feat(english): add Online Read Free Novel source

[RibatTRW]

Closes #149

Study Novels (studynovels.com) from #149 is not covered: the host no longer resolves, so it is out of scope here. Only Onlinereadfreenovel is added.

This PR was written with AI assistance (Claude) and has not had a human review yet.

Screenshots

These are screenshots of the plugin working in the repository's plugin playground (the Vite dev UI), captured headless. They are not from the LNReader app: the Android toolchain is not installed on the machine used.

1. Popular listing with covers and titles:
2. Novel detail with its chapter list (Poles Apart, 27 entries): the site serves pages 2 and 19 of that book empty, so they are skipped rather than listed:
3. Chapter text read from a page of that book:
4. Search results for "Poles Apart":
5. Novel detail after the review fixes: each page is named after the chapter that opens on it (Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone; page 5 is served empty by the site and is skipped):
6. A long book (Anna Karenina) now lists all 219 readable pages, not 122:
7. The end of that list reaches the book's last page (page 239):

Screenshots 1-4 were taken on the earlier revision. Popular, search and the Poles Apart detail and chapter still look the same on the current head. Screenshots 5-7 were captured headless in the playground on the current head (8860ad6).

Untested edge cases

The earlier revision's live validation was inconclusive, and the captain accepted a test exception for it. On the current head the pipeline's live validation verdict is go, and the GitHub Plugin Live Check passes all four steps. These paths are still not exercised against the live site, because the site can't be made to fail on demand:

• a 429, 403, 5xx or network error on a page mid-walk (retried 3 times with backoff, then parseNovel throws)
• a 404 on a page mid-walk (counted as an empty page)
• the 400-page cap and its warning (no live book is that long)

Review fixes, reading improvements and live check

An AI review pass (Claude) on top of 6e93de5, in 45a1a62 plus the pipeline's review fix 8860ad6. All of it was checked against the live site on 2026-10-16.

Why the live check was INCONCLUSIVE. Cloudflare answers GitHub's runners with a 403 "Just a moment..." challenge. A probe on a GitHub runner sent each request shape to /, /allbooks/, search and book pages, twice. These were all challenged:

• Chrome, Firefox and Android WebView user agents
• node (the default), curl, python-requests, an empty UA and bare Mozilla/5.0
• browser Accept/Accept-Language headers, a Referer, full Sec-Fetch-* headers, the www host and http

Self-identifying client UAs (LNReader, Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LNReader), okhttp) were let through every time. The plugin now sends User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LNReader). From a home connection every shape gets a 200, so only datacenter networks (and probably VPNs) are affected.

Live check result. The PR's Plugin Live Check on 8860ad6 passes all four steps: popularNovels (21 novels), searchNovels (20 results), parseNovel (16 chapters) and parseChapter (26604 chars). The same result came from 3 earlier runs of the unmodified checker on a GitHub runner, and from local runs.

Review fixes

• Long books were cut short. The site serves runs of empty pages mid-book (up to 6 in a row seen), and the walk stopped after 2. Anna Karenina listed 122 of its 219 readable pages. The walk now ends at the last page (a page with text and no next link) and skips empty pages.
• A failed page could still shorten the list silently. A 429, 403, 5xx or network error on a page is now retried 3 times (1s, 2s, 4s) and then makes parseNovel throw. Only a 404 or an empty page counts toward the empty run. (pipeline fix)
• Search results that could not be opened. The site cuts search links to a fixed length, e.g. ..._philosophers_stone.ht (a 404) or a slug cut in the middle. The book path is now rebuilt from the link, or from the cover file name when the slug itself was cut. All 13 sampled cut links resolved.
• A blank book could replace a library entry. A book page the site failed to serve returned the title "Untitled" with no chapters. That case now throws, and so does a chapter page with no text, so a blank chapter is never saved.
• Smaller fixes: a stray --> paragraph is dropped. filters uses satisfies Filters, which clears two tsc errors. The page-cap warning fires only when text was actually cut off (pipeline fix).

Reading improvements

• Chapter names. Pages are named after the chapter that opens on them, e.g. Page 1: Chapter 1 The Boy Who Lived. A page with no heading stays Page N, and so does a table-of-contents page.
• Faster loading. Pages are fetched 6 at a time. Opening Anna Karenina went from 88s to 18s.
• Reliable search. Covered by the truncated-link fix above.
• What the site doesn't provide. Book pages have no summary, genres or status, so none are added. Some pages are broken on the site itself for every URL form tried (e.g. Harry Potter book 1, page 5) and can't be recovered.

Residual risk. The checker first sends a HEAD / with its own user agent, which the plugin doesn't control. From a runner that UA was challenged once in 6 probe requests. If that happens, the check reports INCONCLUSIVE, and a re-run clears it.

---

Intent

Deploy an Opus agent to #2686.
Get it to do a code review and also see how it can make the reading experience better for the user; also make sure the live validation passes instead of being inconclusive.

Context: PR #2686 ("feat(english): add Online Read Free Novel source", closes issue #149) adds plugins/english/onlinereadfreenovel.ts. It is open as a draft from the fork RibatTRW/lnreader-plugins, branch fm/lnreader-onlinereadfreenovel-149, base master. Its Plugin Live Check on GitHub currently reports popularNovels as INCONCLUSIVE with "HTTP 403 (likely anti-bot block)" for https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/allbooks/, so the check is green without proving the plugin works. The PR body already carries playground screenshots and AI-authorship disclosure.

