Major update to freeyourstuff.cc browser extension

Team blog: Developers

freeyourstuff.cc is a separate project from lib.reviews, but with a related purpose. It’s a Chrome/Chromium browser extension that lets you download reviews you’ve contributed to major websites, including Amazon, Goodreads, IMDB, TripAdivsor, and Yelp. You can publish them on the site as a backup, or keep your own copy.

The most popular feature turns out to be the Quora downloader: tens of thousands of Quora answers have been downloaded and re-published under free licenses with it (see the upload directory).

Today I pushed out a week’s worth of updates to the extension. From a user perspective, the main changes are that IMDB and Amazon extraction works again (design changes had caused the plugins to break), Quora extraction should be more well-behaved, and all plugins have a clear “busy” indicator when they’re doing stuff.

Under the hood, the extension now uses async/await functions instead of callbacks to make the download flow a lot more understandable, especially for complex plugins like the Quora one which have to monitor changes to a page dynamically made with JavaScript not under the plugin’s control.

If you’ve contributed reviews to other sites, I encourage you to use this extension to keep your own copy (and please report issues you experience). In future, we’ll make it easy to migrate individual reviews to lib.reviews or other sites, as well.