Add alternative sources instead of horrible userstyles.org

[Vulgaris-Viridis]

Since userstyles appear to be completely broken for some time now, can you replace them with, or at least include some alternative sources for (inline) css downloading?

I don't know much about them but Openusercss looks promising..

[lgg]

https://github.com/StylishThemes/ https://openusercss.org/profile/5a51482fd4c8c00b00837101

[kevung]

Use usercss for github css theme hosting: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/wiki/Usercss

[Geeyun-JY3]

Greasy Fork now supports UserCSS.

[narcolepticinsomniac]

This archive looks promising. Converts styles to usercss, and advanced options to usercss configs. Most intriguing aspect is the latter, IMO. Testing and feedback would be good.

https://uso-archive.surge.sh https://github.com/33kk/uso-archive

[tophf]

We can remove our fancy inline search and just show several icons that link to USO-archive, USO, freestyler.ws, with the site's domain/category keyword appended of course.

[narcolepticinsomniac]

We can remove our fancy inline search

Damn. You spent a lot of time and effort putting the fancy into inline search, and now you're suggesting gutting it. That's how bad USO sucks now.

I think it's easy to underestimate the importance of this feature when, like us, you mostly write your own styles, and find a few good ones on Github here and there. For months now, more than half the recent feedback is users complaining about inline search, or USO itself. Casual users don't make the distinction, and it's unrealistic to expect they ever will.

Whether they're complaining about inline search hardly ever working, or the fact that we gutted the feature entirely, they'll still be complaining. It's a no win situation, unless we manage to come up with an alternative for inline search which actually works consistently.

[narcolepticinsomniac]

Since we're unlikely to come up with an alternative for inline search in the immediate future, a decent stopgap would be to add archive search links. Maybe even switch the default external search links to the archive and disable inline search by default. If inline search is re-enabled, we could warn users about USO performance issues.

It's gotten to the point where a half measure is probably warranted. Whatever we decide needs to be, not only more useful, but informative, in order for it to be well received.

I don't think we wanna have anything to do with freestyler though.

[tophf]

USO-archive's index is now 15MB uncompressed or 4.7MB gzipped network traffic so it should only take a few seconds to download it when it's updated. There's no need even to cache it manually as the browser will handle it. So, someone should rewrite our inline search in the popup to use this index file instead of USO. Guess it'll have to be me...

[Vulgaris-Viridis]

This archive looks promising. Converts styles to usercss, and advanced options to usercss configs. Most intriguing aspect is the latter, IMO. Testing and feedback would be good.

https://uso-archive.surge.sh https://github.com/33kk/uso-archive

Good find @narcolepticinsomniac It really does. A working archive of themes found on the internet stripped of ads and promotions sounds like a good, permanent solution.

[eight04]

What is the structure of USO index? If it is a domain->styleId map, we can split them to different files so we just have to query https://uso-archive.surge.sh/index/example.com.json and fetch the metadata lazily from https://uso-archive.surge.sh/styles/${id}.json.

[tophf]

You can view the index file in the source code. The only thing missing compared to USO's original search API response is description. I'm working on it right now and I think I'll just won't show descriptions at first and won't even fetch them in background - instead it'll be shown only when the style is clicked.

[Vulgaris-Viridis]

Great!