autofill

1K club milestone (Oct 4, 2024)

We’re happy to announce that our Discord support community has reached 1000 members! 🥳

autofill.tohodo.com is down (Oct 3, 2024)

autofill.tohodo.com is currently down right now. We are troubleshooting the root cause and will give an update when it’s back up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: The server issue has been identified and fixed.

Major change to matching syntax (Sep 19, 2024)

There’s something that has been bugging me for quite some time: the fact that the Name and Site fields default to regular expressions (regex) syntax. Most people don’t know, don’t care, and don’t need regex, so it’s annoying that if they want to match a field using a CSS selector, they have to type \[type="submit"\] instead of [type="submit"] because square brackets are reserved regex characters that need to be “escaped” (most people don’t know this, nor should they be expected to).

Starting with the next major update (v12.18.0 v13.0.0), the matching syntax for the Name and Site fields will be plain text, so you won’t need to remember to escape certain characters with a backslash anymore (good riddance!). However, regex is not going away—we’re going to try and give you the best of both worlds, so power users can continue to use regex if they need that flexibility. Here’s how it’s going to work for the Name and Site fields (as well as the Exceptions tab):

What does this mean for you? This is a bit tricky because all of your autofill rules are currently using regex syntax, but the problem is they are not surrounded by /. This could be a disaster after you update, as Lightning Autofill would try to do a plain text match for a rule like ^firstname$, which would not match any attribute value, resulting in most of your rules failing. :see_no_evil:

Umm… so how do you plan to solve this? 😅

We will implement two things:

  1. After the update to v12.18.0 v13.0.0, Lightning Autofill will automatically update all rules so that the Name and Site values (and lines in Exceptions) are wrapped in /. This takes care of the data you have loaded currently, but what about the data you keep in CSV files and Google Sheets? That’s where part two comes in…

  2. We will add additional logic in the import function so that if the imported data has a timestamp older than when you received the update, it will also update the Name/Site/Exceptions fields as described in part one.

These two solutions should ensure a smooth migration for the vast majority of users, but we expect there to be a tiny percentage of people who may encounter issues (Murphy’s Law dictates this). The good news is that if your autofill rules break in v12.18.0 v13.0.0, it’s pretty straightforward to fix: either convert your Name/Site/Exceptions values to regex syntax by wrapping them with /, or convert them to plain text by removing the regex special characters.

Rules generator regression (Sep 9, 2024)

There is a known regression issue with the rules generator. We are currently looking into the root cause and hope to be able to fix it this week. Apologies for any inconvenience. 🙏

UPDATE: It turns out the root cause of the recent issues with rules generation was the new “Parse labels” option. Depending on the form, enabling this can result in rules that are too generic, leading to unexpected behaviors as reported by some of you. We will make a few changes in the next release to address this:

In the meantime, if you are having issues with the rules generator, then open Options and disable “Parse labels” in the Settings tab.

Sneak peek: ACTIONS (Aug 31, 2024)

We’re very excited to announce the next major new feature that makes the perfect replacement for the Autofill() function from Autofill v11: ACTIONS.

image

These new rule types allow you to perform basic actions without knowing JavaScript. For example, the AUTOFILL action in the screenshot is equivalent to this in v11: Autofill('c1', 4000);. The following core actions will be available:

More actions may be added in the future. Sorry, I do not have an ETA for when this will be completed. It’s done when it’s done ^_^.

Lightning Autofill v12.16.2 released (Aug 30, 2024)

This is mainly a hotfix release to fix a regression issue where people’s default site filter was changed from “domain + path” to “domain”, which can cause unexpected problems. We threw in an enhancement to address duplicate profile IDs when importing, which can cause all sorts of problems also. Now, when you import data with duplicate profile IDs, the duplicates will be given a new unique ID automatically. Profile IDs should always be unique.

