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Question New Readers
- Dpragan
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Topic Author
In the end reality is only consensual! It means that Al Gore is causing "Global Warming" by his rhetoric alone! Fortunately, there are enough Global Warming "Deniers" still about to keep him from boiling the planet.
=^+^=
- Kristin Darken
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Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- Dpragan
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Topic Author
In the end reality is only consensual! It means that Al Gore is causing "Global Warming" by his rhetoric alone! Fortunately, there are enough Global Warming "Deniers" still about to keep him from boiling the planet.
=^+^=
- Kristin Darken
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One of the 'big picture' plans to solve this involves a timeline/event calendar that will link every canon story with a graphic calendar showing release dates back to Aug 2004. That one will be 'easy'... the second one will be a similar event calendar that does the same with all the timestamps in the stories. A third idea I'm exploring will also visually map all the time/date stamps. Obviously, those ideas will take extra work

Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- Valentine
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Don't Drick and Drive.
- Kristin Darken
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If the author writes them without, there's not much we can do to force it to play nicely with all the other stories. That's fairly rare though.
Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- DanZilla
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- null0trooper
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Valentine wrote: There are a few stories without dates or timestamps. Hobbies and Heckling is one.
Sometimes it isn't critical to the story what day it falls on, as long as the characters can plausibly take part.

At the top of this one it reads: "This event happens sometime late October, early November." so it's not completely free-floating.
Forum-posted ideas are freely adoptable.
WhatIF Stories: Buy the Book
Discussion Thread
- William.Starfox
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- Kristin Darken
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Let's say, for instance, that you would like to read the 13 parts of "Ayla and the Birthday Brawl" again. Now... the Birthday Brawl released over a period of 7 months and Diane was one of our more prolific authors, so this is sort of a worst case search condition... because many other authors and even Diane released other stories in that interval. But if we can do this with Diane over that duration, we can certainly do so with authors who didn't write stories with parts more than five or who have only released 20-30 bits over the years.
How you do this?
1. Go to the Main Menu and select: Read Stories
2. Go to the Side bar (left) Menu and select: Original Timeline
3. This produces the main Original Timeline collection in newest at the top order. Near the top of the table is a text box named "author filter" fill in the author name of the story "Diane Castle" and hit enter.
4. Scan the first page, realize that Birthday Brawl is older than what is currently shown so go to the next page using the pagination options at the bottom of the table.
5. See the 13 sections of Birthday Brawl in the list. Open Part 1 in a new tab from your right click menu when you click on its name.
6. Read the story part. When done, close this tab. Look at the collection page still open on the previous tab, select part 2 and open it in the same way.
Would it be nice if there were next and previous buttons at the foot of each story?
Well, yes. I suppose that would be nice. But here's the thing. When I write a five part story and upload part 1 to the site, the site treats that as a self-contained article. Not a part of a multi part article. If I put next and previous buttons on the bottom, what do they link to? Nothing. There IS no previous or next part. Now, a few days later, I upload part 2. If I have these next and previous buttons at the bottom of pages, in addition to anything else I do, I have to tell the site that hey, this article is associated in some way with that other one. The easy way is to just set the previous button to link to the first part... and then go back and edit the first part to link its next button to part two. The more complicated way is to set things up to create a coded field that forces the association and write the next/previous button plugin to ignore anything not a part of the same super-title.
And that's where the grumpy part comes in. Why do you want me to spend time developing something that you can already accomplish with a modern browser running the site as it already is? I could get it if there was no way to make the site cough up what you were looking for. But... this is work for little gain. I mean... I can turn the next/previous buttons back on. They DO work, but they work based on the order that articles show up in the category list... not some other association.
Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- CrazyMinh
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You can find my stories at Fanfiction.net here .
You can also check out my fanfiction guest riffs at Library of the Dammed
- Kristin Darken
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... that the author filter doesn't actually work."
Well, hate to tell you ... but I use this option quite frequently when prepping stories for release and I don't want to have to log into the admin side of the site to do it. This has nothing to do with your browser or type of hardware. It's a simple text entry box and the php code excludes from the table it builds any author name that does not EXACTLY duplicate what you enter. If you enter Diane Caste, you will get EVERY story that we have attributed to Diane Castle. If certain stories do not show up, it is most likely a data entry issue - in that among the 600 articles/story parts that we loaded into the site, the one that is missing from the list MAY have been listed under the wrong author or a misspelling/typo may have occurred. I fix those when I get reports of them, but I'm the only person with admin side access to handle the problem in our current security structure/set up. Yes, that is not ideal... but it is also something that was done the way it is so that non-canon authors can actually submit stories. Were I only allowing canon authors to submit/post, life would be much simpler and authors would just use the admin side tools to do so and they would have access to fix those things themselves instead of it all bottle-necking at me.
