You are far from the only one frustrated with the problem. We've been dealing with since January.
It's been a while, prior conversation about it is back many pages by now, and there have been developments; so I will explain again.
fanfiction.net (ffnet) is blocking FFF using Cloudflare(CF). Whether it's deliberate or incidental isn't known or important. Back in January we were able to get around it for a few months using a library called cloudscraper. Newer versions of cloudscraper, if there are any, are not public--for good reasons. Please do not bother the cloudscraper developer.
Now, the only way I know to get through CF is using a real browser, whether driven by a user or programmatically. FFDL (from fanfictiondownloader.net) and several other tools now package and run an entire browser instance to get around Cloudflare. FFF doesn't because doing that in Calibre on multiple platforms (win/mac/linux) that would be a nightmare that I don't want to deal with.
Instead, FFF offers several options for using cached pages from outside browsers and a couple options for using a proxy browser instance.
For browser caching, you can:
- Manually download pages in browser
- Automatically download pages in browser (using WebToEpub or equivalent)
- Automatically download pages using FFDL
The
BrowserCacheFeature wiki page details how to configure FFF to read a cache, there are sections at the bottom for using WebToEpub and FFDL instead of manual page download.
There are two proxies available:
- nspa_proxy is a third party proxy specifically for FFF, but requires python and chrome
- flaresolverr is general purpose and has convenient one-stop downloads. This link is as much as I have documented about how to use flaresolverr with FFF.
Both proxies require you to download and run additional program(s), but while running are basically transparent. I use flaresolverr these days.
I personally offer very limited user support for the proxies because it's outside my project and my comfort zone. I've been hoping, in the spirit of open source, that users would step up to help document things. Writing user docs has never been my strong suit.
Since you, personally (fdwojo), are already using FFDL, use ffnet exclusively, and don't sound very pleased with FFF's output anyway, I don't see why you wouldn't just stay with FFDL.