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New Greasemonkey script makes superusers’ jobs easier

13

By on June 15th, 2011

Foursquare’s website does a lot of things right. Sadly, making it easy for superusers to clean up the venue database isn’t one of them. I often find myself with 30-40 tabs open with different venues that need work, switching between them and digging 2-3 pages deep to get to the proper page for editing. A new Greasemonkey plugin from Michael Harris aims to make the process a little easier.

With the plugin installed, a new set of links appear next to each venue on the search results page. They point to the “manage venue” page (where you can close venues, report duplicates, etc.) and the “edit venue” page (where you edit things like address and phone number). The venue ID also appears so you can copy and paste it directly into the appropriate merge field.

In the future, Harris hopes to add a function to search Google Maps for more information about the venue (a great way to find proper addresses, etc) and merge, delete and close functions without ever having to leave the search results screen.

The plugin works in Firefox (via Greasemonkey) and Safari (via an extension). Being a userscript, it should function in Chrome, but I haven’t been able to get it to work. Harris is looking into the issue. UPDATE (3:28 pm): Harris has released an extension on the Chrome Web Store that works perfectly.

I’ve been using the plugin for the past few days and it’s made venue cleanup much easier. I don’t have to open nearly as many tabs or click nearly as many times to edit a venue, which makes the job of cleaning foursquare’s database much quicker.

Superusers, what do you think of the plugin? Does it make your work faster?

  • http://www.twitter.com/michi_w76 Michi_W76

    Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Will try it right away :)

  • http://smalltownbigcincy.wordpress.com Rachel

    Holy Crap!!! this is amazing!!! now I only need 2 tabs open instead of 15! It took me a bit to figure out exactly how to do it, but its pretty flawless! (Once i figured out you need the GreaseMonkey add-on for firefox, BEFORE you did the plugin off the site.)

  • RichG_

    Looks nice. There is an extension for Chrome made by pomu0325 here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ffeldnemcacanbehalgmalihhicmijog?hl=en-US

    These tools really help but if there is any more room to automate other tasks it would be tremendously helpful. I don’t know the limitations of browser extensions and how they work with foursquare’s site but…I would LOVE to see:
    1-click Categorize as Home
    1-click Venue ID Copy
    Include “near 0.0000, 0.0000″ coordinates in the Search Google link
    etc.

    Thanks for the info!

  • Matt

    I applied to be a super user the day I saw this post, as of today (6/14/2011) I haven’t heard anything. I know there probably isn’t a superuser or very few of them in my area (NW Pennsylvania) & I’d really like to clean up alot of the venues around here that aren’t categorized correctly (thus missing out on easy badges) or are simply closed. Can anyone recommend me to be a superuser?

    https://foursquare.com/stewmj

  • vincent

    This is a request for any super user. Can one of you folks fix the designation for KFC locations to be Fried Chicken Joints? All I see when I do a search is mostly Kennedy Fried chicken places…

  • LiteSalt

    You guys would stand a much better chance of having your requests taken into consideration by going to the GetSatisfaction Foursquare user group at http://www.getsatisfaction.com/foursquare.

    And vincent, it would be an almost impossible task for any one superuser to reassign all KFC categories, not to mention that there is some debate to whether KFC is primarily a fast food restaurant or fried chicken joint.

  • Mareks

    Great, just great!. :) And the best of it – it really does the thing – it goes faster :) )

  • http://twitter.com/Netro1 Netro

    cool, gotta try, but I think it will helps a lot

  • http://allthingsempty.wordpress.com/foursquare-resources/ Michael H

    Thanks everyone for all the positive feedback, i’m glad my fellow SU’s have found this plugin as useful as I have from writing it.

    As a new SU, the site design and workflow frustrated the hell out of me and wasn’t conducive to fast action. This was important as my city didn’t have any really active SU’s policing and cleaning it up.

    A couple of quick comments:

    RichG_ :
    Looks nice. There is an extension for Chrome made by pomu0325 here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ffeldnemcacanbehalgmalihhicmijog?hl=en-US
    These tools really help but if there is any more room to automate other tasks it would be tremendously helpful. I don’t know the limitations of browser extensions and how they work with foursquare’s site but…I would LOVE to see:
    1-click Categorize as Home
    1-click Venue ID Copy
    Include “near 0.0000, 0.0000? coordinates in the Search Google link
    etc.
    Thanks for the info!

    Firstly, the Chrome extension you highlight is pretty useless as it works only on the venue page – and even then the Google search query it sends out only has the venue title in it which is a real waste of time.

    As for future features, the Google outlink is on the roadmap, which will provide a better search result and try to use the venue GPS coords where available.

    I don’t know if injecting the venue ID into the venue page is going to be much help, as you should be using search to find the matching location with the most checkins anyway (from which using my script you can get the venue ID anyway, and link straight to the manage venue page to request the merge). Future enhancements to the search results will provide hopefully a pop-up link to request a merge without having to visit the manage venue page, but that’s some heavy work for the moment.

    On the re categorisation front, as I’m only an SU1 I can’t see how this exactly works so for the moment this is out of scope on the roadmap.

    Rachel :
    …It took me a bit to figure out exactly how to do it, but its pretty flawless! (Once i figured out you need the GreaseMonkey add-on for firefox, BEFORE you did the plugin off the site.)

    I did hope I made it clear enough that the Greasemonkey for Firefox plugin was needed before you could use it. I’ll review the page to see if I can’t make it a little clearer up front in case anyone else gets stuck in a similar situation. Thanks for that important nugget of feedback.

    • http://www.therealjamesdean.com Dean T.

      Excellent! Loving this already and I just barely installed it. :-)

    • RichG_

      Cool! Thanks for reading the suggestions.

      I just saw its working for Chrome now so there’s no real use for the other one.

      Another thing, it may be beyond the capabilities of a browser extension but it would be awesome if there was a way for a script to run on the edit venue page that would update the address fields to match the style guide. Capitalize words, Abbreviate Rd, Ave, US States, etc. Awesome Work!

  • Felix

    Definitely helpful.

  • http://painintheparadox.tumblr.com Marques

    Wow, makes my work alot easier! Thanks!

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