Setting up Fiction Reader

The desktop first run

The desktop app asks these before it creates anything on disk. A server or a browser skips straight to the profile question.

What are you setting up? Everything on this computer keeps the library here. Connect to a server I already have turns the app into a window onto a server you run elsewhere. It asks for the address, tests it, and asks for an access token if the server wants one.
Where should your library live? A folder holding the database, every downloaded chapter, every cover and your own books. The suggestion is a Fiction Reader folder in your Documents. You can choose your own, and some choices are refused with the reason: a folder inside Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud or Syncthing (databases and sync clients corrupt each other), a network drive, a folder that already has other things in it, or one the app cannot write to.
Do you want this library on more than one computer? Answer no for now if you are not sure. It can be switched on later in Settings. The other two answers set up sync, either starting a new shared library or joining one that already exists.
Who is reading? Type a name. That is the whole of signing in.

If you already have a library on another device, connect it before you type your name. Once connected, the existing names arrive and you pick yours from a list, so a small misspelling of your own name cannot create a second profile with your reading history split between the two.

Profiles

A profile is a name, and nothing else. There are no passwords, because Fiction Reader is built for a machine you own on a network you trust.

Each profile keeps its own reading positions, unread counts, highlights, notes, tags, collections and display settings. The stories and the downloaded chapters themselves are shared, so two people following the same story download it once.

The profile picker. Switch profiles at any time from Settings → Profile → Switch profile.

Adding a profile is one text field. Names may contain letters, digits, spaces, underscores, dots and hyphens.

The guided tour

Creating the first profile starts a nine-step tour that points at each part of the app in the order you will use it. It takes about two minutes and can be skipped at any point.

To see it again, or for the first time if you skipped it, open Settings → Help and choose Show me around again. The last step of the tour points at that row, so you know where it lives.

Turning sites on

Six sites are supported, and which ones are switched on is up to you. Open Settings → Sources.

Site	Search	Account	Notes
Royal Road	Good	Optional	Rich filters and eight browse lists including Trending and Rising Stars. Signing in unlocks adult content and your follows.
Archive of Our Own	Good	Optional	Fandom, tag, length and completion filters. Signing in reaches restricted works. No cover images.
SpaceBattles	Sometimes blocked	Optional	Browsing a forum section works even when the site's own search refuses automated requests.
Sufficient Velocity	Rate-limited	Optional	Signing in reaches some subforums.
Questionable Questing	Needs an account	Required	Nothing on this site can be reached signed out.
FanFiction.net	None	Not used	Add stories by pasting a link. This site needs a browser-based fetcher that is not built yet, so it will refuse rather than fail strangely.

The Sources section of Settings, showing each site with an enabled switch, its request pacing, and an expanded card with account fields. — **Settings → Sources.** Each site shows how often it may be asked for a page, whether an account is stored, and any login error.

Every site shows its pacing in plain words, such as “one request every 4.0s”. That is deliberate restraint, not a speed limit imposed on you; see why downloads take a while.

The three forums run the same software, so their pacing, fetch strategy and description settings can be copied across with one button. Accounts are never shared between them.

Signing in to a site

Only sign in with your own account, and only to sites you want Fiction Reader to use.

Open Settings → Sources and expand the site.
Enter the username and password and save them.
Press Sign in. Saving and signing in are separate steps on purpose: a typo in a saved password should not count as a failed login attempt against your account.

The status line then says what happened, whether that is signed in and when it was last checked, rejected, or locked after too many refusals. A locked source stops retrying until you save the credentials again.

Two-factor authentication is not supported, and passwords are never shown back to you. On a server, they are encrypted before they are stored and the API will not return them.

Making it look right

Settings → Appearance holds three separate choices, and they apply to every screen.

Light, dark or system. “System” follows the device, so the app turns dark when the device does.
Colour scheme. The page, cards and borders: Warm, Zinc, Slate, Mist, Olive, Sand or Midnight. Every scheme uses the same lightness steps, so switching changes the character of the greys without making anything harder to read.
Base colour. What colour the buttons and highlights are: nine named colours plus a custom one. A custom colour is treated as a hue only; the app sets the brightness itself so a dark blue never becomes a button whose label you cannot read.

All of these follow your profile to every device. The typography inside the reading view is set separately, in the reading view itself. See Reading.

Trying it without committing

Settings → Demonstration mode fills the app with invented stories, books, chapters and reading progress so you can look around a full library before you have one. Nothing in demonstration mode reaches the server or your real profile, and leaving it puts everything back exactly as it was.