[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[Nickname]

Welp, the forum kept logging me out.

I was using the wrong update option "update metadata"

Going back to see how to update my library without completely deleting what is already there

[XRoverMaelstromX]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

If you downloaded to epub, you can do Update EPUB Always. FFF will still go to the site to collect the metadata, but will reuse the existing chapters.

If you downloaded to a different format, Overwrite Always is the only option to update title page. I recommend downloading to epub and converting as needed for all users.

If you aren't already, you should also look at creating and using a custom column for storing FanFicFare Metadata. It won't help with updating the title page inside the epub, but it will let you update Calibre metadata without more network traffic later.

Ah thank you! I feel silly that I didn't realize that, that's incredibly helpful!

And yes, I actually did a bunch of work a few months ago to make a bunch of custom columns to break out the metadata because I had so many things in my default tags from just using the FFF default settings that it was crashing my tag browser in MoonReader, it's been a huge quality of life improvement and also led me to some other tweaks that have been pretty great too.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to use the replace metadata function to standardize the relationship tags a little more, and I've sort of got it but it's not perfect yet and I'm not sure if my ideal outcome is going to be possible, so I'm trying to figure out what kind of compromise outcome I want that is possible - I want any OC characters shipped with named characters to end up second in the ship name, but to keep the alphabetization of ship orders for everything else, and I'm pretty sure I can't write something that will do that, so I'm trying to figure out if it's worth even trying to standardize the various ways OCs are tagged.

I also want to do something that will take the Ao3 fandom names in their custom column and put the standardization in my regular fandoms column. I read a lot of Star Wars and DC stuff and the fandom tags for that on Ao3 cover a lot of different individual books/comics/movies under the same overall fandom, so I have a separate custom column where I just label the overall fandom manually, but if I could set something up to automatically insert the overall fandom into that column using the information from the Ao3 fandom column that would be great but I have been running up against a wall trying to figure that out.

[madame_newbie]

Hi, since AO3 did a maintenance update (as of this date) I ran into the following problem:

HTTP Error in FFF '403 Client Error: Forbidden for url:xxx

I noticed their cloudflare is new? So, do we wait for an update? Thank you.

[richard6154]

Originally Posted by madame_newbie

Hi, since AO3 did a maintenance update (as of this date) I ran into the following problem:

HTTP Error in FFF '403 Client Error: Forbidden for url:xxx

I noticed their cloudflare is new? So, do we wait for an update? Thank you.

Same here, I can view the new chapter but I get the above error when I use FFF.

[kagekarasu]

new problem on fimfiction.net, some fics work just fine, but other give me a new error message, "
Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/523177/"

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by madame_newbie

Hi, since AO3 did a maintenance update (as of this date) I ran into the following problem:

HTTP Error in FFF '403 Client Error: Forbidden for url:xxx

I noticed their cloudflare is new? So, do we wait for an update? Thank you.

Originally Posted by richard6154

Same here, I can view the new chapter but I get the above error when I use FFF.

They have Cloudflare up temporarily: https://ao3org.tumblr.com/post/76058...got-some-extra

Just wait a day or two.

[wildfire070]

BrowserCache feature works as a workaround to download while AO3 has Cloudflare up, but it doesn't download images in fics for me so I'm just holding off on downloading and updating fics until AO3 gets their server issues resolved.

[madame_newbie]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

They have Cloudflare up temporarily: https://ao3org.tumblr.com/post/76058...got-some-extra

Just wait a day or two.

You're right. Waited a bit and now am able to download fics from AO3.

[ownedbycats]

I suggest to bookmark the ao3org tumblr for status updates. There's also the @AO3_Status account on Twitter, but it's kind of useless unless you have a Twitter account.

[sandmanwake]

I'm getting odd behaviors from v4.38 of FFF on SB and QQ where if I have a story already downloaded and the author changed the title of the story or how their name is spelled, it'll download the story again under the new title. Now, I have two copies of the story downloaded.

I try to update by dragging the link from the website to the FFF download/update box since there's a new chapter and I get an error with a comment in the logs stating: "More than one identical book by Identifier URL or title/author(s)--can't tell which book to update/overwrite."

A similar thing happens if I have two copies of the same story from two different websites already downloaded, say SB and A03. The A03 copy updates just fine. However, an attempt to update the SB one results in the same message.

What's even odder is that I occasionally get a story on SB where it doesn't appear that anything changed with the title, Author, or URL, yet I get the same message, like it doesn't recognize the book already downloaded from SB as the one to update.

It happened with this one, for instance: https://forums.spacebattles.com/thre...uto-au.856521/

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by sandmanwake

I'm getting odd behaviors from v4.38 of FFF on SB and QQ where if I have a story already downloaded and the author changed the title of the story or how their name is spelled, it'll download the story again under the new title. Now, I have two copies of the story downloaded.

Well, this is annoying. I just added code in v4.38 specifically to match changed story URLs to existing books for the Xenforo forum sites (SB/SV/QQ).

However, that code assumes that the thread ID number never changes. If it does, FFF will consider it a different story.

How did you start the 'update' that resulted in the second download? Email? Manual from URL?

If you have both the before and after books, please post both story URLs so I can see. (Or PM to me if NSFW.)

FYI, you can also always select the book in your library and hit FFF's "Update Existing Fanfiction Book" option to update that specific book, even if there's more than one copy for whatever reason.

