I apologize first if this has been answered somewhere else. I've been researching for the last few days and haven't found anything, but Google does occasionally let me down.
I like to keep my metadata in a certain way (I may have a touch of OCD when it comes to keeping my data clean and pretty). I have 3 custom columns all for the site's data - #siterating, #siteupdated, and #sitetags. The #siterating is for whatever rating that particular website uses (G, M, NC-17, etc) - when I actually read the story I put the rating I feel it should have in #myrating. This ensures a bit more consistency and I can adjust it up or down based on the author's prudishness or lack thereof without losing the original data - important for changes in rating on an in-progress story that I've already adjusted. The #siteupdated is just the date it was last updated on the site itself.
Those two columns work perfectly fine and aren't really a problem. The tags though, that's another story. It's not as much of a problem on ff.net, but sites like ao3 can go nuts on tags, which means I was either living with not getting anything new after I had updated/fixed the tags or I was putting up with five million tags that drove me crazy - so I created the new column to keep the two sets separate. Unfortunately I need to use the standard calibre tags column as the #mytags (if I had followed the schema above) for a few different reasons (metadata on the book jacket being in alphabetical order is simply one of them). So my problem became how to get the standard tags into the #sitetags column. For a new download it was fine if they both filled in, although I would have preferred only the #sitetags - I just couldn't figure out how to make that happen.
My cobbled together answer was to add this to my personal.ini:
extratags=>#sitetags,a
genre=>#sitetags,a
category=>#sitetags,a
characters=>#sitetags,a
ships=>#sitetags,a
status=>#sitetags,a
I also checked the "New only" for tags on the standard column tab and left the custom column tab 'Type of Data' for Site Tags empty.
For an updated download, whether it was for a new chapter or to update the metadata, this works fine. The information passed to the #sitetags column is complete and accurate (I blanked a few of them out and tested it to be sure). For a new download though, it fails to work the same. The only information sent to the #sitetags column is the "status" (ie Completed, In-Progress, etc). The tags column works fine in both instances. If I update that new story and ask for just metadata though, the #sitetags information is filled in just like any other update.
Is there a way to tell FFDL not to fill in a standard column and pass that information to a custom column on the initial download? Am I not redirecting the information correctly? Or is the problem simply what I'm trying to do and not how I'm doing it? I am getting by using other ways (search/replace is my savior), but I thought I'd ask.
Thanks in advance for any help or advice!
