[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[Pavan7]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

What do you mean by "error after x hours"? How often were you hitting it?

The expected use pattern is watching for notification emails in a regular email client, then hitting FFF's 'get from email'.

If you are instead polling frequently in FFF, I expect you're getting blocked by google.

Another possibility is that your public facing IP is on a block list. Changing it or using a VPN might help.

I did 'Fetch from Email' only once but I haven't done that in around 6 weeks so there are around 500 unread emails built up by now. Not sure if that counts as 1 hit or multiple.
I'll try a VPN, or would the better approach be to do read all, then mark them read in batches of 100 and fetch if its counting each unread email as 1 hit

[Tharia]

I've been having an issue downloading stories from lcfanfic.com (Lois & Clark Fanfic Archive). It is listed as a supported site, but I have not been able to successfully back up any fanfics from it. I am using the latest versions of Calibre and Fanficfare.

Examples: When I try to download a URL formatted like this: "https://www.lcfanfic.com/stories/2009/html/familyma.html" I get the message no valid story URLs entered in the bottom left corner of Calibre.

When I try to download a URL formatted like this: "http://www.lcfanfic.com/stories/2000/html/forgreat.html" it attempts to download but then I get the error "substring not found".

Possible cause: It looks like the website was updated in late September of this year. This may have have caused the method Fanficfare uses to download to break. Here is the announcement of the update: https://www.lcfanfic.com/misc/archive_update_2026

[Reach_greenDot]

Is there a way to use FanFicFare to process HTML files saved to a local directory? I have some old AO3 downloads in my personal stash and I'd like to add them to my library using the same processing as I use for downloading from AO3.
Sorry if I'm doing this wrong, or if it's already been addressed, I did look but didn't find it.

[ovillo]

Originally Posted by Reach_greenDot

Is there a way to use FanFicFare to process HTML files saved to a local directory? I have some old AO3 downloads in my personal stash and I'd like to add them to my library using the same processing as I use for downloading from AO3.

I built a plugin for exactly this case: Extract fanfic metadata

It should be able to extract (some) metadata from ao3 html converted to epub in calibre.

[serpi]

Is there anyway to adjust the title page margins?

I put all my fic on a kobo and the title page has always had text run off screen a bit on the right instead of just starting the word on a new line it cuts the end off, is there anyway to fix this or best to just live with it?

[Reach_greenDot]

Originally Posted by ovillo

I built a plugin for exactly this case: Extract fanfic metadata

It should be able to extract (some) metadata from ao3 html converted to epub in calibre.

Ooh, thanks! I will look at this :)

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by Tharia

I've been having an issue downloading stories from lcfanfic.com (Lois & Clark Fanfic Archive). It is listed as a supported site, but I have not been able to successfully back up any fanfics from it. I am using the latest versions of Calibre and Fanficfare.

lcfanfic.com: Yeah, that's a site change. I'll look into it.

Originally Posted by Reach_greenDot

Is there a way to use FanFicFare to process HTML files saved to a local directory? I have some old AO3 downloads in my personal stash and I'd like to add them to my library using the same processing as I use for downloading from AO3.
Sorry if I'm doing this wrong, or if it's already been addressed, I did look but didn't find it.

FFF use files on disk: Technically, yes, but practically speaking, no.

There is a testing feature that you can use to construct a story from individual chapter files on disk. But it would get [test1.com] handling, not [archiveofourown.org] handling. And I bet you would need to split your HTML into chapter files first.

Originally Posted by serpi

Is there anyway to adjust the title page margins?

I put all my fic on a kobo and the title page has always had text run off screen a bit on the right instead of just starting the word on a new line it cuts the end off, is there anyway to fix this or best to just live with it?

Change title page margins: You can adjust both the CSS and HTML of the title page from personal.ini.

This, for example, will change margins all around for title page only:

## double %% to escape it from INI processing.
add_to_output_css:
 body.fff_titlepage { margin: 5%%; }

FFF default is 2%. See https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFa...pub-title-page for full details.

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2026-11-05
- adapter_lcfanficcom: Update for site changes.
- Fix getConfig caching to not cache passed default. See #1451

[ownedbycats]

Update on AO3, for anyone wondering: https://www.otwstatus.org/incidents/g12jnxck9g6h

[Jade Aislin]

While AO3 is down, I've started looking at Wattpad. So, couple quick questions.

