FPN Reader

A locally-rendered reader for fountainpennetwork.com that cuts thread views from ~71 requests to 1 and blocks the chatbox poll.

FPN Reader is an unofficial extension for readers of The Fountain Pen Network (fountainpennetwork.com). It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the site. THE PROBLEM FPN runs on a server with a request limiter: roughly 125 requests, then HTTP 429 until the client goes quiet for about a minute — and it counts every request, including CSS, images and scripts, not just pages. A single thread view costs about 71 requests on a cold cache. That is a 429 after fewer than two threads. On top of that, the site's chatbox plugin polls for messages every 10 seconds from any FPN tab left open, logged in or not — 360 requests an hour against a budget of 125. WHAT THIS DOES - Renders threads, forum listings, the forum index and the Activity stream itself, from one fetch per page instead of ~71. Clicking between threads never triggers a full page load. - Blocks the chatbox poll outright. This works even with the reader turned off, and on its own is most of the benefit. - Governs the request budget, so the extension backs off before the server ever returns a 429. A meter in the reader strip and in the toolbar popup shows spent/cap, remaining, and a countdown while the budget is resting. During a cooldown, cached content stays browsable and new clicks queue up in order. - Lets you reply and quote using the forum's own editor, so @mentions, emoticons, formatting, font size and colour all behave exactly as they do on the site. Drafts are saved locally as you type, and if anything about the form looks unfamiliar the extension hands you the native reply form rather than risking what you wrote. - Gives you a navigation bar — Browse, Activity, Gallery, new topic and search — so you can move around without dropping back to the native site, plus a per-post menu with copy link, open on FPN, and edit on your own posts. - Watches for new posts on Activity and on the last page of a thread — every 3 minutes, only while the tab is visible, and only for 15 minutes after your last interaction. New posts arrive behind a banner; nothing moves under you. A tab left open overnight costs nothing. - Loads images and avatars inline. Avatars cost one request per person rather than per post and are kept once fetched. If you would rather spend the budget on pages than pictures, one switch in the popup turns automatic image loading off and gives you a per-post "load images" button showing the cost. - Caches pages and images locally, partitioned per logged-in account, so re-reading costs nothing. The popup shows what is stored and clears it in one click. - Optional ad and tracker blocking, shipped OFF. WHAT IT LEAVES ALONE Login, registration, the messenger, notifications, settings, your profile, the moderator CP and the admin CP are handled entirely by the native site. The reader does not intercept, fetch, prefetch or cache any of them. Every reader view also has an "Original page" control that turns the reader off for that tab and reloads the untouched native page, with a pill to switch back. PRIVACY The extension talks to www.fountainpennetwork.com and nowhere else. No analytics, no telemetry, no remote configuration, no third-party API, no remote code. It does not request the "cookies" permission and never reads document.cookie. Everything it stores stays on your device. Full statement: PRIVACY.md, included in the extension. KNOWN LIMITATIONS IN 0.6.2 - Search results are not rendered yet; the search box navigates to the native page. - Gallery is a normal page load, marked with an arrow so the cost is visible before you click. - Posting works and falls back to the native reply form if anything looks unfamiliar, but logged-in behaviour is the least-tested part of the extension. What changed since 0.5.1 - Replies now use the forum's own editor, so @mentions, emoticons, formatting, font size and colour all work. - Adds a navigation bar and a per-post menu. - Images now load automatically by default; a switch in the popup turns that back off. Fixes - replying from mid-thread returned you to the wrong page; - @mention could show a whole thread instead of a member list; - arriving while the site was throttling showed an empty page rather than saying so.