[blackstargit]

fix(english/webnovel): add chapter dates and stats, fix ongoing status

Changes (1.0.3 → 1.1.0)

• Chapter release dates. Every chapter, including locked ones, gets its absolute publish time (ISO).
  Desktop catalog pages only show relative text ("7 years ago"). The mobile catalog
  (m.webnovel.com/book/<id>/catalog) embeds publishTime in __NEXT_DATA__, joined on li[data-cid].
  Chapter paths are unchanged, so existing libraries keep their progress.
• Volume titles are kept in chapter names ("Volume 0: Auxiliary Volume: …"). The old regex dropped them.
• Status. Ongoing novels showed "Unknown Status", because the old selector only exists for completed
  books. Status now comes from actionStatus (30 = Ongoing, 50 = Completed).
• Genres include the novel's tags.
• Stats. rating, ratingCount and display-ready info (views, power stones, golden tickets, chapters,
  schedule, last updated, translator, editor). These come from the mobile book page (~210 KB, against up to
  3.4 MB for the desktop page), with desktop g_data and the old HTML selectors as fallbacks.
  SourceNovel gains optional ratingCount and info.
• Robustness.
  • Mobile extras are best-effort: one retry after 1.5 s, no retry on 404.
  • A blocked desktop catalog now throws a clear error instead of returning "No Title Found" /
    "https:undefined" placeholders that a metadata refresh could write over real data.
  • Invalid timestamps are skipped instead of throwing.

App-side note (please read)

Today the app marks a chapter as updated whenever its releaseTime changes. Without
lnreader/lnreader#2111, the first library update after this plugin version would put every WebNovel
chapter into the Updates tab, and again whenever the best-effort date fetch fails and later recovers. The
app PR fixes that. Chapters in titled volumes are renamed once either way, so they show up in Updates once.
ratingCount/info are ignored by the current app; a stats section could be proposed separately.

Testing

• App: installed 1.1.0 from my fork's repository on a Pixel 9 Pro XL (LNReader with the app fix above).
  Working on my WebNovel library. We now see the chapter update dates, tags for the novel, the novel's current status, various stats, etc.
• npm run check:plugin -- plugins/english/webnovel.ts: INCONCLUSIVE. Cloudflare challenged my PC
  ("Just a moment…" 403), including for unmodified 1.0.3.
• Offline checks against captured pages (Lord of Mysteries, My Vampire System, Shadow Slave):
  • all 1,432 LoM paths are identical to the desktop hrefs;
  • every chapter has an ISO date, and without mobile data there are no dates and the count is unchanged;
  • status is correct for ongoing and completed books;
  • every fetch-failure path returns or throws as designed.
• tsc -p tsconfig.production.json, eslint, prettier, npm run build:compile (ES5 output) all pass.

Related issues: none found (searched "webnovel").

[greptile-apps]

Confidence Score: 5/5

[Medium impact] The PR appears safe to merge; no actionable issues were found.

Summary

Adds chapter dates, full volume titles, tags, ratings, and extra stats to Webnovel novels. Uses mobile data first and keeps desktop chapter paths unchanged.

• WebNovel chapters keep full volume names and gain release dates.
• WebNovel novel results return richer details and the correct book status.

Acknowledgments: blackstargit notes that date changes can add chapters to Updates without the linked app fix. They also identify one-time chapter renames from keeping volume titles as intentional.

_{Reviews (1) · Last reviewed commit: "fix(english/webnovel): add chapter dates..." · Reviewed by Greptile}