1. Has anyone edited there personal ini for Wattpad? If so, what did you do?

2. I noticed that pairings are often mentioned in the summary, but do not have tags. is there a way to search a summary to get tags?

3. How do I get genre tags into the character tags and then edit both separately?

[LordXamon]

I'm trying to download from fimfiction but it doesn't work, am I doing something wrong? Flaresolver is working, and the settings from the personal.ini are as follows:

[www.fimfiction.net]
use_flaresolverr_proxy:directimages
include_author_notes:true

The error I'm getting is HTTP Error in FFF 'HTTP 403'(403) URL, and happens with all the stories I've tried.

[JimmXinu]

Camoufox also failed with 403 for me.

But it worked using Browser Cache:

use_browser_cache:directimages
use_browser_cache_only:true
open_pages_in_browser:true

[culytera]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Somewhat. I assume you're talking about [teststory:1010] type test stories.

Chapter metadata timestamp is given, and the usual index, but not date.

If you what to get really fancy, you give real URLs (or file:// URLs) and adapter_test1 will attempt to use them.

Here's an example I was testing with recently:

[teststory:1003]
#cover_url:http://localhost:8000/cover.jpeg
chapter_urls:
 http://localhost:8000/storyredir.html,Fake Story
 file:///C:/Users/youruser/Desktop/FanFicFare/t/story.html,Fake File Story

Thank you so much, this is just what I need for testing my new layout and Action Chains, really cool what can be done with FFF.

---

I've been working on a more EPUB reader-friendly approach to a titlepage layout that still lets Calibre make the cover, but will show the "true" titlepage layout on the reader while considering readers that don't really respect the stylesheet of the EPUB.

Before, my layout used media queries to make the reader display the non-cover portion in the titlepage, but this isn't followed by some EPUB readers, plus it leaves a chunk of unused elements in the titlepage and stylesheet. I had to make a bunch of Editor Chains to convert the old layouts to the new version so it was a lot of trial and error. Good thing Action Chains has a backup option when using a chain.

The new titlepage layout has a display-on-cover section and a display-on-reader section that's hidden by default in the HTML. It still takes advantage of Calibre taking a snapshot of the added book's first page and making that the cover. Since the display-on-reader section is initially hidden, it won't show in the cover. Using regex in Editor Chains, the display-on-cover section and the display-on-reader section's "display:none" style attribute get removed.

My next problem was figuring out how to trigger this chain when FanFicFare finishes a download. Looking at the scope options, none of them seemed to fit all the cases of FFF downloading a new book, updating a new book, or making an anthology. But then I remembered FFF marks books so I made a search string that covers both new/updated books (FFF marks them as "fff_success") and anthologies (FFF only marks them as "true"): (marked:true) and (not marked:fff_failed or not marked:fff_chapter_error).

Seemed to work based on limited tests, so I'm pretty happy with my setup now. At least until I find another thing to fuss about lol, I can't do anything about updating the covers for old fics that were deleted by the author. The Generate Cover plugin was recently updated to include more customizability, but it still wasn't enough for my use-case. For now, I'll just live with seeing how often my titlepage layout has changed.

[LordXamon]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Camoufox also failed with 403 for me.

But it worked using Browser Cache:

use_browser_cache:directimages
use_browser_cache_only:true
open_pages_in_browser:true

That returns me the error HTTP Error in FFF 'Page not found or expired in Browser Cache (see FFF setting browser_cache_age_limit)'(428)

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by LordXamon

That returns me the error HTTP Error in FFF 'Page not found or expired in Browser Cache (see FFF setting browser_cache_age_limit)'(428)

Sites can mark pages 'no-cache', then the browser doesn't cache them, so FFF can't read them from cache.

If that's true, using a browser add-on to force set pages to be cachable is a possibility. If you understand what that means, and want to try it, see this issue.

And to quote myself from a couple weeks ago:

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Rant

Downloading / scraping has been getting worse for years now. I honestly think it's going to become impossible within a few years at best. We've already accepted as normal the Browser Cache workaround that would have been unthinkable earlier.

We're basically just bailing the boat at this point.

Scraping that runs in browser as a browser add-on will probably work longer. But I don't think that I have the energy to start over. Especially when WebToEpub already exists.