Feature:90001

Discussion below copy/pasted from ISFDB:Community_Portal Marc Kupper 16:33, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)

Non-linear Series Numbering

Take a look at the way Tony Abbott and his publisher number his popular YA series, The Secrets of Droon. To quote the relevant part:

• 16. The Knights of Silversnow. [description follows]
• Special Edition #1. The Magic Escapes. This first ever Special Edition picks up right where The Knights of Silversnow left off and is a Droon adventure like never before, pitting Eric, Julie, Keeah, and Neal against a brand new and particularly mysterious villain. [...]
• 17. [...]
• 18. [...]

etc.

Then we have Special Edition #2 between 21 and 22, Special Edition #3 between 25 and 26 and Special Edition #4 between 28 and 29.

I suppose the logical thing to do would be to call Special Edition #1 volume 17 in the series; the book that is labeled Volume 17 would then become volume 18 according to our numbering scheme, etc. Of course, it would also confuse the heck out of everybody :-(

I guess the question is what is the least painful way to catalog this weirdness that wouldn't break the display logic? Do we (or can we) support "16a" or anything along those lines? Ahasuerus 18:55, 18 Dec 2006 (CST)

Number them both 16 and since the display code seems to sort by Series # and then publication date it'll at least get the specials in the correct spots in your list. I don't think there's an easy solution other than hidden ordinals or some other mechanism for explicitly defining the order. For example, I had suggested earlier to sort unnumbered items by date in the middle of the list but that may not get the specials in the correct spot. 21:15, 18 Dec 2006 (CST)Marc Kupper

I just tried that and it seems to work. I actually tried "16+" as the second one, but it stripped off the "+". Mike Christie (talk) 21:21, 18 Dec 2006 (CST)

Apparently, it doesn't like decimals either :( Al, do you think we could allow "16.1" or would it be abusable? I would really prefer the relationship to be immediately obvious (in part so that helpful editors wouldn't try to correct it), but I am not sure how to accomplish it. We could have a separate Secrets Of Droon Special Edition subseries, but that would obscure the link between the four "special edition" books and the main series. Ahasuerus 22:21, 18 Dec 2006 (CST)

A hack that comes to mind is to display the series numbers modulo 1000 with 0 being displayed as blank. You could then number them

• 6 The Sleeping Giant of Goll (2000) with Tim Jessell
• 7 Into the Land of the Lost (2000)
• 14 Voyage of the Jaffa Wind (2002) with David Merrell and Tim Jessell
• 15 The Moon Scroll (2002) with Tim Jessell
• 16 The Knights Of Silversnow (2002)
• 1000 The Magic Escapes (2002)
• 1017 Dream Thief (2003)
• 1019 The Coiled Viper (2003)
• 1021 Flight of the Genie (2004)
• 2000 Wizard or Witch?
• 2022 The Isle of Mists
• 2023 The Fortress of the Treasure Queen
• 2024 The Race To Doobesh (2005)
• 2025 The Riddle Of Zorfendorf Castle (2005)
• 3000 Voyagers of the Silver Sand
• 3026 Moon Dragon
• 3027 The Chariot of Queen Zara

A low tech but still somewhat user friendly way to manage this is to an edit-series-order page that looks like the following. Up/down would be links pointing at the cgi that would get passed the series, item, and direction which would then recalculate the 1000x numbering and repaint. Or, you could use radio buttons. Marc Kupper 00:06, 19 Dec 2006 (CST)

Control Series order

Move	#	Title
down	6	The Sleeping Giant of Goll (2000) with Tim Jessell
up/down	7	Into the Land of the Lost (2000)
up/down	14	Voyage of the Jaffa Wind (2002) with David Merrell and Tim Jessell
up/down	15	The Moon Scroll (2002) with Tim Jessell
up/down	16	The Knights Of Silversnow (2002)
up/down		The Magic Escapes (2002)
up/down	17	Dream Thief (2003)
up/down	19	The Coiled Viper (2003)
up/down	21	Flight of the Genie (2004)
up/down		Wizard or Witch?
up/down	22	The Isle of Mists
up/down	23	The Fortress of the Treasure Queen
up/down	24	The Race To Doobesh (2005)
up/down	25	The Riddle Of Zorfendorf Castle (2005)
up/down		Voyagers of the Silver Sand
up/down	26	Moon Dragon
up	27	The Chariot of Queen Zara

(unindent) Playing with the series numbers won't help too much as the data types are integers, so the database won't accept strings, or "1A", or "1.5", or anything other than "1". The fundamental problem is that there needs to be an ordinal that describes the order the series items are printed in, and a label that describes the title's series number. At present ordinal=label.

Ordinals are pretty much perfect for determining the printing order, as MySQL can then do the ordering without any postprocessing. An easier change than trying to sort floating point or strings would be to add a label field. From the original example, the ordinals would not be displayed (shown here in parenthesis), but would control the ordering. The labels would be displayed:

• (16) 16. The Knights of Silversnow. [description follows]
• (17) Special Edition #1. The Magic Escapes. This first ever Special Edition picks up right where The Knights of Silversnow left off and is a Droon adventure like never before, pitting Eric, Julie, Keeah, and Neal against a brand new and particularly mysterious villain. [...]
• (18) 17. [...]
• (19) 18. [...]

This would require some additional tools to perform inserts between to adjacent ordinals. Alvonruff 06:33, 19 Dec 2006 (CST)

If we pursue this approach (which seems to reflect reality better than any previously proposed alternative), then we will need to make very clear to the editors why we have two fields for Series Number. We will also need to have a standard for when this mechanism can and can't be used to insert sub-series into the main series. I can see how it could be very tempting to stuff everything into the main series under certain circumstances. Ahasuerus 15:53, 21 Dec 2006 (CST)

I would not show people the second set of ordinals but rather would let them move items in the series up/down. Sub-series are an interesting problem and hmm – it almost seems like we may need hidden anchors in the series list to allow people to position sub-series. This is getting messy – the existing mechanism is defined in the title records and the only title-to-title ordering is the Series # ordinal and title_copyright (first-pub-date). The desire seems to be able to create external lists that have any structure/order and numbering method (decimal, Roman numerals, etc.) plus there is a second desire that a title can be a member of more than one series. With that in mind it seems a case could be made for an entirely external series mechanism that references title records. Marc Kupper 01:09, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)

Series ordering and series numbering have been a messy area for a long time. For example, there is (a) publication order, (b) internal chronological order and (c) preferred reading order; it can be argued that all three have value to ISFDB users and should be displayed independently if they differ. Also, note Feature request 90001 and Bug 30014. I am sure we will revisit this area post-beta, but for now we probably want to save this discussion on some Help template's Talk page or some such. Ahasuerus 11:14, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)

I agree on the revisit and have cut/pasted the entire thread to the Archive and also into Feature:90001. Marc Kupper 16:42, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)

A thought that came to mind with dinking with Legends is we could add ordering support by allowing for "name/#" where name is the series name and if it's followed by slash and a number (no spaces) then the number is used for ordering the titles and sub-series within a series display. The code would look for the /# and if present strip it off and save the # as a separate sort_order integer. It'd be a way to add sorting control without needing to add a separate sort-order field to both the title and series records. This will not solve the problem of the desire for alternative orders but I suspect implementing multiple series per title would work better for that issue. -Marc Kupper|talk 02:53, 28 October 2008 (UTC)