Thread: Author managing own webnovel page

I am Q-ichi, an author of a web-novel. I happened upon your website and saw that it features my webnovel "R.A.M." https://www.wlnupdates.com/series-id/58888/r-a-m

The page features links obtained from royalroadl (RRL). While it has all 5 chapters listed, my main site features 7 chapters. Thus, I am asking if it is possible for your site to feature both links from RRL and my main site.

On a side note, I would like to suggest that the description and information of listed novels to be locked away from user editing. Make it a feature for only site admins and authors of their own novels. It prevents tampering and listing phishing sites in the novel description.

I added it to the RSS scraper system.

On a side note, I would like to suggest that the description and information of listed novels to be locked away from user editing. Make it a feature for only site admins and authors of their own novels. It prevents tampering and listing phishing sites in the novel description.

Has that actually happened? I haven't actually needed to bother with much moderation yet, since I haven't had any significant abuse.

The overall design idea for the site is to be as wiki-like as possible, you can probably see what the edit history for every item is kept, and I think I'll probably go for managing abusers rather then locking content. If a lot of abuse suddenly starts, I'll revisit the decision then.

Alright. Thanks.

You also added the links from my main site. Thanks. It's a little crude but it does its job. I look forward to an updated version in the future.

Did you manually add the links or did you sync with my site?

I basically do everything with RSS. If you right-click on the righthand columns of the release table, you can get more information on each release. If a release is added by rss-feeder, it came by parsing RSS feeds.

I don't have a general way of getting structured release information from unstructured content (e.g. plain web-pages), so I'm stuck with trying to make sense of RSS feeds, at the moment. I have a bunch of infrastructure built around that that does a bunch of things to try to get meaningful volume/chapter/etc... from textual release content.

I think I've discussed it elsewhere, but a significant component of this whole site is an experiment in automation. It's more or less an excuse to play with interesting programming tools.

A good example although not exactly what OP is talking about is here: https://www.wlnupdates.com/series-id/2423/change-new-world

I've removed 'Volume 2 Chapter 90' several times as it then doesn't show proper updates. The 2 he used only denotes a change to the 2nd arc, yet shortly after I 'Edit Release'. It's been re-added 3 times by rss-feeder as you can see on said page.

Still love it, just sadly my browser on my phone (where I read 99% of stuff on this site) won't let me Edit Release.

@Teleclast - For automated releases, if the author has mis-numbered them, don't delete it but instead use the "toggle countability" option.
That lets you exclude a mis-parsed (or typo-ed) release from being included in the "latest release" system, without actually removing it (which doesn't help for stuff like this, as all RoyalRoadL series regularly get re-scanned).

Basically, the problem here is the author is only sometimes adding volume numbers, which the system then doesn't know how to sort, because volume 2 is a larger release number then no volume at all.

Source mis-numbering is a significant issue for the automated system, and I don't have any ideas about how to address it in an automated manner. It's really quite annoying.

@Admin (you should assign yourself a more approachable name btw) Have you considered using some sort of cascade function based on the most recently used volume number to help with the proper assignment of chapter identifiers? Maybe run a string match of the url to see if a chapter has already been added before allowing a new entry?

I've certainly thought about it, but the way the feed parsing mechanism works right now, I don't have access to the other releases, and when they're then inserted into the list of releases, I don't modify the release information.

I do match against the URL, but there are some cases where I want to duplicate releases. This primarily happens where the initial release was parsed from RSS feeds, and the later release came from a more-structured source (e.g. the NovelUpdates scraper). In that case, the later result is more correct, and I don't want to discard it.

Basically, I can come up with a bunch of ideas to make it work better for some cases, but the way it is produces the least horrible result in all cases.