History and Acknowledgements
From PluginWiki
This is the geek equivalent of an Oscar speech, so it may come over all Gwyneth Paltrow.
The plugin was written by Edward Hibbert, who's one of the moderators on Edinburgh Freegle (until 2009 Edinburgh Freecycle), in the UK. It was originally born of a low boredom threshold and a sneaking feeling that moderating was socially worthwhile but in practice quite dull:
The story of my life is one of turning a low boredom threshold into something constructive. Once I started moderating Freecycle groups I decided all those mouse clicks were far too tedious, and were seriously affecting the time I could spend drinking lattes in groovy cafes. So I wrote a little Firefox gizmo to help make moderating Freecycle easier. Now that’s snowballed wildly out of control, and I’m too busy working on that to drink any more lattes. That’s progress.
The group for this plugin has been invaluable in suggesting new features and finding bugs, the former apparently leading inexorably to the latter. Special thanks (and here's the Oscar bit where you mortally offend people by not mentioning them) to Em, Jason (who kindly hosted the first version of this Wiki), Jay, John, Jools, Nick, Rebecca (who handles the Spammer List), Richard (who kickstarted the original help file), and Trevor.
Particular thanks go to Nigel, who does the behind the scenes stuff on the Check Recently Joined Members, Recording Moderator Messages, and Spammer List functions. As well as hosting the domain, this wiki and various databases, he's written the back-end scripts and administrative web pages that most of you don't see, but without which that function wouldn't work. Steve Fairbairn, who was tragically killed in 2009, also helped out with this.
The techy stuff: it started off as a Greasemonkey script, which is an easy route into hacking around with web pages. More recently it's pulled in Javamail, invoked via some magic gleaned from here. Making this work on antiquated JVMs is done via Retroweaver. None of it would be possible without the open architecture of the Firefox browser - gosh, you guys, etc. etc.
You can see where the plugin is being used here, which comes courtesy of Google Maps and Geobyte's IP address locator.
The users of the plugin wanted to add their own acknowledgment into the mix, and so have generated a Thank Yous To Edward page to express their thanks for the most useful tool a moderator could have.
