Trouble updating when online version has chapters removed

[edouard636]

Calibre plugin version : 4.21.0

Issue: When updating a story that has chapters that were removed by the author, FanFicFare says the epub has more chapters than the online version and no update is necessary. Overwriting the story would remove the chapters that are currently not accessible online anymore.

Possible solution: Having the option to store the latest chapter updated in a column or a tag and update based on that latest updated chapter number and not the quantity of chapters.

URL of the story: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47826

Log output:
Status Title Author Comment URL
Skipped Millennial Mage (A Slice of Life, Progression Fantasy) JLMullins Existing epub contains 225 chapters, web site only has 211. Use Overwrite to force update. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47826

[JimmXinu]

Already raised in #949 and #942. I assume some popular story(s) on royalroad started doing this recently.

From #949, quoting #942:

Short answer is no. You can use 'Update Always' mode to get new chapters and discard deleted chapters.

Somebody asked something similar last week in #942. Part of my response was:

FFF's fundamental paradigm doesn't have a way to keep chapters that aren't in the TOC.

A nontechnical issue is the FanFicFare is meant for fanfiction. If an author has removed their content to make money on it, I'm not interested in helping work around that.

However

I was a bit too quick when I said use 'Update Always' mode. Update EUB Always in plugin only works when the number of chapters in the EPUB is less than or equal to the number of chapters on the site.

As I recall, this was requested by users in the very early days(~10 years ago) of FFF plugin specifically to not accidentally update an EPUB when the author has deleted chapters. FFF didn't save chapter URLs in the EPUB until ~4 years ago.

Possible changes

I'm not interested in trying to change FFF's paradigm to keep chapters in the EPUB that have been removed from the site.

I will, however, consider adding a mode or switch to allow Update EUB Always to work when the site has fewer chapters. Maybe something to look at the last chapter URL. In either case, it will discard from the EPUB chapters that have been removed from the site.

That's admittedly less than ideal for this use case, but it's workable, IMO.

Workarounds

What you can do right now is use a tool such as Calibre's Edit book to manually delete the removed chapters from the EPUB (just delete the .xhtml files, Edit book will handle changing the TOC). All that matters is getting the EPUB chapter count down--FFF will re-download them if you delete chapters that are still on the site when you next update the story.

To keep the chapters removed by the author, I suggest either splitting them off into a separate ebook using something like EpubSplit or making a copy of the existing ebook (I don't know a convenient way to do that in Calibre off hand). In either case, make sure that the URL Identifier is removed to not conflict with the copy you will be updating.