[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

@JimmXinu Moved this post (#3440) to this thread so you could address the request.

Thanks, Doc.

As FanFiction beta, I am always reading 'the reviews' as a way to gauge the story's success, and reader reactions are invaluable to see if the intentions of the author worked.

I use StoryMaster for this, but I was wondering if downloading the FanFiction reviews using the URL might also be possible. Writers and betas find this information invaluable.

I've very reluctant to do that. ffnet especially puts only a few reviews on each page, so there are often dozens of pages of reviews for even relatively short stories. Since you already have a tool that gets reviews, I'm even more reluctant.

Sometimes a story gets pulled story, and I get the dreaded 'bad update', which is fine.

I am particularly frustrated, however, when an author 'tricks' the system by replacing chapters with just one sentence. This way the author keeps their chapter reviews posted, but the original text is erased/overwritten, leaving a 'strawman doc'.

Is there a way to have some sort of trigger that shows the 'new update' on FanFiction Downloader plugin has less (wordcount/ kbs/?) than the prior update, to prevent this inadvertent 'erasing'?

If you use 'Update EPUB if New Chapters', that should essentially be the default behavior. It only fetches new (additional) chapters, keeping the old text for chapters it already has. (The exception is AO3 when 'do_update_hook' is set to true because it allows new chapters to be inserted in the middle of existing stories.)