Serial Tracker by Mason

Serial Tracker helps you keep up with web serials across the sites where they’re posted. Track a story, and it learns how often the author updates, shows how close the next chapter is, and checks quietly right after it’s due, so you don’t have to keep refreshing pages.

How it works
Open a story page, click the toolbar button and press Track. From the chapter dates, Serial Tracker works out the story’s release schedule and shows a progress meter toward the predicted next chapter. Shortly after (by default about twenty minutes), it looks once. If nothing has appeared, it looks again after an hour, a few hours, a day and a few days, which covers chapters that are minutes, hours or days late, and then stops. Stories on a break are looked at rarely: about once a month, once a week if the author has shown a sign of life, and only manually after roughly six months without a chapter. A story that is still learning its schedule is checked once a week. You can press Check whenever you like, or switch off automatic checks entirely.

Supported sites
• Royal Road
• Scribble Hub
• SpaceBattles, SufficientVelocity and QuestionableQuesting (XenForo threads with Threadmarks), including long threadmark lists that are split over many pages
• Patreon creator pages (a creator’s post list shows titles and dates to everyone, so no membership is needed to follow new posts)
• Author archives
• Other sites, once you approve them. You’re asked per site, the first time you track something there.
Features
• Learns each story’s schedule from its chapter dates, with a progress meter, a release calendar and an “Up next” list in the popup and dashboard.
• Knows where you are. Each story shows “You’re on Chapter N” and how many chapters come after it. Your place is worked out from the chapters you open, or how far you’ve scrolled down a forum thread, or you can set it by hand. Stories you haven’t started are grouped under To read.
• One story, several sources. Merge the same story from different sites. Each source keeps its own schedule, calendar and chapter list, and you can switch the details between the whole story and any single source.
• Dashboard with sorting (next to update, favorites first, recently or oldest tracked and more), filters for website, status, your place and schedule, and separate sections for finished and abandoned stories.
• Gentle on sites. One request at a time, with a pause between requests to the same site. It backs off when a site asks it to, and it can check a site’s RSS/Atom feed first and only load the page if the feed changed.
• Bot checks and login walls. If a background request is blocked, it reuses a tab you already have open on that site, or gives you a button to open the exact page. It never fakes headers.
• Check favorites more often if you want a particular story watched more closely.
• Quiet hours hold notifications until later while the toolbar badge keeps counting unread chapters.
• Bulk import from Royal Road Follows, Favorites and Read Later, your Scribble Hub reading list, forum Watched Threads pages, or a Firefox bookmarks folder.
• Backups. Export and import everything (stories, your place, status and settings), or save automatic backups to your Downloads folder.
• Themes and colors. Light, dark, grey, black and high-contrast themes, several page backgrounds, and a color for each status.

Privacy
Serial Tracker collects no data. Your stories, reading progress and settings are stored locally in your browser. There is no account and no server. Requests go only to the sites of stories you track, using your browser’s normal cookies. Notifications, browsing history, bookmarks and downloads are optional permissions, requested only when you turn on the feature that needs them.
Firefox for Android
Support for Firefox for Android is experimental. On a touch screen it uses larger tap targets and a full-width layout. Android can pause background processes, so automatic checks may be less punctual than on desktop, and long first reads (a forum thread with many threadmark pages) may need to be started again if Android closes the add-on part-way.
Serial Tracker is an independent project and is not affiliated with WebToEpub, Royal Road, Scribble Hub, Patreon, SpaceBattles, SufficientVelocity, or QuestionableQuesting.