Changelog:

Lightning Autofill v12.16.0 released (Aug 29, 2024)

This update should make Pro subscribers happy – you can now autofill CAPTCHAs! Currently, only Google’s reCAPTCHA challenges are supported, but we hope to be able to add other types down the road as they become more reliable. Since this feature is still experimental, it’s disabled by default, so if you want to autofill reCAPTCHAs you’ll need to enable it in the Settings tab under Experimental. You can test this feature on the sample form, but don’t reload this page too many times or you might be flagged as a bot and get the “automated queries” error message.

Other notable updates:

Changelog:

How to download your invoices

By popular request, we have made your past invoices easily accessible by signing into autofill.tohodo.com:

image

Sneak peek: CAPTCHA autofill! (Aug 20, 2024)

A glimpse of heaven for Pro subscribers (more on this later):

https://youtu.be/mzOV4Zkru54

Lightning Autofill v12.15.0 released (Aug 15, 2024)

This update fixes all known issues with the Firefox version, including the pesky “you did not grant the ‘downloads’ permission” export bug. It also has a cool new feature that I’ve been meaning to add since 2015 from one of my other projects: Autocomplete.

The autocomplete / text expansion feature is still very much in an experimental state, so it’s going to be hit-or-miss, especially in text editor components and other “rich” input fields that use content editable divs instead of standard <input> and <textarea> tags. Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to use this feature:

https://youtu.be/H5Rto2_xRqo

💡 TIP: Starting with this version, you can now use variables in your text clips! For example, if you defined the variable name = Bob (Variables tab), then you can have a text clip like this:

Name
{@name}

When you select the Name text clip (from the context menu or through autocompletion), it will output “Bob”.

Changelog:

Firefox export issue (Jul 29, 2024)

It has been brought to our attention that when you export your data to CSV in Firefox, you get a “Failed to export your data because you did not grant the ‘downloads’ permission” error, and there’s no way to grant this permission (in Chrome/Edge you get a prompt to grant the “downloads” permission). This appears to be a bug in Firefox, and we have reported it to the Mozilla team. In the meantime, you can export your data using the legacy text box. Here’s how to enable this:

  1. Go to Options / Settings

  2. Ensure the “Import/Export text box” option is checked:

    image

Outputting the data to the text box instead of writing it to a file doesn’t require the downloads permission.

Autocomplete / Text Expansion (Jul 27, 2024)

Here’s a sneak peek of the next planned experimental feature:

autocomplete2

This feature will be powered by Text Clips.

Firefox v128.0.3 missing context menu issue (Jul 26, 2024)

There seems to be a bug with Firefox version 128.0.3 where the Lightning Autofill context menu is missing when you start the browser (actually, context menus from all add-ons are missing). This issue was not present in 128.0.2 because we were only able to reproduce it after updating to 128.0.3. We have reported this to the Mozilla team. For the time being, you can manually reenable the context menu by going to Options / Settings and toggling the “Context menu” option off and on again.

Lightning Autofill v12.14.2 released (Jul 25, 2024)

This is a maintenance release to patch up a few things.

Changelog:

LightningAutofillPro updated

The LightningAutofillPro AI model has been updated from Claude-3 Haiku to GPT-4o mini. This newer model consumes half the number of credits (15 vs. 30) and is just as good or better than the responses generated by the previous model in most cases. Note that the AI model used by the CommunityOne chatbot in the #ask-ai channel is still stuck on GPT 3.5-Turbo, so for the best support we recommend asking LightningAutofillPro instead of CommunityOne.

Firefox v12 released (Jul 24, 2024)

Mozilla just completed a thorough review of Lightning Autofill v12 and approved it for release. It is now live:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/lightning-autofill/

The Firefox version has been merged with the Chrome/Edge code base for easier maintenance, but it’s still a little behind (currently at v12.12.0) because of the slow review process.

