[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[ILB]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I tried to set up the email subscription with auto-forwarding to one of my throwaway emails, but between messages ending up in the spambox in one email and then the IMAP giving me trouble on the other, it was too much of a hassle to get working. I just manually check for updates on my in-progresses once a day (with a large slow_down_sleep_time to prevent accidentally hammering the sites).

I do get an RSS feed for my favourite categories in FFNet and AO3, but AO3 only shows new stories.

I made a separate email (on gmx) and use it for AO3 and FF.net. That works without problems for me.
I even use it with outlook to delete not wanted stories (as I subscribed also to authors in general) before using FFF to download the newest chapters of my subscribed stories.


For SPAM: Did you try to "white-list" the sender mail? Each site should have only one mail sender address from which your mail could come.

[DavidTC]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

@DavidTC, If I implement your suggestion, it would only partially solve your described problem.

You changed the default action to 'update metadata only' and forgot to change it back.

If update-existing vs download/update-from-URLs vs download/update-from-email all had different default settings, and you changed the update-existing default setting and forgot to change it back, it would still bite you the next time you went to use update-existing.

I guess...but...I honestly don't see any reason to change the _default_ for that. Somewhere here came up with a scenario where they wanted to be able to _select_ a different options for some things, but...that still wouldn't be changing the default.

But okay. Let's leave everything that can currently done as-is, and think of a different way.

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

What do people think about adding a new top-level menu action after 'Update Existing FanFiction Books' that was 'Update Calibre Metadata for Existing FanFiction Books'? With maybe a sub-menu for 'from website' and 'from saved column'?

Those options would invoke the same code, but for metadata-only without changing the default settings.

I don't have a problem with it, I almost suggested doing that instead. It would solve my particular issue, because I would keep the default on the 'correct' thing.

In fact, I'm in favor of that.

But I didn't suggest that because I saw it wouldn't actually solve things for everyone. If people change the default for _some other_ reason, like changing to 'Skip' because they're pasting a bunch of URLs, or whatever other reason they might have to change the default...

...and then they do an email check...and either miss the option or have it set not to prompt...bad things.

If you really want to solve the fundamental problem that 'non-prompting and missed-prompting email updates can do a completely stupid thing and pointless thing that no one does want if the default is different', and yet leave the ability to set defaults for everything....I think the thing to do is to split the option into three or four different defaults:

One default for email update (With a warning that 'You almost certainly don't want to change this to something that won't update your book somehow'....or don't include those particular options on that list.)

One default for updating selected books (And while we're leaving off dumb options, removing 'skip' and 'add new book' from that list, like they are missing from the actual dialog list.)

And one or two defaults for pasted and scraped URLs. (I don't know if those two should be treated differently.)

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by ILB

I made a separate email (on gmx) and use it for AO3 and FF.net. That works without problems for me.
I even use it with outlook to delete not wanted stories (as I subscribed also to authors in general) before using FFF to download the newest chapters of my subscribed stories.


For SPAM: Did you try to "white-list" the sender mail? Each site should have only one mail sender address from which your mail could come.

The spam filtering was done at the server level, so whitelisting it in Thunderbird didn't work - and the server didn't have any options to whitelist specific senders. The second one I tried did let me whitelist, but it had IMAP problems. I might look into GMX though.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by DavidTC

If you really want to solve the fundamental problem that 'non-prompting and missed-prompting email updates can do a completely stupid thing and pointless thing that no one does want if the default is different', and yet leave the ability to set defaults for everything....I think the thing to do is to split the option into three or four different defaults:

One default for email update (With a warning that 'You almost certainly don't want to change this to something that won't update your book somehow'....or don't include those particular options on that list.)

But does the email update even have its own separate dialog, or does it just parse the URLs and pass the results into either the Download or Update Existing dialog like the URL scraper does? There might not be a way for FFF to tell that you're trying to update from email once you're in the dialog, at least without a lot of additional programming.

[DavidTC]

Heh. I just noticed, if I set the default to 'Skip' in settings, but then go and run update on a book, it doesn't default to skip, because that option literally doesn't exist in the dialog that comes up.

But Skip is, inexplicably, a choice in the email dialog, where it makes just as little sense.

