UI Improvements for Royal Road

Filter and re-lay-out Royal Road fiction lists, hide fictions for good, and improve chapter typography and comments.

UI Improvements adds what's missing in royalroad.com: local filters and layouts for the fiction lists, typography and a recap for the chapters, infinite scrolling, and a set of comment controls the site doesn't have. Every part of it is a toggle. Five of them change the page the moment you install: a toolbar above the fiction lists, hide/dropped buttons, lists that keep loading as you scroll, and clearer comment threads. Nothing else moves until you turn it on. THE FICTION LISTS - Filters that exist nowhere on Royal Road outside its search page: rating, followers, views, pages, chapters, tags in and out, status, type, when it last updated and how long since the last chapter. You can also drop anything you already follow, have favourited, saved for later or gave up on. - Filters that say what they are doing. A list filtered down to nothing tells you so, instead of looking like a page that simply has no matches. Put the same tag in "must have" and "must not have" and the panel says that can never match. And after four pages that match nothing it points at your own Global Filters — the site-wide ones you set on Royal Road — which Royal Road applies before serving the list, so a filter that looks broken here may be working perfectly on what is left. - Hide a fiction and it leaves every list for good. Undo is one click. There is a list of everything you have hidden, and a mode that puts them back in place so you can see what you did. - Tried and dropped: a bookmark button for the ones you gave a go and stopped. The card dims and says so wherever it turns up, but stays in the list and stays clickable, in case you change your mind. - Lists that keep going. The next page arrives underneath instead of replacing what you were just reading, with your filters and your hidden list applied to it on the way in, up to twenty-five pages deep. - Four layouts: Royal Road's cards, compact rows, two columns on a window wide enough for them, or a wall of covers. There is a width cap too, if you want more of a wide monitor than Royal Road is willing to use. - Expand every blurb at once, or one at a time on hover. - Every tag on a card, without the click. Royal Road folds all but the first few away behind a plus; this opens them while the pointer is over the card, or always. Its own plus goes on working, so you can pin a row open or close one again. - Colour the tags you care about. Give "LitRPG" or "Progression" a colour and it follows that tag wherever it turns up: the fiction lists, a fiction's own page, and the home page if you want it there too. The text colour is worked out from the background you picked, so a dark colour does not leave dark text sitting on it. Every tag you did not pick is left exactly as Royal Road styles it. - "Some Title [LitRPG, Dungeon Core]" becomes "Some Title". Lists only, and the tooltip keeps the whole thing. A CHAPTER - Line height, justification with real hyphenation, text colour, any font on your machine, and a reading width past the ceiling Royal Road's own Reading Preferences stop at. - A line above the chapter: when it was posted, how long it is in words or in minutes at your own reading speed, and how many chapters are left after this one. - A recap of how the previous chapter ended, at the top of this one, named so you know which chapter it is recapping, for when you are following several fictions at once. Always visible, behind a click, on hover, or off. - Reopen a chapter and it offers to put you back where you stopped, or jumps you there without asking. The spot is measured against the chapter text rather than the page, so comments loading in underneath do not throw it off. - Author notes: collapse the cross-promotion and keep the note, or collapse the lot. Nothing is deleted; one click brings it back. - Comments get a rule between conversations, a thread line down each reply chain in a colour you choose, and a collapse control on anything with replies. - Comments posted since your last visit are marked, and the older ones can fold down to a single dimmed line that opens on hover. Anything with a newer reply underneath it stays open. - Fold or hide the low-effort comments: the "thanks for the chapter"s, the "first!"s, the lone emoticons, and any word, phrase or regular expression you add yourself. Two kinds are never hidden, only ever folded. A comment with replies, so the replies still make sense, and the author's own, which are left alone unless you say otherwise. - Comment lists that keep going, the same way the fiction lists do. A FICTION PAGE - Every section can be left alone, forced open or forced shut: About, Statistics, Table of Contents, Leave A Review, Reviews. Others Also Liked can go altogether. - What has changed since you last looked. Royal Road only ever prints today's total, which cannot tell you whether a fiction is climbing or has gone quiet. Each figure now carries the change since your last visit: (+312), (-2), (+0.02). That covers the six statistics and all five star ratings, and while Statistics is shut the header sums it up. The numbers come off the page you opened, so nothing is fetched, and a first visit has nothing to compare against yet. - A long tag list opens past Royal Road's plus, and the tags you gave a colour are coloured here too. - Reviews get a default sort order, and keep loading like everything else. OLD LAYOUT OR NEW Royal Road runs two site layouts and decides which one you get. The popup hands that choice back: leave it to them, always the new design, or always the old one. It applies to the page you are on and every page after, with no flash of the wrong layout on the way in, and it survives a refresh. It works signed out. Under the hood it sets Royal Road's own layout cookie, the same one their "Revert To Legacy UI" link writes. PRIVACY No server, no account, no analytics, no third-party code. Your settings, your lists and your reading history stay on your device, and Options -> Backup exports the lot as a JSON file you keep. It talks to royalroad.com and nowhere else, and only ever to answer something you just did: the next page of a list, of comments or of reviews, Royal Road's tag list for the filter panel, and, once you switch them on, the previous chapter for the recap and the fiction's chapter list for the chapter count. All public pages, one request at a time. It never writes to your Royal Road account: no follow, no favourite, no rating, no comment. Open source, MPL-2.0: https://github.com/jmgpgit/royal-road-ui-improvements