Both documents had drifted away from the repository they describe: they
pointed at fixtures and a helper script that are not present, documented a
local-server workflow that is no longer used, and filed one page type under
the wrong view. Following them meant setting up things that cannot work while
trusting claims that no longer held.
The README also explained every design decision before showing a single
result, so the question a reader asks first — what does this actually look
like — took the longest to answer. Screenshots and a short feature list now
carry that job. The reasoning stays where it is needed, next to the code.
Restricting the dev loader to the live site closes a side effect that only
surfaced locally: its patterns matched page names common enough that the
stylesheet would have leaked into unrelated local projects.
The version number existed in two places and had already drifted apart.
Reading it back from the metadata block leaves one place to change it.
The list script matched the whole forum, thread pages included, and injected its
stylesheet there before bailing out of its own build. Both stylesheets were
therefore live on every thread, and rules sharing a class name resolved by
userscript load order rather than by intent — a layout that could differ between
two machines with the same files installed. One of those clashes was already
costing the clearance behind the fixed bar.
A single script picks its view from the page type instead, which turns the
shared class namespace from a hazard into a plain fact of the file, resolved
with a modifier on the root element. Pages outside either view now stay
untouched, where before they still received a full stylesheet.
Two things the merge brought to light: the global image rule was overriding the
avatar dimensions, which only went unnoticed because square avatars happen to
scale to the same result, and a zero-width space had been sitting in the source
as a literal character rather than an escape.
Installations carrying the old thread script have to remove it; the remaining
one keeps its name and updates in place.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0158owAAsXAfFiT3hGkQt1Xk
The forum nests each post body inside its own table, so ascending to the
nearest enclosing row stopped within that inner table rather than at the
actual post row. The author and profile columns were never in scope, and
every post silently degraded to the placeholder name and the generated
initial avatar instead of the real ones.
Author lookup additionally keyed on a profile link attribute this forum
does not emit at all, so even a correct row would have yielded nothing.
Both conditions failed quietly, which made the result look like a styling
problem rather than a broken DOM traversal.
Andre