Report Website Bugs Here!

[Korppi]

Encountered a strange bug.

In library, Realist Hero 3 and Rokujouma 8 had new versions to download(green entry)

Once I hit the download for Rokujouma 8, it instead downloaded a copy of Orphen 15.

When I tried again afterwards, it downloaded the right volume(Rokujouma 8), and nothing was amiss with Realist Hero 3 either.

I know this isn't some fluke, because I remember that the same thing happened a few weeks ago also, first download was totally unrelated, next ones worked as they should. I then thought I might have messed up somewhere, but now it happened again.

Could be the website leaves something in the browser cache, so clearing cache next time before downloading might alleviate the issue?
(Chrome Version 97.0.4692.71)

[myskaros]

@terabyte @Gat We're aware of the calendar not updating issue and investigating it.

@Korppi Huh, that's pretty odd. I'll forward this to chocolatkey to look at.

[Korppi]

@myskaros I have a theory what happened. The website has some noticeable lag, if you freshly load the main page for example the 'USER' still reads 'LOGIN' before switching, if you click before that happens you get the login page for a brief moment.
So if there's lag on the user page as well, that might be to blame if it clicked higher on the list than expected(the green entry didn't disappear, and Orphen was on the new books list above).

[chocolatkey]

@korppi Something you can do is give us the link to the download from your browser's downloads page. Here is an example for Chrome:
https://image.prntscr.com/image/JO1ryH6cS5mdcA3RRrS0pA.png
Be sure to remove everything after the question mark, so no access_token!

[Korppi]

@chocolatkey
Orphen 15 https://labs.j-novel.club/app/v1/me/library/61d844ae3cb46d8fb5397629/epub?
Rokujouma 8 https://labs.j-novel.club/app/v1/me/library/5a3306e0dca1960624dd8536/epub?

By the way, that image gives 403 error.

[chocolatkey]

@korppi Thanks. That confirms that the links are correct and correspond to the names you put next to them. So if the link you clicked on did not correspond to them, that means it's a bug with the website interface or a misclick

[sniper_samurai]

All the chapters in the app on manga volumes that started release since December are being stated with a fixed number of pages per chapter and not the actual page counts.
If the chapter being read has less pages than this placeholder number it is showing as not being completely read in the app.

[sniper_samurai]

The parts for Jessica Bannister Volume 5 are showing as expired on January 16th despite still being in prepub.

[Korppi]

It's been slow before, but today the site has been unresponsive to new heights. Loading the main page took forever, and each time after a few browses between main/user/calendar etc., it settled on stalling indefinitely, showing me even logged out. And trying to log back in straight stalled indefinitely as well. Even the forum is quite unresponsive today, which it hasn't been previous times.
The rest of my internet works and loads normally, so it's not my connection at least.

Clearing cache, cookies, and logging in again(still slow but worked), I was able to purchase credits and use them for today's volumes, but had to repeat the procedure between each.

Win10 Pro 64bit, Chrome Version 99.0.4844.74 64bit

Edit; And now it works. Still takes time to load any page, but works...

[myskaros]

@korppi Do you think it's possible it's your specific internet connection? I assume if the site was unresponsive to everyone that there would be a lot more complaints, but yours is the only one I've seen in recent memory.

[Korppi]

@myskaros Could be, but I don't know why it would. Everything seems to work normally now, so have to wait until next time it's slow, and then check;
If it's isp connection, I'll just test if it works normally though vpn.
If it's a script getting blocked that's causing the issue(ublock shows googletagmanager .co m and cloudflareinsights. co m scripts blocked) then incognito mode should work normally.
If it's a browser issue, switching to firefox might help.

[Treviisolion]

I'm looking at getting a subscription but the Subscription button does not appear to be working. Opening up the web console I am getting a 404 error trying to load the https://labs.j-novel.club/app/v1/me/subscription resource.

[Treviisolion]

@treviisolion Apparently if you do not subscribe through the button on the https://j-novel.club/user/membership page it is possible to subscribe. The button on https://j-novel.club/howitworks properly leads you to https://j-novel.club/subscribe which is also thankfully working. https://j-novel.club/user/membership is however not working quite properly.

[yanrishatum]

It seems after switching to new API that fetches novel metadata, prepub expiration markers broke. It now shows all chapters as available for prepub reading regardless if they are expired or not (clicking on expired one will open a subscribe page):

iirc old API had an expired bool, while new one contains expiration object that is clearly not honored. If they supposed to work as buttons (while before they didn't), they should have a different color - alongside to purchased books and catchups as to not confuse people.
Ah, yes:
Windows10, Chrome. I did a full refresh as to be sure I didn't have cached scripts that caused the bug while server had a new one without it.

