DeviantArt Message Notifier (2010-2021) was an extension for interfacing with DeviantArt's message center for easy access to new messages in the browser.
It no longer works, as the API it worked with was disabled on the DeviantArt side. This repository is now made public under MIT license for preservation purposes.
Its existence started as a port of the deviantAnywhere extension for Firefox when I was personally switching away from Firefox to Chrome as my main browser. DeviantAnywhere itself was discontinued in 2016.
Being a personal project at first, it worked remarkably well, and I made it public.
At some point it peaked at ~12k users. At the time of writing there are still ~6k active installs. A work on a Firefox version started 2017 but a public release was postponed until a serious overhaul of already ancient code that never happened.
It relied on an API called DiFi, short for DeviantArt Interactive Fragmented Interface. This was essentially an AJAX-like component of their website, and it was convenient to call it instead of trying to load a page and trying to scrape it for information. But it was tightly coupled with the website UI itself - should that change, DeviantArt would have no reason to keep it operating.
In 2018, DeviantART announced a complete overhaul of their website, called Eclipse. This was a herald of the end for DiFi, but the new UI was optional until May 2020.
After the final switch, it was only a matter of time until critical parts of DiFi stop working, and that finally happened in March 2021.
This code represents babby's first JavaScript project. 11 years later, I cringe looking at it, but back then both JS itself was quite different (ES5 was still new!) and I had much, much less experience. So please approach it from this angle.
DO NOT LOOK AT THIS CODE AS A GUIDE ON HOW TO WRITE JAVASCRIPT OR ANY BROWSER EXTENISONS. This is old and bad code. Many things can be done better, and I never had the energy to rewrite them seriously.
There is a "build" system relying on GNU make of all things, but all it does is to copy the src folder and the required manifest.json to another folder, following by zipping it up into a browser-specific extension format.
I would like to thank:
- PostaL2600 for writing the original deviantAnywhere, which formed a basis of this extension.
- Chrome development team for providing decent documentation for extensions.
- Many people who helped by testing, reporting bugs and assisting in reproducing them. Some of them, especially early ones, are listed in the credits file, but inevitably some would slip through the cracks.
- DeviantArt for tolerating this unofficial leech on their internal API for so long.
- All of the users throughout the years!