Lightning Autofill v12.14.0 released (Jul 23, 2024)

Highlights in this update:

Changelog:

Lightning Autofill v12.12.5 released (Jul 15, 2024)

Here’s a summary of the changes in this update:

Lightning Autofill v12.12.0 released (Jul 11, 2024)

Here’s a summary of the changes in this update:

Lightning Autofill v12.11.0 released (Jul 8, 2024)

With the release of version 12.11.0, I’m proud to announce a very cool feature that I didn’t think was possible at first: bi-directional cloud syncing! This means whenever you make a change in Google Sheets, your changes will sync back to Lightning Autofill automatically and you no longer have to go into Options to manually click the Restore button. In theory, you can now manage all your data in Google Sheets without opening Options. This feature is considered “experimental”, so it’s at the bottom under the new Experimental section.

image

Other highlights:

Changelog:

Regression issue with v12.9.0 (Jul 7, 2024)

Two users have reported an issue where clicking on the extension icon (lightning bolt) no longer brings up the infobar to execute profile / generate rules. We are currently investigating this issue and will release a fix for it in the next update. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Lightning Autofill v12.9.0 released (Jul 4, 2024)

This release has a lot of internal fixes and a few feature requests. Here are the highlights:

Changelog:

Regression issue with v12.7.0 (Jun 30, 2024)

Three users have reported an issue where text fields in some forms are being autofilled repeatedly. We are currently looking into this and will put out a fix ASAP this week. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Lightning Autofill v12.7.0 released (Jun 27, 2024)

Another big update will be rolling out to your browser soon. I’ll go over the biggest changes…

Fixed profiles saved to Unfiled regression

I thought I fixed this in v12.5.0, but some people were still seeing their profiles getting dumped into Unfiled when importing large CSV files. This bug turned out to be a nasty one that was hard to track down and squash since it was dependent on your PC specs/configuration, but I’m glad to report it’s finally squashed (or squished?) for good.

Added support for latest Google and Microsoft Forms

Both Google Forms and Microsoft Forms had recent platform updates, which changed their underlying HTML code. This resulted in Lightning Autofill no longer being able to reliably autofill many of the fields (especially dropdown menus). This update adds back the support for the latest Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, although you may have to re-generate the autofill rules for these forms in order for Lightning Autofill to autofill them correctly since I had to rewrite all the logic.

The autofill rules for both forms are available here: https://pastebin.com/raw/k5j87pZB

Added developer mode popup option

Some Pro users were getting tired of the popup window instructing them how to enable developer mode if they choose to keep it disabled. This option should make them happy:

image

You can find it in Options / Settings / Interface. It’s enabled by default, so uncheck it to suppress the developer mode popup.

Complete changelog

Lightning Autofill v12.5.3 released (Jun 20, 2024)

This is a hotfix release to fix a regression issue where your passwords are replaced with bullet characters (●) when you autofill password fields. Thank you Jan and Mike for reporting 🙏. Apologies, we should’ve caught this – this is what happens when you go on many days without a lot of sleep 😅.

We want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that passwords are NOT encrypted by the browser’s storage API, so we would not use Lightning Autofill to store bank passwords and such. Use a dedicated tool like Bitwarden or your browser’s built-in password manager if you value your security. If the account is not important to you (e.g., forums, burner accounts), then it’s perfectly fine.

Lightning Autofill v12.5.2 released (Jun 13, 2024)

This is a hotfix release to fix a regression issue introduced by v12.5.0. I wanted to add support for the new Google Forms in this update, but that’s a big undertaking and will probably be part of v12.6.

Known issues:

Rolled back to v12.3.0 (Jun 13, 2024)

A user reported v12.5 broke something that was working in v12.3, so to be on the safe side we rolled back to v12.3 while we take a look at this regression issue today. Version 12.5.1 is actually version 12.3.0 (this only applies to the Chrome version – Edge still hasn’t updated and will go straight to whatever version contains the hotfix for this regression issue). Stay tuned…

Update

I identified the root cause of the user’s regression issue and fixed it. However, while troubleshooting this problem I discovered a bigger problem: it appears that Google migrated Google Forms to a new framework recently, so the old Google Forms autofill logic is broken. I am updating the code to support the new Google Forms for the next release.