[garantiertnicht]

@yanrishatum said in Report Website Bugs Here!:

It seems after switching to new API that fetches novel metadata, prepub expiration markers broke. It now shows all chapters as available for prepub reading regardless if they are expired or not

There is a positive here, tho: we're able to see the %-progress of the parts we read on the browser on expired parts which we weren't able to view before. If you started reading prepubs/catchups, didn't finish it and wondered which volume to purchase later, this would help. To me personally, I think that's slightly more valuable than seeing if I can read everything for free on first glance, especially since there is an “Expired” badge.

Nonetheless, it does seem like it isn't supposed to be like that; as you say a different color would help and clicking on them leading to the subscribe page seems confusing at best and misleading at worst.

PS: Can confirm; Firefox (current Nightly) on Linux

[Geezer Weasalopes]

I'm not sure it's a website bug, but it very definitely is a bug in how the JNC bibliographic control database is set up.
Yuri Tama: From Third Wheel to Trifecta by Toshizou.
The Sidekick Never Gets the Girl, Let Alone the Protag’s Sister! by Toshizo.

Toshizo & Toshizou are the same author; all related titles can be found within the same Narou account. [https://mypage.syosetu.com/1333777/]
If you search the JNC database by author and enter Toshizo both pull up, but if you search by Toshizou you only get the current work.
Which shows that it is indeed a free text search of the author field as opposed to utilizing an Authority Control Entry for the author.

Erm.
Bunch of librarian gobbledygook there.

It looks like when you click on the name of an author in a series entry to see what else JNC has of theirs, it does a strict character search of the Author field, and and anything that matches the string (including items where the search string is a truncation of the entire string) counts as a positive hit, and anything shorter than the string is a negative.

Searching upon Toshizo pulls up Toshizo and anything which has Toshizo and more as well, to wit, Toshizou.
Searching upon Toshizou doesn't pull up Toshizo, since it's a shorter character string.

So it's not a case of there being an entry which is Author Number 99, and "Toshizo author of series A" and "Toshizou author of series B" both point to that author entry, but rather that there is an Author field in the database which is a free text entry, and the search is a free text entry, and only things which are matches of the free text search term are shown as being the same author.
Which means that depending upon which series page you are coming from, you may or may not find out that JNC really is publishing two works by this individual.
And that if JNC were publishing works by two individuals who publish under the same name, their works would get grouped together if doing an author search and they spelled their names the same; given that this does occur within the LN/Manga publishing industry as a result of the widespread use of aliases, as well as just having the same name in the first place, this could become an additional problem down the line.

The Library community has had to come up with solutions to this a long time ago.
Publishers and retailers have been much less careful.

[myskaros]

@Geezer-Weasalopes We're aware of the issue. It boils down to contracts with different companies; one contract requires us to spell it "Toshizo" and the other "Toshizou." We'll try to solve it at some point, but no specific timeline in mind at the moment.

Another example of contract spellings:

https://j-novel.club/series?search=author:"Ichiro Sakaki"
https://j-novel.club/series?search=author:"Ichirou Sakaki"

[Geezer Weasalopes]

@myskaros
If the standard search is a plain free text search, it'd take slapping a pre-filter onto the search engine that basically checks the search term against a list, and it it's a hit, tells it to search 'x' term instead.
It'd be a pain to set-up, and each time a new irregularity showed up the list of terms would need to be added to, but I don't think JNC would have enough of these to justify setting up the kind of things libraries use in their bibliographic control systems; too many changes would be required, it wouldn't make economic sense at all.

This does have a rather low priority compared to a great many other things, yes.
It could be far worse; how many different ways did William Shakespeare spell his name?!

[Vilidious]

• old card had changed and subscription ended
• attempted to resubscribe with new card
• payment does not go through via new card
• enabled google pay
• google pay verifies my card works
• all payment methods removed
  • bug 1: failed attempts to add a new payment method creates new overlapping payment methods
  • had to remove same method many times to see it cleared
• added new payment method as google pay
  • payment method accepted (the 0 eur transaction succeeded)
  • bug 2 (?): payment method is shown as the new card
  • google pay is connected to it, which should be irrelevant to this site
  • expected: google pay shown instead of the card connected to google pay
  • assumption: the website drags the card details from memory and tries to use it instead of google pay?
• attempting to resubscribe with this payment method fails at payment
  • assumption: still attempts to use removed new card instead of google pay
  • this is known to fail from the start

Basically, I won't be able to resubscribe to your service due to this, as such I suppose I won't.

Maybe I'll come back again some day and see if it works then, but for now I don't think I'll be actively following this.

I already spent likely a couple of hours on this and took into use a service I didn't really need (google pay), after all.

[myskaros]

@Vilidious Can you please email us at support@j-novel.club? Payment-related issues frequently require us to ask about personal details in order to troubleshoot, so the public forum isn't really an appropriate place to discuss this.