Your Reading Desk: Profiles, Notifications and a Daily Shelf Digest

Shelves have been on DaoSearch since September: save a novel as Planned, Reading, Paused, Finished or Dropped, and it lives in your Library. What they didn't do was tell you anything. If you wanted to know whether the book you're reading had new chapters, you opened it and looked.

Now there's a notifications page, a daily digest for the books you're actually waiting on, and a small public profile. All of it needs an account (Google or Discord, from the top of any page), and none of it changes what anyone else sees in the catalogue.

The daily digest

Once a day, each reader with books on their Planned or Reading shelf gets at most one notification. It covers every book on those two shelves, across every platform, and lists the ones where something changed since the last digest. The headline says how many, like "6 books on your shelf updated".

Each book gets a line saying what happened, most important first:

• New chapters, with how many: "+15 chapters"
• Updated at source, for books where the platform gives an update time but no chapter count
• A status change, most usefully when a book you're waiting on is marked completed
• A ranking move: when the book enters a chart ("Entered Monthly Votes at #42"), reaches the top 10, or climbs at least 10 places ("Up to #7 on Monthly Votes (Fantasy)"). Drops are never reported. Nobody needs a notification that their favourite book slipped.
• No longer available at the source, if the book disappears from its platform

A digest shows up to 30 books, with the biggest changes first: most new chapters, then the biggest ranking jumps, then status changes. If more than 30 changed, it says how many more and links to your Library sorted by Updated, which puts the same books at the top.

A few details that save confusion:

• Nothing changed, nothing sent. A quiet day doesn't produce an empty notification.
• A new save starts quiet. The first time the digest sees a book, it just notes where the book is. You hear about changes from then on, not about the 900 chapters it already had.
• It runs in the afternoon, UTC. The digest goes out from 13:00 UTC each day.
• Only Planned and Reading. Paused, Finished and Dropped are left out on purpose. If a book is burying your digest in daily chapters you're not reading yet, move it to Paused and it goes quiet without leaving your Library.

A digest for the booklists you follow

Following a booklist works the same way. If a list you follow changed since the last digest, you get one note a day with a line per list: how many books the curator added, with the newest three and their covers, books taken off, a new name or a new description. The headline reads like "3 followed lists updated", and the button at the bottom opens your followed lists sorted by Updated.

The same rules hold. The first time the digest sees a list it only notes where the list is, so following a 400-book list doesn't bring 400 "new" books. A new English translation of a list's name isn't counted as a rename. A day where none of your lists moved sends nothing.

Turning it off

Notification settings has two switches:

• Library updates: both daily digests, for your shelf and for the lists you follow
• Site news: new sources, new features and anything else every reader needs to hear

Replies to your reports and notices about your account always arrive. Those are answers to something you did, so they can't be switched off.

The notifications page

Notifications is in the account menu. It has filters for All, Reports, Library and Site, and a Mark all as read button that works on whichever filter you're looking at. When something new arrives, a dot appears on your avatar at the top of the page, and the account menu shows the count.

Read notifications are cleared after 180 days and unread ones after a year, so the page doesn't turn into an archive.

Report replies land here too. How reports work covers what you'll see when one of yours is decided.

Your profile

Every account now has a public profile at /u/ and your username. It's deliberately small. It shows:

• your username
• your avatar
• the month you joined, never the day
• the listings you've helped fix through reports, up to the 20 most recent, with the total

That's all. Your shelves, followed booklists and saved searches stay private, and profiles ask search engines not to index them.

Your username and avatar

You get a username when you first sign in. It's generated, an adjective, a noun and four digits, something like AzureCrane4821. Nothing is taken from your Google or Discord account, not your name and not your picture.

You can change both on your Account page:

• Username. The first change is free. After that you can change it once every 7 days. Your old name is held for you for 30 days, and links to your old profile forward to the new one in that time.
• Avatar. Pick a generated one in one of several styles, or upload your own. Uploads can be JPEG, PNG, GIF or WebP, up to 512 KB. They're cropped square and stripped of all metadata, location included.

Usernames and pictures are public, so they have to be fine for anyone to see. If one breaks the rules, we replace it with a generated one and you get a notification saying so.

The Account page is also where the Download library button lives. It gives you one file with your saved novels, their shelves, your followed booklists and your saved searches. More on shelves and saved searches.

A way to use it

Put the two or three books you're reading right now on Reading. Put the ones you're waiting to finish on Planned, and let the digest tell you when their status flips to completed. Everything else goes on Paused. You get one short note a day about the books you care about, and you stop opening twenty tabs to check.