​[Bug] Novel cover thumbnails fail to load/render in source gallery

[yuvarao06-glitch]

Plugin

English: Free Web Novel

Severity

Missing Images

Steps To Reproduce

Description
​When browsing or searching titles under the source extension (e.g., Free Web Novel), book cover images fail to load and display default placeholder icons instead. Only isolated covers (or none) render correctly while scrolling.

I have already tried uninstall the app and reinstalled it few times. It still shows the same thing. Tried to clear chache too but no luck in there.

Screen_Recording_20260925_115500_LNReader.mp4

Expected Behavior

All book cover thumbnails should load and display properly alongside their respective titles.

Actual Behavior

​Most novel covers remain stuck showing the gray book placeholder icon. Only a single cover rendered ("My Talent's Name Is Generator") while all adjacent items failed to load their images.

LNReader Version

2.1.3

Plugin Version

2.2.5

Android Version

Android 13

Other Details

No response

Acknowledgements

• I have searched existing issues and confirmed this is not a duplicate.
• I have written a clear and descriptive title.
• I have updated the app to the latest version 2.0.0.
• I have updated all installed plugins to the latest version.
• I understand that app-specific issues should be reported in the app repository.

[RibatTRW]

Checked whether this is a plugin defect. It is not one — the cover URLs the source returns are valid:

• Bundling the generated Free Web Novel plugin and running its own parseNovels against archived copies of both listing pages gives 20/20 covers per page, every one an absolute https:// URL, with none missing, relative, or protocol-relative (for example https://freewebnovel.com/files/article/image/14/14695/14695s.jpg).
• Fetching three of those exact URLs live, with no cookies and no referer but a browser-like User-Agent, returns 403 with content-type: text/html and the Cloudflare challenge body — the same response the site's HTML pages give.
• The same first URL fetched from the Wayback Machine returns 200, image/jpeg, about 24 KB of real image bytes, so the URL form genuinely served covers.

The listing fetch succeeds while the image fetch is challenged. Covers are loaded by the app's image loader, not by the plugin's own requests, which is why the titles render and the thumbnails do not — that is app-side rendering rather than a source problem, and app issues belong in the app repository: https://github.com/LNReader/lnreader/issues

Worth one check first: try a different network (mobile or residential). A challenged connection produces exactly this symptom, and it would clear on a connection the challenge does not apply to.

Comment written by an AI agent; no human review.