What Changed

• Adds a standalone English plugin, plugins/english/onlinereadfreenovel.ts (v1.0.0), for onlinereadfreenovel.com. It implements popularNovels (with a genre filter), searchNovels, parseNovel and parseChapter. parseNovel throws instead of returning a blank entry when no book is found, and parseChapter throws when the site returns no text.
• Chapter lists are built by walking every paginated chapter page in batches. Failed pages are retried, and a persistent failure throws, so a rate limit can't silently shorten a list. Non-OK responses carry an HTTP status, so the live checker can tell a site block (403/503 → INCONCLUSIVE) from a plugin bug. The walk stops at the last page or after a run of empty pages. It logs a warning if it stops at the MAX_PAGES cap.
• Adds the plugin icon at public/static/src/en/onlinereadfreenovel/icon.png.

Closes #149

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Risk Assessment

✅ Low: I traced the batched page walk, the retry and throw handling, the empty-run logic and the MAX_PAGES warning against the recorded decisions, and found no defects. I did not run any tests or the live check.

Testing

I ran the live checker against onlinereadfreenovel.com. popularNovels (21 novels), searchNovels (20 results), parseNovel (16 chapters) and parseChapter (26.6k chars) all returned PASS, none INCONCLUSIVE. I did not drive the mid-walk retry/throw, 404-as-empty and cap-warning paths, because the real site cannot be made to fail on demand.

• Live validation: ✅ go - 1 of 3 scenarios driven live against the product

Scenario	Result	Live	Evidence
Live check passes all four steps (not inconclusive) against the real site	✅ pass	live	live-check-plugin.js output: 4/4 PASS
Mid-walk rate-limit/5xx pages are retried and then make parseNovel throw; 404 counts as an empty page	⏸️ untested	no	The real site cannot be made to return 429/5xx or 404 on demand. A mock would stand in for the site rather than drive the product, so I did not run one.
MAX_PAGES (400) cap warning appears only when text is cut off	⏸️ untested	no	No live book is long enough to reach the cap. Reaching it would need a synthetic site.

Evidence: live check output

popularNovels PASS 21 novels; searchNovels PASS 20 results; parseNovel PASS 16 chapters; parseChapter PASS 26604 chars. Result: Passed

Pipeline

Updates from git push no-mistakes

✅ **intent** - passed

✅ No issues found.

✅ **Rebase** - passed

✅ No issues found.

🔧 **Review** - 2 issues found → auto-fixed ✅

• ⚠️ plugins/english/onlinereadfreenovel.ts:212 - The user's recorded decision was to keep sequential page fetching and keep the MAX_PAGES cap at its decided value. This change walks pages in parallel batches (PAGE_BATCH = 6, Promise.all at lines 212-223) and raises MAX_PAGES from 300 to 400. Parallel fetches also interact badly with the decided rule that a non-OK page is treated as empty. Under 429/403 rate limiting, six concurrent requests are more likely to fail, and 12 consecutive non-OK pages (MAX_EMPTY_RUN) end the walk with a silently truncated chapter list and no warning. Smallest honest remedy: confirm that the later parallel/12-empty-run design supersedes the earlier decision. If it does not, revert to sequential fetching and the earlier cap.
• ℹ️ plugins/english/onlinereadfreenovel.ts:248 - The MAX_PAGES warning (lines 248-252) fires whenever the for-loop is exhausted. That includes the case where the page at the cap is empty and the book has no more text, so the warning can be a false positive. The round-2 decision was to warn only when the cap actually cut off text. Remedy: warn only when the last handled page had text and a next link.

🔧 Fix applied.
✅ Re-checked - no issues remain.

✅ **Test** - passed

✅ No issues found.

• Live validation: ✅ go - 1 of 3 scenarios driven live against the product

Scenario	Result	Live	Evidence
Live check passes all four steps (not inconclusive) against the real site	✅ pass	live	live-check-plugin.js output: 4/4 PASS
Mid-walk rate-limit/5xx pages are retried and then make parseNovel throw; 404 counts as an empty page	⏸️ untested	no	The real site cannot be made to return 429/5xx or 404 on demand. A mock would stand in for the site rather than drive the product, so I did not run one.
MAX_PAGES (400) cap warning appears only when text is cut off	⏸️ untested	no	No live book is long enough to reach the cap. Reaching it would need a synthetic site.

• npm ci
• node scripts/live-check-plugin.js plugins/english/onlinereadfreenovel.ts

✅ **Document** - passed

✅ No issues found.

✅ **Lint** - passed

✅ No issues found.

✅ **Push** - passed

✅ No issues found.

[greptile-apps]

Confidence Score: 5/5

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

Summary

Adds Online Read Free Novel as an English source, with browsing, genre filtering, search, book details, chapter text, and an icon.

Since the previous review:

• Readers can browse and search Onlinereadfreenovel books.
• Books open as named pages of readable text.

No new actionable issues were found. This review checked code only; it did not run the live checker.

_{Reviews (2) · Last reviewed commit: "no-mistakes(review): retry and throw on ..." · Reviewed by Greptile}