I have a small feature request.

Would it be possible to get a direct link to the reviews for each story in the results?

 

Sure thing boss man.

 

Thanks.

It's one of those little things that is appreciated (at least by me).

Also, thanks for creating one of the most useful sites on the internet

 

I've got a question.

I usually use your search engine to see if some of the rarer pairings got any new stories that I'd be interested in reading, so I've got Harry as a required character and several female characters allowed. Problem is that I still get all of the stories with just Harry in them among the results.

Is it possible to prevent that?

 

Right now it is not possible to specify that the results must have two characters. I'm racking my brain to try and figure out if it could easily be done using the existing indices, or if I'd need to specifically aggregate the character count during indexing. I'm leaning towards the latter, and that means a fairly involved update to get that up and running.

Out of curiosity, how do you envision this option on the search page? Something like a "Minimum Character Count" option? Or a new option alongside "Allow" and "Exclude" (Perhaps "Use at least one")?

 

I could personally see it as a check box similar to the completed stories only.

Single Character Only (When checked only the first character choice shows up, when not it autos to two characters.)

 

As it's just a minor inconvenience I'd say go with whatever's the easiest to implement. Maybe just a checkbox called Pairing Required or something along those lines.

On the other hand there are quite a lot of stories that don't even have a single character tagged. I can't remember if there's even a single story among those that's actually good, but you're quite probably aiming for completeness with this engine, so going with character count might be worthwhile. Totally up to you, really.

And again, thanks for doing this, you made browsing for new stories actually feasbile.

 

I just want to say, thanks so much for doing this. It's brilliant.

 

How often does the database get updated?

I just noticed that a story that was deleted from FF.net about six months ago is still showing up in search results.

 

The database gets updated every hour. Unfortunately, the RSS feeds that Fanfiction.net publishes don't include stories deleted, just added or updated. In order to prune dead stories, I'd have to re-parse the entire set of stories to find what was deleted.

I'll log a case for it; it'll probably be a part of the user input/tagging updates.

 

Ouch! That sounds like a pain in the ass.

 

At this point, it's all automated, so it's not really a pain for me. The fanfiction.net servers, on the other hand, may not agree.

 

They should publish an API.

 

I'm pretty sure that violates the hell out of their TOS

 

Possible bug

When I'm on the page linked below and hit 'Next', I get a server error. Is there a limit on the number of results returned?

Search

 

Is there a way to add an option that filters out the reading something fics?

 

That would be awesome, but I don't really see how you could implement that (short of having people manually tag all the reading the books fics manually).

Best solution I've come across is to just put '-reading, -read' in the word filter (along with -slash to weed out some stories that aren't listed as Harry/Snape or whatever). Some do slip through, and it's likely I might be filtering out some stories that aren't actually reading the books fics, but it's well worth it in my opinion.

 

I keep getting 0 Results back. Here's a sample query that gives me nothing:

http://fffn.darklordpotter.net/sear... -book -mpreg -bond -bash -manipulative -mate

 

That's because there's nothing that fits that search. Harfang Lupin Longbottom isn't a common main character.

 

I'd never heard of this person before.

Edit: Even w/o all of your settings there are still no stories with Harfang L.

Edit2: This is the only one that shows up on FFN. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7592490/1/Hidden_in_Plain_Sight

Also, Beonid, it's Longbottom apparently, not Lupin.