Goblin Shelf: Book Reviews & Reading Lists

The bookcase has three shelves with room for 33 books each: 99 books. The number comes from the real measurements of the modern bookcase: a shelf is about 1015 px wide when the page is 1200 px wide, and a typical spine plus the gap between books takes about 30 px. The bookcase is drawn so that 33 books always fit on a shelf, whatever the width of the page. On narrow screens it keeps its proportions and is scaled down to fit, with no sideways scrolling. The limit also has a second purpose: with Open Library or Google Books turned on, the covers of the shelf are requested from those services in the background, and the limit keeps that to 99 requests at most per visit, which avoids overloading them and being blocked.

No new book can be added: the form says so, the server refuses it, and a book created in the dashboard stays as a draft. The books that are on the shelves can still be reviewed. Delete a book (Goblin Shelf → Goblin Shelf) to make room.

No. They are published as soon as they are sent. Protection against abuse: a hidden field for bots and a limit of 30 reviews per hour from the same IP address (filter goblinshelf_ip_limit). You can delete any book or review from the dashboard (Goblin Shelf → Goblin Shelf and Goblin Shelf → Reviews). If your website is behind a proxy or a CDN, use the filter goblinshelf_ip to give the real IP of the visitor.

Covers are optional. When adding a book, the form lets you upload a photo of the cover (JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF; it is reduced in the browser and checked again on the server). It is only used if the book has no cover yet. You can also open the book in Goblin Shelf → Goblin Shelf and choose or replace the image from your Media Library. If you turn on Open Library or Google Books in Goblin Shelf → Settings → Book search, the cover of the book chosen from the suggestions is shown straight from that service. It is not downloaded or stored on your website (only a short reference is saved), and it stops being shown if you turn the service off. You can replace it at any time with an image from your Media Library.

For each book, its title, its author and optionally its cover (an image saved to your Media Library); for each review, the rating, "the best thing" and "the worst thing". Nothing about the person who writes it. The visitor's browser keeps locally (localStorage) a list of the books already reviewed, only to warn about duplicates; it contains no personal data and it is not sent anywhere. To limit abuse, a one-way hash of the visitor's IP address is kept in a temporary counter (a WordPress transient) for up to one hour; the IP address itself is not saved. If you turn on Open Library or Google Books, a cover chosen from the suggestions is saved only as a short reference (for example ol:12345), not as an image.

Goblin Shelf uses the language of your website (Settings → General → Site Language). Translations are provided by the community through translate.wordpress.org and are installed by WordPress like any other plugin translation. The dashboard is shown in the language of each user's profile.

All the data of Goblin Shelf is permanently deleted when you delete the plugin from Plugins → Installed plugins (deactivating it deletes nothing): the books, the reviews (also those in the trash), the cover images that Goblin Shelf saved to your Media Library (those uploaded from the form), the settings and the temporary data. Images that you chose yourself from the Media Library are your own files and are not deleted. This cannot be undone, so make a backup first if you want to keep your books and reviews. If another Goblin Shelf plugin (for example Goblin Shelf Pro) is installed, nothing is deleted, so you can switch from the free to the Pro version without losing anything.

Only the first 99 books (the oldest) are shown on the shelves.