A couple of hours ago I downloaded the 17 chapters of QM's Champion of the Gods. A couple of hours later I was checking to see if there were any new downloads, and noticed that there was no green arrow downloaded indicator. I hit the Firefox refresh circle but no change. I checked on my disk and all 17 chapters were there. I finally downloaded again, and now the green arrow shows. I have had this happen before, but not very often.
Is there a way for us premium users to access the flag presence or absence in advanced search?
If not, can we get that flag available for search?
ETA: specifically looking for access to whether the item has been downloaded or not. I know I can access flag presence, read state, voted state etc, but the download status is not available.
SOL uses read as "Read online" and/or "Downloaded", so it's somewhat possible to sort out downloaded stories by setting "Read:" to Read stories only.
The download arrow is created when the story is downloaded, it's not possible to sort only out those stories.
And there's the problem. Two different functions are able to set the same indicator for different things. Yet the other indicator exists and shows the desired state, but is not available for searches.
If I accidentally open a title, then the advanced search I use that excludes the titles I've already downloaded will also not show titles I read online but hadn't downloaded.
Even worse is the titles that got updated since they were downloaded reset the download indicator but the read indicator remains. This makes it impossible to search for updated versions of previously downloaded titles without having to resort to massive search results and screen scraping to feed into a filter that shows not downloaded titles. That makes a very heavy load on the database and web servers to send out massive amounts of data for a few hits. Far more efficient to do this search in the database directly, it's already a Boolean and therefore more efficient to use it.
Just had an example of this, nerdy scientist was updated recently and looks to be extending it in the future. Happened to see the blog post about it and sure enough, the title was set to read, but the download icon was not set any more as it was recently updated after the download.
But there is no search I can find that will show the updated and previously downloaded stories so the offline version can be refreshed.
Just download it again to the same folder and it will over write what you have to the longer version.
I understand how to download, thanks. Been in this industry since before pcs were released.
What I can't do is find which of the many titles I've downloaded previously have been updated since I downloaded them last so that I can refresh them.
The only method I've found is to do an advanced search for everything with a read flag set and save the search results one page at a time and feed the saved files to a python script to search for files that are missing the downloaded indicator and extract them to a new html result file for manually downloading them again. Or I can visually scan the search results line by line looking for the absence of the downloaded icon.
That's about as wasteful of a search as I could possibly imagine.
Or the advanced search page could have a minimal change made to add one more Boolean search at the bottom titled "downloaded" [blank, yes, no] just like the read or exclusive or flagged booleans and shift the search to the db where it belongs.
Try this page:
https://storiesonline.net/library/not_downloaded.php
It's not completely ready yet, but it works.
Great feature! Thanks for your hard work keeping the site functional and operational!
Thanks! It would be good to have a 'more info' button for each entry (or have the story link go straight to the more info page for the story) and a way of filtering the list to show just stories that have been completed.
However, what I'd really like is to be able to filter out stories that I had previously downloaded - but I'm worried you may have lost this info!
Thank you for all the work you do in making this site so great, and being so responsive to the needs/wants of the readers and authors.
However, what I'd really like is to be able to filter out stories that I had previously downloaded - but I'm worried you may have lost this info!
The way the system works is that when you download a story, a flag is set for it. When it gets updated, those flags get cleared for everybody who had downloaded it before.
There is no way to show which stories you've previously downloaded. Only that you've viewed them. So this page shows the stories that are marked as 'READ' and no download flag.
To make it work perfectly, I would have to modify the system to stop the flag from being cleared, change it to a date instead of just a flag. We'll see.
To make it work perfectly, I would have to modify the system to stop the flag from being cleared, change it to a date instead of just a flag. We'll see.
What about changing the flag to a kleenean rather than a boolean if your database supports that?
Then if a story gets updated, instead of setting the flag back to off/false, you set it to maybe/unknown instead.
No need for a date.
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2183117/kleenes-three-valued-logic-and-tautology
There is no way to show which stories you've previously downloaded.
That's what I suspected/feared. It would help (me) if the list could be filtered to remove incomplete stories, and to restrict it to stories by authors I follow, please!
I'm hoping that the page that was shared is a basic quick proof of concept and that the download status bit becomes a selectable setting for the advanced search function. Then we can filter as desired and get the results we need.
Much better!
I'm hopeful that you will be able to make the download status flag also available for advanced searches in the future.
Very timely as I just discovered a bunch of titles uploaded recently that are all resets of the download status but still marked read, as is proper.
That tri status thing looks pretty cool though, need to get up to speed on that for my own database stuff.
Thanks. This is much better than filtering over a thousand titles to find the 12 that are updated since they were downloaded.