But I wonder then, what it is that you ARE having problems with, if it is not the author filter on the main story lists. Is it that you are simply misspelling the name of the appropriate author? Are you talking about something in the SEARCH engine instead of the story listing on the page I pointed him at? I don't know. If you feel less ranty, maybe we can get that straightened out for you.
Indeed. That would be because the tagging system in the default Joomla system is not usable from the front end. As I noted above... we either use a reduced option front end and have non-canon authors... or we use canon only authors can work from the admin side of the site. I did later come across a tagging system that works from the front end and we have been adding tags since then, both on new stories as they come out... and on older stories. This, however, takes time. a LOT of time. And again, there's a limit to how many people have access to it... most of those people would rather spend their spare time writing stories and not being data entry putting in tags on old stories.Most of the older stories don't have correct tagging
Why yes, this IS intentional. Why would someone who only visits the site to read the newest stories want to page through multiple pages of story listing to get to the LAST stories released? They wouldn't. They'd want the newest releases at the TOP of the list... like is done for movies, for comics, for computer games, and every other release date oriented listing known to man on the internet. And fortunately, for those new folks who want to see the list in oldest to newest order? You just click on the words Published Date, and wooo! it resorts the list to your desired order. Are you honestly bitching about the sort order of a sortable table that lets you list old to new/new to old, alphabetical by author, alphabetical by title, and lets you use a word entry box to narrow down to just one author's content? The flexibility of this list is WHY we haven't prioritized a tag system... you really don't need a tag system unless you're looking for story by internal character or story arc.and there's problems with the listing. The instructor stories are back-to-front in terms of publishing date (was this intentional?
That story isn't moving around. It's possible that you resorted the page by hits or another option. A sort by date won't come any where close to sorting Insanity Pre, Part 4 in the midst of Ayla and the Mad Scientist... Ayla and the Networks? Yes. But not AatMS, which came two years later. Another Dr B story, AAA does fall amidst AatMS though. Perhaps that is what you saw? Keep in mind that that IS a 23 part Ayla story that took something like 14 months to release all of it. There are LOTS of stories by other authors that will be found on the release listing in there.stories with multiple parts will move around a lot (I found Insanity prerequisite part 4 in the middle of the Alya and the Mad Scientist listings just yesterday
Since taking the advertisements off the site and moving us to a more powerful VM, the average load time I'm seeing is between .1 and .15 seconds. I'm happy to look into the analytics data and see what the average Australian user is seeing and whether I can resolve that any (given the number of readers in that time zone, I can't really justify a separate machine for more local access)... but if I take the time and see that the problem is all on 'your' connection (which remember, for web sites has little to do with computer processing power and more to do with network bandwidth and reliability)... I'm going to be grumpy. I'm sympathetic about bad connections, but not enough so to take flak for it being our site when its your connection.the stories that do show up often take their sweet time loading
There are more than 13 million words in just the canon stories on this site. If you can't narrow it down more than that, how exactly do you expect anyone to fix it? Not that we spend much time doing editing of stories that have been released for years. We know there are errors. Far more ten years ago than we have now... but we've never had a paid editor on the staff, only volunteer editors who are the gods gift to fiction web sites. But even the pros have been known to miss things. and again, we can spend time combing through old content fixing typos or we can work on new material.multiple HTML issues (formatting showing up in the middle of the text),
Yes... but we don't want you to read the stories by 'everything with this title' then 'everything with this other title'... we want you to read them in the order that we release them. Because they aren't separate stories. Even stories that seem to have NO interaction with core plotlines are potentially there for a reason and have information that will eventually impact something somewhere else. WE make a conscious effort not to spoiler each other and we DO make an effort to foreshadow each other or make references that someone following stories will see. And we do these things with an understanding that you have read part one of a story by Elrod in January... and might read story parts by five other authors before you get to part two of Elrod's story. In fact, some story parts are literally a year or more apart. Reading them by publishing order is the author recommended way to read. Why should we make extra effort to create ways for you to read our stories out of the order we designed them for?arrangement??? It's almost impossible to spot specific story parts amid a sea of stories that were published during the story arc
Ya... now... the rest of this was understandable frustration. You can't find things, you don't understand to process/intent involved in the layout and so you think its wrong because it isn't set up the way you would set it up. And I can get that. THIS though. Is an insult. It is NOT a buggy build. Yes, there are some glitches, that happens when you try to make generic software do something that its not really designed to do... but it isn't buggy. And saying you are a newbie programmer and thus know better... well, good, newbie programmer. Write me the Joomla plug-ins and/or modules for the features that you want put in, set them up on Github and I'll look them over and we'll use them.the site has enough bugs to cause a newbie programmer like me to hyperventilate with anxiety. Seriously, this is a ridiculously buggy build!!! (No offense- I know you're trying your hardest)
Don't want to or can't do it? You can send the appropriate groveling apology to my PM box. (Translation: put up, or shut up)
Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- Sir Lee
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The volunteers who did the conversion to the new system have done, by my reckoning, a heck of a job in a very short period. (I feel free congratulating them because I was not part of the team -- the most I did was to supply a few stories they didn't have a better source for).
