Overview

From PluginWiki

Basic Terminology

This introduction talks you through some basic terminology.

Firefox is a web browser, like Internet Explorer (for Windows) or Safari (for Mac). It lets you look at web pages on the Internet. When you go online to look at your Freecycle group's page, you're using a browser to do it.

But Firefox has an important difference: it allows people to write little gizmos that can do extra stuff, strictly speaking called extensions but often called plugins. You can get plugins for lots of things.

The Moderation plugin is one such gizmo - a more complex one than most - that changes the way Yahoo's web pages look (to you), to make it easier to do various things you need to do to run a Freecycle group.

Java is a programming language. Part of the plugin is written in Java, so you need to install Java for the plugin to work. Java's written by Sun, and some versions have a bug, which stops the plugin working, so there are often a lot of mails about it on the group.

A wiki is web page that can be changed by anyone. (Most web pages can only be changed by their original creators.)  The most well-known wiki is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. This help documentation for the Moderation plugin is a wiki, so that users of the plugin can improve the help documentation.  

Ok, what does this plugin do?

The aim of the plugin is to radically reduce the number of mouse clicks you need to do when performing your day to day moderation tasks on Freecycle groups. So

• You can set up standard messages for rejecting posts with a single click.
• Rather than have to click through several Yahoo screens to find something out, the plugin will pull it into the page you were originally looking at.
• Rather than go through several steps to check something, or make a change, the plugin should reduce it to a click or two.

...and so on.

That's the aim. So if you find that you're doing something which seems repetitive and could be automated, then Contact us. There may already be a quicker way of doing it - or if not, maybe we can add one. Remember, WANTEDs help Freecycle too.

You're welcome to use this plugin for non-Freecycle groups, but priority for support, bug fixes and enhancements goes to Freecycle groups. If you do use it for non-Freecycle groups, then out of interest I'd be grateful if you could mail me just to let me know.

This plugin is written for the Firefox web browser and will not work with Internet Explorer, Opera, or most other web browser. It does work with the brand new (but still beta) Orca browser.