[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[whiteowl]

Is there a way to disable plugin's popup notifications "Start fetching metadata..." and others?

They are not exactly needed, but do distract and the dialog "FanFicFare download complete" appears behind the notifications, so I need to wait for them to disappear (or close them with 'x') before I am able to click on "yes" to allow book update.

Do not see any option for "notify" in plugins-default.ini file.

[Da Man]

If you use Linux, right click on the notification icon and go to settings. There you can enable or disable them for Calibre. Well, if you use KDE, but probably similar for gnome etc.

In Windows 11 / 10 you find those in settings - Notifications / Notifications & actions.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by whiteowl

Is there a way to disable plugin's popup notifications "Start fetching metadata..." and others?

Not separately from other Calibre notifications.

FFF calls self.gui.status_bar.show_message() to show those messages. When I wrote that code, it only displayed the message in the status bar at the bottom of the Calibre window.

If there's a way to do that without Calibre throwing a notification, I'd be happy to change it.

[whiteowl]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

If there's a way to do that without Calibre throwing a notification, I'd be happy to change it.

An option in personal.ini to completely disable them? Or disable some of them?

I found "Disable notification on job completion" in Calibre's Preferences -> Look&Feel. It does disable popups from the plugin. But as far as I understand it is a global disabling. Can be used as workaround for now.

I am not sure we need these notifications at all - the dialog "FanFicFare Download Complete" does inform about work completion, and "Jobs" button opens a window with explanation what plugin is doing, if it is doing something right now. The messages are just extra.

[JimmXinu]

Turns out there is a trivial way to write the status bar without throwing notifications now.

I'll put it in the next test version. It may be a couple days, I'm working on a new feature.

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2026-05-22
- Add retry_failedtoload_images option
- PI: Don't throw notifications when doing show_message()
- PI: INI Snippets

Three changes to this version:

PI: Don't throw notifications when doing show_message() -- What it says. FFF shouldn't generate notifications any time it shows a status message.

Add retry_failedtoload_images option -- When retry_failedtoload_images:true and you update an epub with images that failed to download since the image handling update back in Jan2026, FFF will retry them.

(I need to add the description for this to defaults.ini. This hasn't been hugely tested because my commonly updated stories don't have failed images, apparently.)

However, I don't think this should be turned on all the time, so I finally implemented:

PI: INI Snippets - Under 'Show Download Options' on the Add / Update dialog boxes there's now a dropdown for 'INI Snippet'. You can enter a one-time INI snippet, or use previously saved snippets.

FFF will offer to save one-time snippets and there's basic add/edit/remove snippets under the personal.ini tab in FFF config.

A new snippet will already have an [overrides] section. You can use other sections instead. But even if you remove all sections, FFF will still inject an [overrides] section header in front of the snippet because these are meant to be highest priority.

My personal use cases for this are retry_failedtoload_images as mentioned above, and ffnet check_next_chapter.

[wildfire070]

Is it possible to make the "Add Reject URLs" popup menu behave like the "Download from URLs" menu, where when you click it, it will automatically paste any link(s) if you have them?

Currently, I'll click "Add Reject URLs" and then have to select the example text within the box to delete before I can paste my links in.

[JimmXinu]

Not without code change.

Although I question why you're adding rejects for so many stories that it would be useful?

Personally, I almost exclusively use 'Reject Select Books' for stories I started, but didn't like.

[wildfire070]

Dang...ok, no worries then.

I subscribe to my favorite authors on AO3 instead of just subscribing to specific stories, so that way I get notified when they release a new story. I also use the "Get story from emails" option a lot to download/update stories. Sometimes the authors will have several WIP stories drop at the same time and the email notifications will come together. I have a shortcut I've programmed, where it will open multiple links in my browser so I can do a quick read through to see which I want to download, and then I'll select the tabs I don't want and do a bulk URL copy to paste into FFF to reject.

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2026-05-22
- Add retry_failedtoload_images option
- PI: Don't throw notifications when doing show_message()
- PI: INI Snippets
- PI: Prefill Add Reject URLs dialog from clipboard and allow ctrl-enter

I don't think prefilling the dialog is as useful as the pre-existing URLs from copy-paste/drag-drop; that code doesn't interpret MIME/HTML. But here it is.

Also added Ctrl-Enter as equivalent to clicking OK.

Repeated since it's still in the same day:

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Three changes to this version:

PI: Don't throw notifications when doing show_message() -- What it says. FFF shouldn't generate notifications any time it shows a status message.

Add retry_failedtoload_images option -- When retry_failedtoload_images:true and you update an epub with images that failed to download since the image handling update back in Jan2026, FFF will retry them.

(I need to add the description for this to defaults.ini. This hasn't been hugely tested because my commonly updated stories don't have failed images, apparently.)

However, I don't think this should be turned on all the time, so I finally implemented:

PI: INI Snippets - Under 'Show Download Options' on the Add / Update dialog boxes there's now a dropdown for 'INI Snippet'. You can enter a one-time INI snippet, or use previously saved snippets.

FFF will offer to save one-time snippets and there's basic add/edit/remove snippets under the personal.ini tab in FFF config.

A new snippet will already have an [overrides] section. You can use other sections instead. But even if you remove all sections, FFF will still inject an [overrides] section header in front of the snippet because these are meant to be highest priority.