But in a body that large, done in a short period of time, in a somewhat ad-hoc basis, with people learning on the job, it's inevitable that mistakes will slip by. As Kristin explained, the original tagging system didn't work well, so earlier stories (and there are a bunch of them) are not tagged to current standards.
Do we all want to improve the situation? Yes we do.
Do we want to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch? No we don't. We went through that a couple years ago, and chances are that a full rebuild would have us in the same place we were one year ago or thereabouts...
But things can be slowly tweaked. There are a number of things that, for practical reasons, currently require the super-duper-ultra-max site admin powers to do. Which, currently, only Kristin has, and she's justifiably reluctant in delegate. Well, I expect that for redundancy's sake, at least one of the other canon authors, possibly Warren, has also this kind of access in case of an emergency... but whoever they are, they aren't currently actively involved in the administration of the site, and therefore are unable to share Kristin's burden.
So, what we can do is to make the job of fixing stuff easier. If we notice an issue, just document it politely in the appropriate forum. Supply as much detail as you can -- a full URL to the story is better than the story name, for instance -- so whoever goes to fix it does not waste time searching for it. And don't complain if it isn't fixed immediately. They will get to it when they get to it.
- Anne
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To everyone else, like Sir Lee, though only Warren was mentioned in this thread, though you haven't been mentioned, thank you for the time and dedication you have shown to this site. I would very much miss the stories here if the only way to find them was through the internet time machine. Because that takes even more search foo than does searching this site.
Adopt my story: here
Nowhereville discussion
- null0trooper
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I can say that sorting relational data retrievals in a procedural language is not as straightforward as end-users and casual or "newbie" programmers like to think that it is. Been there, done that, retired of it.
Forum-posted ideas are freely adoptable.
WhatIF Stories: Buy the Book
Discussion Thread
- Kristin Darken
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null0trooper wrote: because the three have the same publication date, so the default ordering by title takes over.
mmm... well, even that is fixable, because I can set one to morning, one to afternoon and one to evening... I think clock times are accounted for in sorting. They may not, but the field is date and time.. not just date. So its something I could try. For that matter... I don't think they all released the same day originally.. unless the date that we put in for release is the day they jumped to canon? I'm not sure. If someone has the REAL dates that would put them in order, that info would be welcome and would be corrected fairly quickly.
Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- CrazyMinh
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Yeah, jokes aside, I'm actually serious. I don't have any sorting buttons. They're there, but when I click on them, nothing happens. Also, when I say 'newbie' I mean with website coding. For my mechatronics degree I had to work a LOT with C, Python, and Java. I don't claim to be a expert in this type of coding though. My experience is with coding motor controllers, pathfinding software, port mapping, robot and machine code (NOT binary (I'm refering to code specifically designed to run machines, not the actual base code itself)) plus a bunch of other things required to get stuff running. I'm still confounded by HTML in a lot of cases. BTW, the Instructor stories I was refering too were the Eric Mahen stories. They are listed (from the current last page forward): Intructor 3, Instructor 2 and Instructor 1, which goes against the flow of the other early stories. Plus, the jumping thing happens even when I just click on the story page, and nothing else. I saw several older stories right up at the end of Gen 1 Year 1. and everything else was in the correct order. I'm sorry for not providing detail, and yes, I can be a bit of a asshole occasionally. I can also be crude. Don;t blame me. Australia is a crude place. Seriously, Americans are sometimes offended by the word Hell???? I know that's really in the bible belt, but I used to play against christian private schools here in Oz at the regional FIRST competitions back in the day, and they swore like pigs!!! Not saying pigs swear. I did know a friend who trained his pig to snort the theme to 'America, Fuck Yeah' though. Anyway, sorry for the confusion. And the rapid delivery of the last one. I was trying to type it quickly before going to my weekly D&D game
You can find my stories at Fanfiction.net here .