Lightning Autofill v12.5.0 released (Jun 12, 2024)

Version 12.5 is finally out! It’s the biggest update since v12.0. I fixed more bugs in this release than all previous v12 releases combined, so I’m hoping all the reported issues so far have been addressed by this version. More importantly, I re-architected a lot of the underlying legacy code that were getting a little outdated.

Changelog:

As usual, expect the update to start getting pushed to your browser in the next couple days. If you’re still facing issues, then do not hesitate to reach out on Discord or email. Enjoy!

We’re skipping v12.4 (Jun 11, 2024)

For the past two days, I have been struggling to fix the various regression issues with the rules table lazy loading introduced in v12.3. I managed to fix the data eating save bug, but then I still wasn’t happy with the table rendering performance loading and scrolling through thousands of autofill rules (a flaw that has been bugging me since the first release). After a lot of failed experiments with different hacks, I ended up redesigning the rules table altogether. Taking inspiration from this article, I replaced the clunky table with an all-new modern CSS grid system. As you’ll soon see, it’s a lot snappier, and as a bonus I added a progress bar for you guys. Here’s an example loading over 1500 rules:

GIF 6-12-2024 4-07-31 PM

In addition to the revamped rules table, I made so many other improvements to the architecture (plus a ton of bug fixes) that we’re skipping version 12.4 and going straight to 12.5 for the next release! Aside from the previously mentioned data saving bug, all reported profile execution and remaining rules generator issues should be fixed in this release as well. I’m making my final rounds of testing today, and if all goes well expect v12.5.0 to be released by the end of the day. Once again, thanks for your patience and understanding. 🙏

Data eating bug (Jun 9, 2024)

There’s a nasty bug introduced in v12.3 that can eat your rules if you save a profile that has more than 50 or so rules. Please remember to back up your data, and pay extra attention whenever you save to double-check that all your rules are intact. For the time being, you can work around this bug in two ways:

  1. Scroll all the way to the bottom before saving.
  2. Add new rules in Google Sheets and restore (you can use any rule ID you want as long as it’s unique).

I hope to be able to get this fixed for version 12.4, but as of now I haven’t found a good solution yet. In a nutshell, this bug snuck in as part of the rules table rendering enhancement that made scrolling big tables crazy fast. The trick I used was lazy-loading only visible table rows with a bit of a buffer so that the scrolling is smooth. It seems this mechanism is resulting in any rows that haven’t been rendered yet not to be saved. To fix this bug, I will likely have to revert this enhancement and go back to painfully slow table rendering (sorry, people with thousands of rules).

No more localization (Jun 6, 2024)

Now that modern browsers have built-in translations, starting with v12.4 I will remove localization in Lightning Autofill. Adding support for localized strings is too much of an overhead for me because every time I add a new text or reword an existing text, I have to translate it for each localized language – I simply don’t have the bandwidth to continue doing this as I add new features.

Please take advantage of your browser’s translation feature to translate Lightning Autofill Options, like this:

image

In many cases the translations will be better than the ones I’m using.

Poe bug (Jun 5, 2024)

Poe has a new major bug that prevents us from adding a new knowledge source to custom chatbots. The way we train the LightningAutofillPro chatbot is to delete the old knowledge source and upload the revised one. With this bug, after deleting the old source we were not able to upload the revised source, so now LightningAutofillPro is no longer trained on Lightning Autofill. 😓

When you consult with LightningAutofillPro, please be aware that it no longer has any knowledge of Lightning Autofill. Another update will be posted when this bug is fixed and LightningAutofillPro is back to normal.

UPDATE: A whole day has gone by without a fix from the Poe team. Fortunately, this bug only occurs when an existing bot is updated, so we were able to find a way around this bug by creating a new bot based on the same characteristics and knowledgebase as LightningAutofillPro. The original LightningAutofillPro has been retired, and the LightningAutofillPro handle now points to the new bot.

UPDATE 2: Quora finally fixed the upload knowledge source bug, so the original LightningAutofillPro bot is back!

