[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[texasnightowl]

Update...went ahead and edited my personal.ini. I still don't know about the 'n' flag? but the following seems to be working....that is for fics that had no romships, #pairings is getting populated by platships. And when there are romships, the platships data gets replaced by the romships data.

custom_columns_settings:
 chapterslashtotal=>#chapters
 firstship=>#mainship
 platships=>#pairings
 romships=>#pairings

include_metadata_pre:
 romships=~/
 firstship=~/
# otherships=~/  
 platships=~&

Will need to do more testing but on the handful I updated...so far so good.

[texasnightowl]

oh...got it...I probably need the 'n' for new downloads? I've been updating from my saved metadata column while testing instead of constantly downloading. So I definitely need to test what happens on a new download.

[texasnightowl]

That's probably it for me tonight. I do have it doing what I want at the moment, but I am going to step back and decide tomorrow what behavior I want to live with. Thanks for the help!

[bigwoof]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

That's one of the specific examples of something the new INI Snippet feature is good for.

Thank you for this btw! been trying it for the last few days and it's perfect for the FF.net chapter shenanigans issue..

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2026-05-29
- adapter_ficbooknet: Fixes for site changes.

[taratears]

Is it possible to see a log file of the urls that errored? I'm running into a rate issue, and its understandable, but since it marks all emails as read after running, I need a way to go back and re run only those urls. I'm guessing can extract them from the logs and run them separately? Will the logs also show which urls are skipped because they exist vs failure/rate block?

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by taratears

Is it possible to see a log file of the urls that errored? I'm running into a rate issue, and its understandable, but since it marks all emails as read after running, I need a way to go back and re run only those urls. I'm guessing can extract them from the logs and run them separately? Will the logs also show which urls are skipped because they exist vs failure/rate block?

In Calibre's lower right corner where it says 'Jobs': click on that after download to open the background jobs list and double click the job to see that download job's log.

It's full of debug info (mostly for when I need to help people), but at the bottom will be lists of which URLs succeeded and failed you can copy.

Note that these logs are only available for the current Calibre session. Closing Calibre discards them.

[JimmXinu]

New Version Released

Version 4.58.0 - 2026-06-01
- adapter_ficbooknet: Fixes for site changes.
- 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
- Add OTW story note labels config #1347
- Improve continue_on_chapter_error_try_limit exceeded reporting
- Chrome browsercache_sqldb added, but cannot read cache while browser is open. See [#1341](https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/issues/1341)
- adapter_fanficauthorsnet: Domains changed from .nsns to -nsns
- Include genre/category in defaults.ini when include_in_X for extragenres/extracategories
- Set minimum Calibre version to 5.

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 still need to add the description for this to defaults.ini -- forgot before releasing. But I also haven't heard much from users, so call it sorta-beta-ish right now.)

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.

[Wolgan]

I recently made a personal.ini change to drop all the extra AO3 series into an existing custom column (#ff_cat, which also stores fandoms) using a custom seriescomp field in my personal.ini.

My issue is that with my current ini settings, when Category is associated with the #ff_cat column under Custom Columns tab in the FFF Plugin Settings dialog in calibre (using the dropdown), updating the metadata overwrites everything in #ff_cat, losing any other data I may have had in that field. When I disassociate it (set the dropdown to blank), it works as designed and appends the series names.

The 'Allow custom_columns_settings from personal.ini to override' box is checked and there are no custom_columns_settings under [overrides] in my personal.ini just some global add_to_replace_metadata entries, and none of those affect series, fandoms, or categories.

I'm guessing my logic isn't quite right, but I'm not sure where I've gone wrong.