You can also check out my fanfiction guest riffs at Library of the Dammed
- Kettlekorn
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- Kristin Darken
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"Written in Blood" Part 4 has had its time of release changed to 23:00, while leaving Part 3 at 17:00 with both stories on the same day. They now appear to sort in order. Problem solved.
Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- JG
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If I post it again, can we add a sticky to it somewhere?
We could make a forum section for chronological listings and links to stories for authors or something.
- Kristin Darken
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Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- William.Starfox
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Real friendly people here.
- Valentine
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Sir Lee wrote: Just to keep things in perspective... I store multipart stories as a single file. And, under my private system, the canon Whateley has 276 stories. Since many of those are multipart stories, I would guess that total story listings probably exceeds 600. Add to that a bunch of other material by the canon authors which is part of the Library and... well, I wouldn't be surprised if the count hits four digits anytime soon.
The volunteers who did the conversion to the new system have done, by my reckoning, a heck of a job in a very short period. (I feel free congratulating them because I was not part of the team -- the most I did was to supply a few stories they didn't have a better source for).
But in a body that large, done in a short period of time, in a somewhat ad-hoc basis, with people learning on the job, it's inevitable that mistakes will slip by. As Kristin explained, the original tagging system didn't work well, so earlier stories (and there are a bunch of them) are not tagged to current standards.
Do we all want to improve the situation? Yes we do.
Do we want to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch? No we don't. We went through that a couple years ago, and chances are that a full rebuild would have us in the same place we were one year ago or thereabouts...
But things can be slowly tweaked. There are a number of things that, for practical reasons, currently require the super-duper-ultra-max site admin powers to do. Which, currently, only Kristin has, and she's justifiably reluctant in delegate. Well, I expect that for redundancy's sake, at least one of the other canon authors, possibly Warren, has also this kind of access in case of an emergency... but whoever they are, they aren't currently actively involved in the administration of the site, and therefore are unable to share Kristin's burden.
So, what we can do is to make the job of fixing stuff easier. If we notice an issue, just document it politely in the appropriate forum. Supply as much detail as you can -- a full URL to the story is better than the story name, for instance -- so whoever goes to fix it does not waste time searching for it. And don't complain if it isn't fixed immediately. They will get to it when they get to it.
I believe I have around 550 individual story parts at 276 stories, that is about 2 parts to a story, but some of these stories are double digit part epics. Since around 500 of these are Gen 1 stories, Kristin may someday in her copious spare time

The big problem with linking stories, is that someone (Kristin) has to manually do this, and if there is a problem with the site that ends up with the stories being having to be reloaded, someone (Kristin) has to fix them all. From what I understand that for security reasons or something, the file addresses could also have to be changed. The normal links, on the webpage, automagically update, but someone (Kristin) would have to manually update all those stories.
We need to thank Kristin more.
Don't Drick and Drive.
- null0trooper
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William.Starfox wrote: In other words, sit down, STFU and don't bother anyone.
I think it's more a combination of "We've explained what's going on as best we could, every time it comes up, and it still comes up a lot." and a bit of "Well, hell. We missed that one too."
Forum-posted ideas are freely adoptable.
WhatIF Stories: Buy the Book
Discussion Thread
- Anne
-
That is not quite what has been said. Try this instead? This site is run on mostly a volunteer basis by Kristin. She is not taking a salary at all so far as I know. All moneys received from Patreon are going to make it possible to put this site up without ads. This I suspect is not a small consideration after all we have quite a mass of stories, and that does not count the forum, or any bandwidth that the usage of the site consumes. So it is more on the line of if you think you have a good idea write it up, not just as a suggestion (though with an app to join the stories I expect Kristin or one of the admins would want to review it at a minimum) but get in and publish it here in the forum. Like I said, one day soon, I will be adding some more lists to the ones I've already posted, Why? Because like some people here, I like to read through all of Ayla, then go back and read through all of Merry, Then maybe go back and read through all of Jade... Etc, etc wash, rinse repeat. So don't just complain, put your talent to work here to improve the site if you can, if not remember it could be unavailable except on the wayback machine.William.Starfox wrote: In other words, sit down, STFU and don't bother anyone.
Real friendly people here.
Adopt my story: here
Nowhereville discussion
- Phoenix Spiritus
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Kristin Darken wrote: Someone else want to confirm the failure of Mac to be able to properly browse the site? I test in Firefox, Chrome and Edge, but not owning an Apple system, I am unable to test it.
I’ve never had a problem on a Mac browsing the site with Safari, could be an Opera bug and there should be a Windows version of that Browser.
To put the volume of stories in perspective, if you go to the ‘Read Stores’ section there is 75 pages of stories in the system, and since we fixed the tagging system we’ve only managed to tag the last 14 pages of stories listed there.
