SlateStarCommentServer

The thing that helps with the thing which highlights new comments on Slate Star Codex posts

See https://github.com/bakkot/SlateStarComments

This is a server that queries WordPress's api, fetches the list of comments, and then exposes an endpoint indicating which comments are in reply to which other comments.

Endpoints

You can check the status of the comment-fetching process here: https://sscnotify.bakkot.com/

And see a report on its uptime here: http://stats.pingdom.com/at8g7vi1e72k

To fetch replies for a user, query https://sscnotify.bakkot.com/replies. This endpoint takes the following query string parameters:

author_name (required) the name of the author to fetch replies for

from (required) a unix timestamp in ms to fetch replies after

page_size (defaults to 10) the number of replies to return. replies are returned in ascending chronological order, starting from "from".

page (defaults to 1) which page of replies to return, in "page_size" chunks.

This endpoint returns an array of comments in the same format as returned by the Wordpress API's comments endpoint (documented here: https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/reference/comments/).

For example, to return 10 replies to Scott's comments on Sept 1, 2014, you would visit: https://sscnotify.bakkot.com/replies?author_name=Scott%20Alexander&from=1409591958000

Email Subscriptions

Users can sign up to get email notifications of replies to their comments at the following url: https://sscnotify.bakkot.com/subscribe. This url takes one parameter, author_name. For example: https://sscnotify.bakkot.com/subscribe?author_name=Scott%20Alexander.

Once subscribed, users will get periodic emails with any new replies to that user name. Emails have an unsubscribe link in them to cancel future subscriptions.