Drunkard's Walk Forums

A thought: Once we get past the retconning and start posting stories here again, instead of naming stories here with the name format "[IC][Story][Arc #] Storyname", we name them with the name format "[IC][Story][YYYY-MM-DD] Storyname", with YYYY-MM-DD being the in-universe day that the story starts.

(For example, the retconned version of the existing "[IC][Story][Arc 1] House Call" would be called "[IC][Story][2016-10-11] House Call".)

That way, we can decide after the fact that Arc 2 starts on 201#-##-##, Arc 3 starts on 20##-##-##, Arc 4 starts on 20##-##-##, Arc 5 starts on 20##-##-##, Arc 6 (if we go that far) starts on 20##-##-##, and so on, and not need to worry ahead of time about which stories go in which arcs.

It would also make sorting the stories into reading order much easier.

On the other hand, it would require every story to have its own title - no more dumping the works into a single story thread - and sometimes I can't name a story to save my own life.

Do others like this idea, am I way off-base here, or do folks have another idea that's better than this one?

I'm okay with that. It'd make it nice and easy to read things in chronological order, which is the way I prefer to go through massive works that aren't always written that way (I'm looking at you, Undocumented Features).

Right, but I'd like to lose the [IC] and [OOC] littering every thread, and just have a subforum for full stories. Possibly with rare exceptions like the fake real news thread, and the incidental tidbits thread which would live one forum up. Date tags sound like a good idea, because the forum software can sort on title without any additional work from us.

So, create a subforum for stories and name them in the format "[20##-##-##] Title"... or just "20##-##-##: Title" if we want to get rid of the square brackets as well. (I don't care either way, but we need to pick one and stick with it if we're going to let the forum software sort the threads for us.)

Just so nobody's surprised, it looks like we're going with the "20##-##-##: Title" format and a "Stories" subforum when we start posting stories again.

Also just so nobody's surprised, there will be some reruns that didn't need any retconning. There will also be some apparent reruns that did need some retconning. And I know that I'm forgetful enough to forget on occasion to identify which is which, so you're just going to have to re-read all of the stories...

(10-09-2022, 01:01 PM)robkelk Wrote: [ -> ]Also just so nobody's surprised, there will be some reruns that didn't need any retconning.

That list is growing shorter every week. It might be best to assume that all stories have been retconned to a greater or lesser extent.

And I'll make this promise right now: There will be a story posted before Christmas 2022.