My personal use cases for this are retry_failedtoload_images as mentioned above, and ffnet check_next_chapter.

[wildfire070]

Thank you!

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

PI: INI Snippets - Under 'Show Download Options' on the Add / Update dialog boxes there's now a dropdown for 'INI Snippet'. You can enter a one-time INI snippet, or use previously saved snippets.

FFF will offer to save one-time snippets and there's basic add/edit/remove snippets under the personal.ini tab in FFF config.

A new snippet will already have an [overrides] section. You can use other sections instead. But even if you remove all sections, FFF will still inject an [overrides] section header in front of the snippet because these are meant to be highest priority.

My personal use cases for this are retry_failedtoload_images as mentioned above, and ffnet check_next_chapter.

Let me know if I need to explain this better. At least a couple people have asked for something like it over the years.

I'm also interested in hearing comments on the GUI aspects of it. I'm not great at GUI.

[estherflails]

Thank you so much for the retry_failedtoload_images option, I'm sure it will become very useful! Unfortunately I already redownloaded all the most recent fics that had issues due to the browser cache method, most of the older ones with broken images actually have broken images on ao3 and can't really be fixed. I did find one that has a broken image which loaded fine on ao3 but unfortunately this method didn't fix it.

Here's the html from the downloaded epub in case it helps:

<p class="p1"></p>
<div><img alt="Art by MONAMARIA_HP on Twitter!" longdesc="failedtoload" src="failedtoload"/></div><br/>
<strong>[<a href="https://twitter.com/MONAMARIA_HP/status/1293354990233423884">ART BY MONA</a>]</strong>
<p></p>
<p class="p1">

And on ao3:

<p class="p1" align="center">
  <img src="https://img.wattpad.com/2bb04ca084399abc49a6b1fbf2936776aff9208e/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f59426747395943614d615a7271513d3d2d3935353439323137342e313633653531633435376263353738653736313037363131363636362e6a7067?s=fit" alt="Art by MONAMARIA_HP on Twitter!" width="500px" align="center"><br>
<strong>[<a href="https://twitter.com/MONAMARIA_HP/status/1293354990233423884" rel="nofollow">ART BY MONA</a>]</strong>
</p>

I wondered if I could use it with fics that don't have a new chapter with the "Update Always" option without losing the end note. I tried using `remove_authorfootnotes_on_update:false` but it still deletes the end note from the last chapter. I tried it as an INI snippet as well with the same result. Am I doing something wrong?

Let me know if you need more info. I can try testing it on more fics later.
If you wanted to do more tests yourself, you can probably get some broken images with these settings:

use_browser_cache:true 
use_browser_cache_only:true 
open_pages_in_browser:true

I use Firefox as the default browser for this, it has some trouble loading imgur for some reason.
Social media style fics tend to have a ton of images, at least the ones with their own workskins. Heated Rivalry has a lot of such fics.


As for the INI snippet feature, it's very cool and I'm sure it's gonna be useful! It was easy to figure out once I noticed the option in the download menu but I initially thought I'd have to set it in the customization screen 😅 My bad tbh, maybe if I paid more attention to the description above I would've understood sooner.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by estherflails

...
I did find one that has a broken image which loaded fine on ao3 but unfortunately this method didn't fix it.

Here's the html from the downloaded epub in case it helps:

<p class="p1"></p>
<div><img alt="Art by MONAMARIA_HP on Twitter!" longdesc="failedtoload" src="failedtoload"/></div>
...

That failure is from before the Jan 2026 update that started recording failed image URLs. Without that img URL, FFF can't retry it.

I'd delete that chapter and update.

Originally Posted by estherflails

I wondered if I could use it with fics that don't have a new chapter with the "Update Always" option without losing the end note. I tried using `remove_authorfootnotes_on_update:false` but it still deletes the end note from the last chapter. I tried it as an INI snippet as well with the same result. Am I doing something wrong?

When remove_authorfootnotes_on_update is true, FFF adds the class skip_on_ffdl_update to the end note on that update. On the next update, FFF removes all tags with class skip_on_ffdl_update.

So changing remove_authorfootnotes_on_update doesn't affect the current update, it affects the next update.

It's a bit of a hack, honestly. But I don't have a better way to handle it in the face of epub updates.

Originally Posted by estherflails

I use Firefox as the default browser for this, it has some trouble loading imgur for some reason.
Social media style fics tend to have a ton of images, at least the ones with their own workskins. Heated Rivalry has a lot of such fics.

Not my lane, sorry.

Originally Posted by estherflails

As for the INI snippet feature, it's very cool and I'm sure it's gonna be useful! It was easy to figure out once I noticed the option in the download menu but I initially thought I'd have to set it in the customization screen 😅 My bad tbh, maybe if I paid more attention to the description above I would've understood sooner.

Thanks, hopefully it's useful.

I'm considering whether a 'Rename' snippet button is necessary and whether the 'INI Snippet' dropdown on add/update dialogs should be hidden unless the user checks a box in config.

[estherflails]

That failure is from before the Jan 2026 update that started recording failed image URLs. Without that img URL, FFF can't retry it.

I'd delete that chapter and update.

Thanks, I missed that info 😅