SFACG Explained: SF轻小说, Monthly Tickets, Likes and Reviews

SFACG (SF Light Novel, SF轻小说, also called 菠萝包 after its app) is the home of Chinese original light novels: anime-styled stories, often shorter and lighter than the long cultivation serials of Qidian or Zongheng. It joined DaoSearch on 8 November, with 17K and Ciweimao, taking the site to nine platforms. Almost everything on it is new here.

It is a paid platform: authors sign with the site, the best-read books go behind a VIP paywall, and readers spend monthly tickets on the books they follow. Its shelves are fantasy in two flavours (Western-style magic, 魔幻, and Eastern fantasy, 玄幻), campus, urban, sci-fi, games, mystery, an ancient-style shelf and fanfiction. Its best-known tags are 变身 (gender-bender) and 橘味 (yuri), which you'll find in the tag filter.

The figures

Every SFACG book shows Monthly tickets, Clicks, Favorites, Likes and, when enough readers have rated it, a Score. Chapters and word count sit beside them.

Monthly tickets (月票) are the tickets paying readers give a book this month, the same idea as Qidian's monthly votes and Zongheng's tickets. They reset at the start of each month and they're the catalogue's default sort. Most books draw none in a given month, so the default list shows the books with tickets first and then every other book by clicks, with a line where the ticket books end.

Clicks (人气) is SF's lifetime read counter. It only goes up, so it tells you how much a book has been read over its life, not how it's doing today.

Favorites (收藏) is how many readers have put the book on their shelf. It's a deliberate act, so it says more than a click.

Likes (赞) are free votes readers give a book. They cost nothing, so they measure enthusiasm across a wider crowd than the tickets do.

Score is out of 10. SF shows a 5.0 on a book with only a handful of votes, so DaoSearch shows a score only when at least ten readers have rated the book.

The catalogue sorts are Monthly tickets (the default), Clicks, Favorites, Likes, Updated, Added and Words. On the book page, the tag row also says whether a book is Signed or Paid (VIP), marks a Branching story (an interactive novel whose readers pick its path) and gives the month it was First published.

The rankings

SF publishes nine boards, most of them for several windows: this week, this month, this year and all time. Pick a board, then its period.

• Monthly Tickets (月票榜): this month's tickets, the headline board and the default. Its all-time version counts every ticket a book has had.
• Popular (人气榜): clicks in the period.
• Bestsellers (热销榜): what readers are paying for.
• Most Bookmarked (收藏榜) and Most Liked (点赞榜): shelf adds and likes in the period.
• New Books (新书收藏榜): new books by bookmarks, against each other rather than the back catalogue.
• Most Discussed (评论榜), Tips (打赏榜) and Most Updated (更新榜): comments, tips paid to the author, and words written this month.

This month's Popular and Monthly Tickets boards also come per genre: try Western Fantasy by monthly tickets. Rows show how far a book has moved since the previous day. The ticket boards print their own count; the others rank books and show each book's overall figures.

Booklists and long reviews

SF readers build booklists (书单), and nearly every book in a list carries the curator's own note on why it's there. DaoSearch translates the lists and the notes, and a book page shows the lists it appears in.

The comments on a book page include SF's long reviews (长评): titled reviews with the reviewer's own score out of 5, shown beside the likes. Short comments follow. Reviewers are anonymized, as on every source.

What's hidden

DaoSearch keeps every record SF serves but hides four kinds from the catalogue:

• Chat novels (对话小说): stories told as chat bubbles, read in SF's chat reader. They aren't prose.
• Restricted books: books SF itself marks as restricted.
• Stubs: books under 5,000 characters, unless they're signed, charted or in a booklist.
• Short unsigned openers: unsigned books under 20,000 characters with under 1,000 clicks.

The last two aren't permanent. Hidden books are re-read regularly, and once an opener grows past the bar it comes back on its own. Together these cover most of SF's raw catalogue, which is why we list about 33,000 of its roughly 67,000 records as of November 2026, and the number is still filling in. The stats page shows how many are held but not listed.

Where to start

1. Open this month's Monthly Tickets board and switch to a genre you like.
2. Or browse completed SF books by favorites and add a tag such as yuri or gender-bender.
3. Paste a book.sfacg.com link into the search box and the book comes up directly. The search guide covers that.

Explore the catalogue: SFACG (novels, rankings, stats).