I've been using https://archiveofourown.org/works/56204458 (G-rated) as my test story, as it has multiple series and one of the series has a comma in it, and I had added BatFam to #ff_cat, but this behavior happens for any AO3 story I've tested with (some other examples below, all G-rated).

https://archiveofourown.org/works/58539067
https://archiveofourown.org/works/17476328
https://archiveofourown.org/works/45550813
https://archiveofourown.org/works/60815992

[archiveofourown.org]
is_adult:true
use_browser_cache:true
use_browser_cache_only:true
open_pages_in_browser:true

use_archived_author:true
keep_in_order_freeformtags:true
add_to_extra_valid_entries:,tags_raw,seriescomp
include_in_tags_raw:freeformtags.NOREPL
include_in_genre:
include_in_seriescomp:,series,series00,series01,series02,series03

add_to_replace_metadata:
 seriescomp=>,\ ?=>，
 seriescomp=>\[\d+\]=>
 authorUrl=>(/users/orphan_account)/pseuds/.*$=>\1
 collections=>Untagged=>
 kudos=>([0-9])\,([0-9])>\1\2

add_to_custom_columns_settings:
 chapterstotal=>#ff_totchap
 restricted=>#ff_warnings,a
 collections=>#ff_collections
 bookmarktags=>#collections,a
 tags_raw=>#freeform_raw
 ships=>#ff_rel,a
 characters=>#ff_char,a
 kudos=>#ff_likes
 hits=>#ff_views
 bookmarks=>#ff_favs
 seriescomp=>#ff_cat,a

[ovillo]

I have FFF configured to automatically generate covers through the generate_cover plugin. However, there's a few fics where I have manually set a cover. I'd like to keep that cover when updating metadata. I tried adding a .ini snippet with

use_old_cover:true

This is working fine for individual stories, but not anthologies?

is this a bug or by design?

[ovillo]

Correction: does not seem to work on individual stories either.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by Wolgan

My issue is that with my current ini settings, when Category is associated with the #ff_cat column under Custom Columns tab in the FFF Plugin Settings dialog in calibre (using the dropdown), updating the metadata overwrites everything in #ff_cat, losing any other data I may have had in that field. When I disassociate it (set the dropdown to blank), it works as designed and appends the series names.

It sounds like you've already found the solution: Unset the dropdown GUI setting for that custom column.

The dropdown GUI settings for custom columns always replaces the existing column value. And those dropdowns are still applied--the checkbox about 'Allow custom_columns_settings' activates custom_columns_settings, it doesn't stop the dropdowns.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by ovillo

I have FFF configured to automatically generate covers through the generate_cover plugin. However, there's a few fics where I have manually set a cover. I'd like to keep that cover when updating metadata. I tried adding a .ini snippet with

use_old_cover:true

This is working fine for individual stories, but not anthologies?

is this a bug or by design?

Originally Posted by ovillo

Correction: does not seem to work on individual stories either.

FFF Cover settings are a bit of a mess. Have you read the wiki page about it?
https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFa...Calibre-Plugin

use_old_cover:true affects the epub cover. Generated covers come after that because generated covers can contain the epub cover--such as adding title/author text to the image.

Anthologies are a special case.


If you want cover generate most of the time, but not for all stories, you'll probably need to use generate_cover_settings instead of the GUI settings and explicitly set an 'empty' GC for those specific stories.

## The individual story settings need to be above the default in this case, 
## because generate_cover_settings stops on the first match.

generate_cover_settings:
# match only this one story, set no GC.  $ is to NOT match story 99991
 ${storyUrl} => works/9999$ =>
# match any title
 ${storyUrl} => .+ => MyGC

You cannot have a Default or site GC setting in the GUI because it will be applied to the story because 'empty' and not-found are treated the same. See attached.

[famewolf]

Can fanficfare be made to only keep the cover or to remove all ffdl* images from the epub? I tried setting personal.ini to images of coveronly and false. They both seemed to make the cover not show up when the book appeared on my kindle even though it's showing fine in calibre. I've ran a one line shell script as a workaround that does find . -name "*.epub" -type f -exec 7z d {} "ffdl*.*" -r \; on the calibre directories but would like to automate things. This is for royalroad stories in particular. My old kindle can't handle books with 300 book referral images in them. It only has 1GB to start and those images eat up the space quick. I'd love to just weed out the book referrals entirely but didn't see an option.

[MidnightRose]

Is there a way to force exclude media files via extension or regex?

A story I'm trying to download (This one: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73097281 )
has an mp4 video on one of the chapters that kills conversion to KFX. (The SVG images in the story also cause problems, but for those I can just disable image processing)