Userscripts.org

» see userscripts.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Firefox was the browser I had moved to by the middle of the 2000s, on a TTNet line at home and whatever the university lab had for everything else, and Greasemonkey was the thing you installed second. Userscripts.org was where you went after that. The proposition was that a page belonged to you once it had finished loading, and that if a site's own design was wrong, somebody had already written twenty lines of JavaScript to fix it and uploaded them.

The site went up in 2005, a year after Aaron Boodman released Greasemonkey as a Firefox extension, and it was built and run by an American programmer named Jesse Andrews. For about six years it was the only address that mattered for this. The updated-scripts column from February 2008 reads as an index of what people actually wanted changed: four separate entries for the browser game Travian sit next to AutoPagerize, which glued the numbered pages of a long result list into one continuous scroll.

In 2010 Andrews posted that the site had gone into maintenance mode because he no longer had the time, and asked for a volunteer to take it over. Nobody did, and he remained the only administrator. That arrangement held for three more years: a repository of executable code which strangers installed directly into their browsers, run by one person who had already said in public that he was finished.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

A userscript is a text file. Greasemonkey read the include line at the top of it, matched that against the address bar, and injected the rest into the page once it had loaded. There was no review queue and no code signing. That openness is the whole reason the library got as large as it did, and it is also the reason the last two years look the way they do.

The social layer was thin and worked anyway. Scripts carried star ratings and a public install counter, and the counter was the number everybody actually read, because it told you whether a fix had been tried by four people or by forty thousand. In April 2013 a thread opened on the forums about the install counts being wrong. The counter stayed wrong.

~ the spam years ~

By November 2013 the front page had turned over completely. The popular-scripts list on 6 November is nine Facebook entries in a row: a bot to accept friend requests automatically, and one called facebook break privacy whose own description offered to break the profile privacy of your friends. Every single one carried a rating of 3.6667 from exactly six reviews, and every single one reported zero installs.

Identical scores from identical review counts, with no installs underneath them, is a voting ring that nobody was left to sweep. The rating system was still running fine. There was nobody reading what it said.

~ what came after ~

The final capture of a working userscripts.org is 6 May 2014 at 05:51 UTC, six kilobytes of ordinary front page. By 1 June the address answers a redirect with nothing behind it. There was no announcement and no farewell page, which tracks, because the person who would have written one had asked to be relieved of the job four years earlier.

Two replacements came out of the same community inside a year. Greasy Fork, written and still run by a Canadian programmer named Jason Barnabe, took over the function. OpenUserJS was started by some of the most active contributors off the old forums. Both are still up in 2026.

The archive survived by accident. userscripts-mirror.org appeared within weeks of the disappearance, put up by somebody with no connection to Andrews, and it answers today under the original title, Power-ups for your browser. The domain Andrews actually registered resolves and returns a healthy 200. The page behind it belongs to a squatter and is called Dance Party.

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