Lightning Autofill v12.3.0 released (Jun 4, 2024)

With this giant bugfix release, all known autofilling issues have been squashed. It took awhile (apologies and thanks for the patience), but Lightning Autofill v12.3.0 should be as stable as the last MV2 version (v11.9.0). If you still encounter issues, it’s very likely this issue also existed in v11.9.0 (you can verify by testing the Firefox version, which is still on MV2).

Changelog:

As usual, expect the update to be published in a few days. Hopefully, this will be the last release dedicated to fixing bugs – now I can begin to focus on enhancements to Lightning Autofill. 🚀 But first, I think I need a vacation – it has been a very crazy, chaotic week! 😅

Lightning Autofill v12.2.3 released (Jun 2, 2024)

This hotfix release fixes a critical regression issue that might be responsible for a bunch of bugs since v12 came out.

Changelog:

I was able to cancel Edge’s v12.2.0 submission and replace it with v12.2.3. Chrome won’t let me cancel a submission, so I will have to do an immediate update after v12.2.0 is published.

Lightning Autofill v12.2.0 released (Jun 1, 2024)

There are more autofilling issues to fix, but I wanted to get this out to you guys ASAP since it contains a lot of critical fixes. It also has performance enhancements for power users with 10k rules, especially with importing and scrolling through “All” profile with thousands of rules.

Changelog:

Chrome and Edge should be updating in the coming days. The next release will focus on fixing actual autofilling issues.

Autofill() is gone (May 31, 2024)

In Autofill v11 (MV2) we used to be able to use a special function called Autofill() in JavaScript rules to execute other profiles. For example, to execute a profile with ID “c1” after a 4-second delay, you’d enter this as your JavaScript rule:

Autofill('c1', 4000);

You could even chain these commands, like this:

Autofill('c1', 4000);
// Do some automation
Autofill('c4', 1000);
// Do some automation
Autofill('c10', 2000);

After some testing today, I realized that this function no longer works in v12 (MV3) because of the way MV3 extensions work. In the new world, in the name of improved security, all user JavaScript codes are executed in a different “context” than other scripts that exist on the web page, so they have no access to Lightning Autofill’s Autofill() function.

I’m not sure how I’m going to replace this function yet, as it was very useful in a lot of situations. MV3 continues to annoy the hell out of me every day. 💢

Need help testing (May 30, 2024)

Hi everyone, since I can’t test every form on the internet, I need your help to test my fixes against your forms. If you are having issues autofilling or generating rules, it would be a great help if you could provide me with the following:

  1. URL of the form having the issue.
  2. Autofill rules for this form (you can export to CSV and attach to email).
  3. If necessary, login credentials and exact steps to get to the form and reproduce the issue you are facing.

Please email all this to tom@tohodo.com. This way, I can follow the exact steps you are doing to reproduce the issue, then fix the issue for you. Remember that I can only fix what I can reproduce on my system, so please help me help you.

Light at the end of the tunnel

I would like to take this opportunity to point that what many people may not understand is that Lightning Autofill v12 is really Autofill v0.0.1 because I had to make so many fundamental code changes that it’s almost like starting from scratch again. It also didn’t help that I had to rush to release it by the June deadline, hence there are more bugs than usual. Yes, we may be starting from ground zero, but the most important thing is that Lightning Autofill now complies to Google’s MV3 standards and is future-proof. Lightning Autofill will only get better from here on out. If you give it some time, v12 will eventually surpass v11 in every way. 🚀

Rules generator has gone crazy! (May 30, 2024)

A lot of people have notified me that too many rules are being generated now. This is a known regression bug that stems from a fix put in v12.1.0 to address the “No fields have been changed” error many people complained about. In implementing this fix, I made the algorithm too relaxed, so now it picks up a lot of fields that were magically hidden by Lightning Autofill before. This has been fixed in the next release, which will drop soon.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but you should take this opportunity to see just how crazy complex some forms can be – tons of hidden fields!

