdefoe / ridge
Ridge — a long thread shows its own high ground. The posts people quoted, reacted to and marked, drawn as shading behind the scrubber.
Package info
Language:JavaScript
Type:flarum-extension
pkg:composer/ernestdefoe/ridge
Requires
- php: ^8.3
- flarum/core: ^2.0
Requires (Dev)
None
Suggests
None
Provides
None
Conflicts
None
Replaces
None
README
A long Flarum 2 thread has a shape. A few posts get quoted, reacted to and marked far more than the rest — and nothing in the forum shows you where they are. You scroll, and hope.
Ridge reads the signals the forum already holds and draws them as a strip of shading down the post scrubber, so a 300-post thread tells you where its high ground is before you get there.
Three bands, three places the thread actually turned: the budget everyone quoted, the quote that settled the venue, and the post that booked it.
What it reads
Nothing is curated, nobody votes, and no new content type exists.
| Signal | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Being quoted | 3 | The strongest ordinary signal a forum makes — it costs the quoter something and says these words mattered |
| Being marked | 2 | Nobody highlights a passage for someone else's benefit (Marginalia, public marks only) |
| Reactions | 1 | Cheap by design, so worth the least — flarum/likes and fof/reactions both count |
| Accepted answer | floor | Not scored against the rest: given a guaranteed peak, because a scrubber that buries the resolution of a 200-post thread has failed |
Every signal is optional. Ridge checks which tables exist and counts what it finds, so it works on a forum with none of those extensions installed — there is simply less to draw.
Decisions worth knowing about
- Shading, not markers. Threadmarks and friends put pins on the scrubber. A second extension adding pins to the same forty pixels would be a fight the reader loses, so Ridge paints the track instead and the two can be installed together.
- A strip at the edge, not a wash behind the track. Full-width shading put a gradient under the handle's own label, which is a legibility gamble in every theme its author cannot see.
- Peaks are spread over their neighbours. One post is a fraction of a pixel on a 400-post track; a band is something a reader can aim at, and "around here" is the honest claim anyway.
- Short threads get nothing. Under twelve posts (configurable) there is no shape worth drawing and the reader can see the whole scrubber already.
Cost
One request per discussion per page load — four aggregate counts, grouped by post. It is a route of its own rather than an attribute on the discussion resource, because hanging it there would run those counts for every row of the discussion list to draw nothing.
Installation
composer require ernestdefoe/ridge
Licence
MIT