FanFiction Plus & AO3 Reader 17+

I loved this app. I paid for the ad-free edition years ago and its been good to me. Until cloudflare/capcha. At first, it was just a little annoying, have to verify i’m not some sort of malicious bot or whatever, no big deal. Then it switched to this for every update i tried to do. Inconvenient, but ok. Then it was every 21 chapters, i had to do the capcha, and in the original implementation of this, it would (as others have pointed out) tag you for another capcha, then make you start the download over.

But today, today was the day i gave up. I had literally over a hundred fanfics saved in my phone through this app, and I haven’t been able to update them in over a month, as the cloudflare interface has me check a box, then tries to establish a session, then bombs and starts over.

On top of this issue, I sent 2 different bug reports to the devs to get them to look at this issue, but they have been incommunicado. This being the case, i uninstalled the app, removed all the app’s data and rebooted my iphone. Now, my library is gone and the app is still exhibiting the same behavior when i was simply trying to login.

Devs, get your stuff together and work with the site security admin to remove this issue, or I will not be the last person that finds greener pastures.

I’ve used this app for years and for awhile it worked fine but recently it’s been a pain to deal with, whenever a story is updated it doesn’t actually update and if I go into it and click force update nine times out of ten it just stalls on that loading screen forever, also it pulls up this weird loading screen to fanfic dot net and that used to be fine but now it doesn’t load and also it keeps interrupting my reading by pulling that up and stalling out. The stalling out and it trying to load has caused it to crash a few times as well, the issues popped up suddenly about a year ago so I figured it was a bug that was caused by an update and was hopeful it would be fixed but it hasn’t so I figured posting this review might cause the developers to look into it, I still use this app occasionally but it’s such a hassle that I just only use it to keep up on the stories I had favorited a year ago and don’t look for more on the app. Hopefully the problem can be fixed soon. Thanks

1. If you do a general check for story updates, the app lists how many updates there are, and offers to run them all. But once updated, it can be very hard to tell which stories were updated (and which were real and which weren’t - there are occasional “false positives” on updates). That little bar showing reading progress is useful at the beginning, but when a story is over 80 chapters, the gray gap gets hard to notice. My suggestion: have a filter to only show stories in the Library with unread chapters.

2. Please add a feature to add stories by ID #

3. When browsing categories, even if the rating filter is set to All, it’s actually showing K-T. You have to switch the rating filter to M, then back to All, to truly show All.

4. It would be nice to have a “write a review” function at the end of a chapter.

5. More sorting functions in the Library would also be welcome, including sorting by the actual last update date for the story instead of the last time the app updated the story.