Activation woes (May 29, 2024)

A number of users have reported that they are not able to activate unless they use a VPN service. This is a sign that something is blocking access to the Cloudflare servers used to validate the subscription. What can block the validation servers? It could be your firewall, your company network, your internet service provider, even your country – it’s hard to say. The only solution right now is to use a VPN service. If you don’t already have one, then I recommend Windscribe as it’s got a very generous free data quota. If you use the link below, then we will both get an extra 1 GB when you sign up.

https://windscribe.com/yo/5irboecv

Lightning Autofill v12.1.0 released (May 27, 2024)

This update should fix most of the major bugs in v12.0.x. It should be approved for Chrome and Edge soon and roll out to you guys soon. Please test and report back.

Changelog:

The next update will focus on improving the Free plan based on the ongoing poll, as well as making the Pro plan more enticing. I’m currently hard at work on trying to enable multi-account Google Sheets for the Pro plan. Stay tuned!

Alternative payments (May 26, 2024)

Many people have contacted me saying they want to subscribe, but Stripe is not supported in their country. I have added Q&A #47 to address this:

https://www.tohodo.com/autofill/help.html#faq-q47

Or consult with LightningAutofillPro helpdesk bot:

https://poe.com/s/uvyNyifTnnEP5lrOjkiA

Version 12 for Chrome postmortem (May 25, 2024)

The release of Lightning Autofill v12 for Chrome was, to put it mildly, quite a challenge. I was ill prepared for the spike in traffic, and the services I employed also struggled under the sudden load. Now that the dust has finally started to settle, I think it’s worthwhile to review everything that went wrong in the hopes of avoiding these mistakes in the future. All of the issues that you guys experienced were a result of a perfect storm of the following all converging at the same time that Google released v12 on the Chrome Store:

  1. I had recently upgraded from the legacy G Suite plan for my tohodo.com domain to Google Workspace Business to prepare for the increase in email volume. Google Workspace Business allows you to send out 2000 emails per day – or so I thought. What I didn’t realize at the time was that when you start out on the trial period, you are still limited to 100 emails per day. What ended up happening was that after the 100-email quota was used up, the welcome emails stopped going out to new subscribers. That forced me to frantically send out the welcome emails manually one by one. 😅
  2. Some code was added recently to allow for a trial period. The backend code responsible to determine whether something was a valid trial subscription depended on the text “Trial” in the product description. The problem was that Stripe localizes product descriptions (e.g., “トライアル期間: Lightning Autofill Pro Plan”), so this check failed and invalidated the subscription. This resulted in a bunch of people in non-English countries getting the 400 error when they tried to activate their plan.
  3. My domain registrar was bought out by another company, and they chose the exact same time Google released Lightning Autofill v12 to do the domain migration. This resulted in me not receiving any emails to tom@tohodo.com or support@tohodo.com for a time, and emails being sent there were also bouncing. This couldn’t have come at a worse time because there were so many support emails that never reached me until much later. In fact, I thought the v12 release was going so smoothly since I wasn’t getting as many emails as I did with the v10 and v11 releases. I didn’t realize my domain was being migrated until I got an email confirmation from the new registrar, and then the angry emails started coming in soon after. 🙈

To avoid a repeat of fiasco 1, I have subscribed to external email services to use as a fallback in case I exceed the daily email quota in the future. Furthermore, once my Workspace Business trial is over, my email limit should be upgraded to 2000 per day. I don’t expect fiascos 2 and 3 to repeat themselves again, so we should be good there. Thank you all for your patience and understanding during this launch, and hope you can bear with me as I continue to iron out the remaining bugs within Lightning Autofill itself. 🙏

Lightning Autofill for Chrome finally released (May 23, 2024)

The big day has finally arrived – Chrome v12 got released. 🥳 Technically Edge v12 came out first, but that was more like a small appetizer considering Edge only has about 30k users vs Chrome’s 1M+ users (Firefox, by comparison, has about 20k users).

This will be a true test to see if there are still outstanding bugs. I expect a sudden influx of new members to the Discord community as well. It will be exciting! 🕺

Lightning Autofill v12 for Chrome update (May 22, 2024)

Version 12.0.0 for Chrome was just published, but I had to immediately roll back to v11.9.0 because it has the same issue as the Edge version (wouldn’t work unless developer mode was enabled). Since I had to pick a version number larger than 12.0.0 when rolling back, version 12.0.1 is actually v11.9.0. I just published v12.0.6, so hopefully it will get approved a lot sooner than v12.0.0.

