What have I learned after creating Stem Assistant Extension

If you do not know what exactly Stem Assitant is, please read @mobbs's post https://steemit.com/steemit/@mobbs/introducing-stem-assistant-no-more-wasting-vp-on-science-content-thieves.

SteemSTEM Chrome/Firefox Extension will give you a list of BlackList, Whitelist and GreyList Users thus the header will turn Red, Green or Grey accordingly.

Initial Release

In the initial release, I have created an array of BlackList and Whitelist users and thus whenever a user opens any Steemit user link it will check if the user is Blacklist or Whitelist. But this approach has a shortcoming that if the user list has to be updated we have to release a new version of the extension.

Subsequent Release

In the subsequent releases, I have been working to find out how to give the managers of SteemStem the option of editing the user list. I used Google Sheet, but somehow the values are not getting updated in the extension. Creating a service will be an overhead.

Last Release

I thought of creating a GitHub Repo which will serve as an API where we will keep the json file of all the user list. In the chrome extension we have to use XMLHttpRequest class to retrieve them. The problem arose here is that XMLHttpRequest can be called regularly only in background.js and the values of that should be passed to contentscript.js. For that I have to use chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener in the background.js and chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener in the contentscript for message passing.

The Stats of SteemStem Extension in Chrome

Chrome Extension Download Link : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stemassistant/bbaobeefambibhbkifjaogcpmjfcihef Mozilla Firefox Add On Download Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stemassistant/