EDIT: Heh. Someone just asked the question above if FFF knows how it got somewhere, and I inadvertently answered the question there.

FFF seems to know when it got to that dialog via Update, so...I presume it knows other ways it got there?

[ILB]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

You've already linked to my answer and it hasn't changed, but I'll quote it again here for others:


What we're discussing is a change to menu/GUI organization with minimal change to functionality.

What you wanted turned out to be a surprisingly complex problem of changing how the system works.

No problem. And I don't want to annoy you with it.
I just had the idea that with the "update EPUB Cover" option on present update option

and if you add the new "only update metadata" thing it could be feasible.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by DavidTC

Heh. I just noticed, if I set the default to 'Skip' in settings, but then go and run update on a book, it doesn't default to skip, because that option literally doesn't exist in the dialog that comes up.

But Skip is, inexplicably, a choice in the email dialog, where it makes just as little sense.

EDIT: Heh. Someone just asked the question above if FFF knows how it got somewhere, and I inadvertently answered the question there.

FFF seems to know when it got to that dialog via Update, so...I presume it knows other ways it got there?

There's two different dialogs. The Download New URL (which the URL scraper passes the URLs into) does have skip:



The Update Existing doesn't:



Is there a separate dialog for the email? I thought it just did the same sort of thing as the URL scraper.

[JimmXinu]

There are exactly two dialogs that do multiple duty:

add_dialog takes a list of URLs, which can come from user input, clipboard, dragged from different sources (including emails in thunderbird), 'From Web Page', or from email. There's significant logic involved in looking for existing books that match the story URLs given. (When invoked for an anthology (or anthology update), the download options are hidden.)

update_dialog takes a list of existing Calibre books. And... that's it? Huh, I guess it's mostly on add_dialog.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

update_dialog takes a list of existing Calibre books. And... that's it? Huh, I guess it's mostly on add_dialog.

Something I found fun is that you can create a completely empty Calibre book entry, put a url into the identifiers, and FFF is able to update it.

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2020-10-17
- Disable rather than hide unused menu items, reorg into sub menus.

The motivation for this change is a bit obscure. When you assign a keyboard shortcut (AKA hotkey), Calibre erases any shortcuts that don't have valid actions. That seems sensible and right at first, but there are plugins that vary what menu items/valid actions are available by current library. So changing a shortcut for a view in View Manager in one library can erase your 'Add/Remove Reading Lists' shortcuts in FFF if those are only configured in a different library.

I've offered a PR to Kovid to fix it in Calibre, but I admit it's a less than perfect solution.

This test version addresses the issue for FFF, at least.

[ownedbycats]

The menu looks a little tidier now.

[DavidTC]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Is there a separate dialog for the email? I thought it just did the same sort of thing as the URL scraper.

Yes, [edit: by which, I mean, yes, it's the same as the URL scrapper] except when it doesn't have a dialog at all because you can turn that off in the Email Setting page.

Which is when having a default that doesn't update the books is super-annoying, because you won't even catch what happened unless you click 'View Log' at the end and notice a bunch of 'Metadata collected.'

Which I don't even do all the time, or didn't until I figured out what was happening, so who knows how many fanfics I subscribed to, was sent emails for updates, FFF noticed those email, and dutifully 'updated' the fic via...not updating it.

Now I've got the dialog turned back on, so catch it like 80% of the time, and I also check the Log at the end always, so just end up sighing when I forget the default, but can copy the 'Metadata collected.' URLs out of there and paste them in manually. (Or go unread my email, whichever seems easier.)

[ownedbycats]

Different default actions for the add_dialog and update_dialog might help for your case but I'm not sure how viable it'd be to do.

[Robin42069]

Preview
so ive tried to download off storiesonline.net and all i am getting is this.
Status
Title
Author
Comment
URL
Error
The Healer
QM
'NoneType' object is not subscriptable
https://storiesonline.net/s/22134

it happens on all that i try and download from there. i tried from fanfiction.net and that was fine. so it only appears to be storiesonline.net. let me know if you need more info. also it just happened after i updated to the new plugin the previous one worked fine

[ownedbycats]

On the topic of updating metadata is there a way for FFF to detect what type of update is being done when applying metadata rules? I have FFF change the #read column to No when updating but it'd be nice to not have that happen if I'm just updating the metadata.