Firefox v12.0.0 v12.0.10 is still under review.

Lightning Autofill v12.0.5 released (May 17, 2024)

This is mainly to fix the issue where the extension breaks if you don’t have developer mode enabled.

Changelog:

The Chrome and Firefox versions are still under review (as expected, the review process is taking longer than usual).

Lightning Autofill v12.0.3 released (May 16, 2024)

This is a hotfix to address some Edge issues that only surfaced after the extension was published (these issues are not reproducible in local testing, hence they were not caught). Changelog:

UPDATE: After v12.0.3 was released, I was still getting reports of the Options page being blank in Edge even though it was working fine for me. After digging some more, I identified the real root cause: sadly, Chrome and Edge require you to enable Developer mode in order to execute JavaScript rules in MV3:

image

This explains why I was not able to reproduce the issue (because I’m always in Developer mode, which is required to develop and test extensions locally). I still can’t wrap my head around why they introduced such a silly requirement, but I’ll go along with it. I will update both Chrome and Edge versions to add instructions on how to enable Developer mode and republish. Sorry for the troubles! 🙏

🎊 Lightning Autofill v12.0.0 released 🎉 (May 15, 2024)

After 118 commits over three months, countless improvements, refactoring and bug fixes, Lightning Autofill version 12 has finally been released! It may not look like it on the outside, but underneath this is the biggest release since version 1.0. Let’s go over the major changes:

Since so much of the code was rewritten, and the extension migrated from MV2 to MV3, I expect the review process to be longer than usual, possibly over a week, so hang on tight. I’ll post another announcement when it’s published and starts rolling out to Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

How to activate your plan

Once Lightning Autofill has been updated to v12, you will see a new Subscription section in Options → Settings:

image

This is where you enter the invoice number to activate your subscription plan.

Bye bye, Wallu

After monitoring the #ask-ai channel on Discord for awhile, it’s clear that the CommunityOne bot gives consistently better quality responses than Wallu AI. Hence, I will give Wallu early retirement and keep only CommunityOne in the channel. Having two bots answer at the same time can be confusing as well, so this is a good change.

Hello, LightningAutofillPro

Even though we have the #ask-ai channel, the best helpdesk chatbot is actually the one I trained on Poe: LightningAutofillPro. I recommend everyone consult with LightningAutofillPro for the following reasons:

Introducing LightningAutofillPro Poe bot (May 11, 2024)

I just created my first bot on Poe, and after lots of testing it seems to provide superior responses to both CommunityOne and Wallu AI Discord bots. LightningAutofillPro is based on Claude-3 whereas CommunityOne and Wallu are based on the older ChatGPT, so I’m not surprised. Please check it out for yourself:

https://poe.com/LightningAutofillPro

Also, good news about Lightning Autofill v12: I think I have ironed out all the bugs and should be able to release it by the end of this weekend! 🥳 It’s a bit delayed from my own initial timeline, but in the grand scheme of things it’s still very ahead of schedule considering the MV3 deadline is June.

Wrapping things up (Apr 27, 2024)

I’m just about ready to publish the new version (v12). As the icing on the cake, I’ve decided to integrate one big feature for subscribers: the ability to manage their rules from Google Sheets! Since Sheets cannot communicate with browser extensions, you will still have to manually click the Restore button to retrieve the latest data from Sheets, but that’s still night & day better than the current experience (export CSV, manipulate data in Excel/Sheets, import back into Lightning Autofill).