Originally Posted by sandmanwake

I try to update by dragging the link from the website to the FFF download/update box since there's a new chapter and I get an error with a comment in the logs stating: "More than one identical book by Identifier URL or title/author(s)--can't tell which book to update/overwrite."

I assume you meant you tried to update the one you have two books for. FFF doesn't know which to update, so it bails rather than make a mistake.

That also suggests that the code for matching changed story URLs did work in that case...

Originally Posted by sandmanwake

A similar thing happens if I have two copies of the same story from two different websites already downloaded, say SB and A03. The A03 copy updates just fine. However, an attempt to update the SB one results in the same message.

Same story from different sites should never match existing book by story URL.

However, if you have the "Search by Title/Author(s) for If Story Already Exists?" option checked (FFF General settings tab, right side, Misc box), it will find stories with the same title and author, even from different sites. That's kinda what it's for.

Story URLs?

Originally Posted by sandmanwake

What's even odder is that I occasionally get a story on SB where it doesn't appear that anything changed with the title, Author, or URL, yet I get the same message, like it doesn't recognize the book already downloaded from SB as the one to update.

It happened with this one, for instance: https://forums.spacebattles.com/thre...uto-au.856521/

Do you still have the epubs(s) in question? Can I see them?

[sandmanwake]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

However, that code assumes that the thread ID number never changes. If it does, FFF will consider it a different story.

How did you start the 'update' that resulted in the second download? Email? Manual from URL?

I manually checked. The thread id number didn't change. I tried to start the update in two ways. Dragged and dropped the url from the browser onto the FFF update box. Also CTRL+C the URL and then clicked the FanFicfare icon in calibre, which brings up the update box with the url inserted from clipboard. Same behavior.

If you have both the before and after books, please post both story URLs so I can see. (Or PM to me if NSFW.)

I'll keep that in mind next time, but unfortunately no longer have the before and after books as I used the update existing book option after manually selecting the existing book or redownloading the entire book after deleting the old one.

I manually checked using the "Edit metadata individually" option. The thread id number stays the same and the rest of the url could have changed or it could stay the same (identical to the one I'm trying to update with), it doesn't seem to matter, and it's unclear to me why some stories update successfully, but others didn't.

The url I gave in my last post was one where the entire url, including thread id number, didn't change, but it didn't update as it presumably sees a duplicate somewhere. I did search and there was only a single copy for the website that was already downloaded.

Here it is again though: https://forums.spacebattles.com/thre...uto-au.856521/

Now that I think about it though, the "Title" of this particular downloaded story shows up as just "Obito-Sensei", which is different from the title attached to the thread id number of 856521. When checking the metadata for it, the "Ids" field has:

url:https://forums.spacebattles.com/thre...uto-au.856521/

FYI, you can also always select the book in your library and hit FFF's "Update Existing Fanfiction Book" option to update that specific book, even if there's more than one copy for whatever reason.

Yeah, I've used this method.

I assume you meant you tried to update the one you have two books for. FFF doesn't know which to update, so it bails rather than make a mistake.

That also suggests that the code for matching changed story URLs did work in that case...


Same story from different sites should never match existing book by story URL.

Yeah, I know about this behavior and have accounted for it. The behavior I described only occurred after I updated to v4.38 of FFF, which from what you said above was when you added code to match changed story URL for SB/SV/QQ.

However, if you have the "Search by Title/Author(s) for If Story Already Exists?" option checked (FFF General settings tab, right side, Misc box), it will find stories with the same title and author, even from different sites. That's kinda what it's for.

Story URLs?


Do you still have the epubs(s) in question? Can I see them?

Hmm, I do have that option checked. I'll try to see what happens if I uncheck the box the next time I run into the update error again, but I'm fairly sure I had it checked before the update to the latest FFF.

Story URLs? See above and in previous post.

Unfortunately I don't have the epubs any more as I manually deleted them and redownloaded the entire thing whenever the error popped up. I will keep it in mind though.

[JimmXinu]

You've given one story URL without any indication of how it changed.

All I can do with that is confirm that trying it twice finds the existing book--which I have; including with a virtual library selected that doesn't show that book.

Personally, I use FFF's log page feature and record the story URL as well as title, author, etc. Perhaps I should make that the default.

Or is there a history somewhere on SB I don't know about?

[sandmanwake]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

You've given one story URL without any indication of how it changed.

Sorry about that. I just didn't have any previously downloaded examples to provide since whenever the error pops up, I just deleted all old copies and downloaded from scratch.

Thinking about it more, the error might be related to why you added the new code for SB/SV/QQ in the first place. I think what might be happening is that whenever an author changed either the story's title or their name, the previous version of FFF I had added a second copy of the story even though there was already an old copy of the story downloaded. So now there's two or more downloaded stories with the same thread id number from the same website.

Then, I upgraded FFF's version with the new code and it sees multiple stories with the same thread id number already existing due to the previous version of FFF and throws that error. Hence why it seemed random to me why some stories threw an error and some didn't.

Sometimes the change in title or name was small enough I missed that there was even a change or the title or name changed entirely and I don't notice that there are two copies of the same stories going by different titles or having different author names.

So in conclusion, maybe there's nothing wrong with the current version of FFF and it'll all work out once I clear all duplicate downloaded stories caused by the previous version of FFF.

[JimmXinu]

That sounds very plausible.

Keep an eye on it, and save both story URLs if you see it happen again.