This is a pretty big feature to add at the last minute, so I may not be able to release by the end of the month, but we’ll see. 🤞

Wallu vs. CommunityOne (Apr 15, 2024)

Yesterday, I discovered another promising ChatGPT-powered helpdesk bot. I’ve spent most of today comparing @Wallu - AI and @CommunityOne after training them on the exact same Lightning Autofill documentation. Often I found Wallu’s responses more technical and detailed (for example, it sometimes provided code samples), but I felt CommunityOne’s responses had more personality. CommunityOne can also reply to more general questions, which makes it more engaging. You can judge for yourself by going to #⁠ask-ai and ask way – both bots will respond. Eventually you guys can help me choose between the two of them. 😁

Introducing ⁠#ask-ai channel (Apr 13, 2024)

I’ve just added an experimental customer support AI chatbot called Wallu to help answer questions related to Lightning Autofill. I’m currently training it on Online Help as well as a few of the channels on the Discord server, so hopefully it will get better over time.

To chat with the bot, head over to the #⁠ask-ai channel under Support. Try asking it simple questions like “Can I make changes directly in Google Sheets?”.

Firefox blues (Apr 12, 2024)

The most challenging part of the v12 update so far has been trying to get Firefox to NOT break using the same codebase (I do not have the resources to manage two codebases). Starting with MV3 Firefox and Chrome/Edge have diverged in terms of what extension APIs they support, and even what features within the same API that they implement. This has made extensions development very difficult, and I do not rule out ending support for Firefox down the road.

Lightning Autofill v12 update (Apr 11, 2024)

Hi guys, I’m putting the finishing touches on the major version 12 release. The OAuth app (for the cloud sync feature) is currently going through Google’s verification process, which can take over a week. After that, Lightning Autofill will have to go through the extensions review process for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox before the update can get published. If everything goes as planned, expect the big v12 to roll out by the end of this month.

In the meantime, I recommend you back up all your data to a CSV file using the Import/Export tab.

Google Groups is retired – moving to Discord (Apr 8, 2024)

Hi all, I got too tired of not being able to paste screenshots into Google Groups (among many other annoyances over the years), so I will no longer be maintaining this forum. It will remain online as a reference only.

Please join the new Discord server for support issues moving forward:

https://discord.gg/NY6xxsQBRD

Note that it will be quiet for the next week or so as I am super busy trying to get Lightning Autofill v12 ready for the big release.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🥳 (Feb 10, 2024)

Happy belated New Year everyone (well, I guess it’s not belated if we’re using the lunar calendar). It has been quite a busy start to the new year for me, with lots of important developments. Let’s jump right in…

Official MV3 timeline

Google has published the latest Manifest V3 timeline, and it seems that June 2024 will be the final deadline. This means that Autofill will need to be updated to MV3 before June to remain in the Chrome Store.

Since MV3 extensions cannot evaluate JavaScript code strings, users who have built up a large collection of JS rules might be getting a little nervous. However, fear not, my friends – I have found a solution that will allow you to keep your JavaScript rules! See the next section for more details.

Automate → Autofill v12

Instead of starting from zero, I have decided to merge Automate into Autofill starting with the next major release, Autofill version 12. This release will have a bunch of exciting changes:

New monetization strategy

As many of you know, I left my daytime job to focus on Autofill about one year ago. After considering many different types of monetization options, I settled on the Wikipedia model where Autofill shows a nag screen to encourage users to support the development of Autofill by subscribing. This was completely voluntary. After trying the nag screen for a year, I have come to realize that it isn’t working – the subscriptions barely pay for my rent, and I’m still eating into my savings account every month 😟. Starting with Autofill v12 (Lightning Autofill), I will implement a new three-tier monetization strategy as outlined below:

As promised, current subscribers will be grandfathered in as follows:

After more than 12 years of giving Autofill away for free, I think finally charging for it is only fair. I’ve considered selling Autofill more than once over the years, but after reading about what happened to The Great Suspender, Hover Zoom, and many other extensions, I don’t think I would be able to sleep at night knowing there’s even a 1% chance that Autofill would one day be associated with malware.

I’m expecting this change will not be popular, and as a result, there will be a flood of negative reviews when v12 is published. If you do find Lightning Autofill useful, then I would greatly appreciate it if you spared a minute to leave a positive review to balance out all the negative reviews. THANK YOU 🙏