It’s a monumental task to tag all the stories, and we’re sorry that the site isn’t perfect, but we didn’t have the luxury of getting the site perfect and migrating the stories over perfectly at our leasure, we took about six month of hard work just getting them on this site so they could be read at all, and I’m sorry, it’ll be something like six months or more before we finish tagging them for you.
Please, it’s relatively easy to type in the name of the author and sort the stories into the order published and read through them that way, it’s not ausome sauce and everything else, but it works. It’s kind of disheartening as the people trying to fix this to be constantly getting beaten up over and over again about things we’ve apologiesed and explained so many times before.
- Rose Bunny
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High-Priestess of the Order of Spirit-Chan
- Kristin Darken
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William.Starfox wrote: In other words, sit down, STFU and don't bother anyone.
Real friendly people here.
Let me help you understand the scope of what you asked.
Describe to me this 'better' navigation system that you want me to implement.
Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- Wavehead
-

Eg:- Without a doubt a lot of things have been explained a number of times over the years by Kristen and others who help support the site and I can understand how that can seem irksome when a subject gets raised yet again


However to a newcomer to the site they do not know any of the history, problems, the many crashes, how the site was maintained, how the site is now maintained or even how the site is planned to be maintained given sufficient funds in the future

The newcomers also have know idea that many of the authors and administrators struggle to earn sufficient money to support their family’s in real life, which means Whateley Academy is very much a labour of love for them, being “Their Baby” so to speak


Maybe a section titled “Read First” before making any comments etc in the Forums should be mandatory reading for all newcomers and probably a good idea would be for all of us to re-read it at least twice a year

- William.Starfox
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But, what I got was a rather short tempered (grumpy) blast that I didn't deserve. No need to take your bad day out on users.
Now, if you want another suggestion, instead of blasting everyone who asks the question, why not turn that raving response into a FAQ. Then you can point users who ask relatively simple questions to the FAQ.
- Kristin Darken
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And in my more recent response to you, I asked you to describe what sort of navigation would be the 'better' solution that you have in mind... because, let's face it, maybe my dismissal of navigation options is premature... maybe I'm thinking of something I know the software can't do without introducing other problems (or generating more work), but YOU are thinking of something completely different. If you describe your solution, and it is something I can implement... then great. If you are just asking for something better and don't have specifics, then you can maybe come to understand why the open suggestion can be frustrating... after all, just because it is a viable concern, doesn't mean it has a solution that I can implement.
Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
- JohnBobMead
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Each story builds upon all the previously released stories, and helps set the scene for all the future stories, regardless of individual author. To make this work, the Canon authors: 1) have a mutually developed master outline of what will occur within the Whateley Academy Universe and the underlying premises that shape that universe, 2) are in fairly constant communication with each other to insure that 3) their individual stories aren't going in ways that conflict with that shared vision and the other authors implementation of it, 4) that to the greatest extent possible, the individual stories provide the background details required such that the events in each story make sense both inside that story and in conjunction with the other stories while at the same time not providing unintentional spoilers in regard to yet-to-be-published stories (intentional spoilers are quite another matter; mutually agreed upon ominous forboding is central to all the Whateley Academy storylines, and as has been shown with the Gen2 sequence, they do have a shared understanding of what is going to happen to the various individual characters, so Gen1 characters can have cameo appearances in Gen2 stories without being too spoilerish in regard to yet-to-be-published events in the Gen1 story arc).
Because each story builds upon all the other stories, chapter release by chapter release, the reading order recommended by the Canon authors is the order of publication, without regard to individual story arc. This is very important to keep in mind when one considers that the publication sequence does not match the chronological order of events within the Whateley Academy universe. [There was a great deal of semi-acrimonius debate within those setting up the wiki in regard to the default order to present the stories as a result of this, with the compromise being listing each release in chronological sequence within the universe, but with the ability to sort by release date if so desired; release date was _not_ a field included when that table was created, and considerable research was required to ascertain when certain stories were first released, given the number of sites initially used for publication of Whateley stories, and certain of them no longer existing, and others having had information lost due to hardware failures leading to the discovery that information was missing from the backup media when restoring from the backups. I know whereof I speak, since I was the one who did that research as I was the one most insistent upon providing the ability to easily list the stories in release order.] Thus, yes, you will keep shifting around between various multi-part stories; it is exteremely uncommon to find two chapters of a given story released without an intervening release from a different story (it has happened, but it's worthy of note when it occurs).
This isn't to say that reading a single story title from beginning to end without reading the intervening story releases is wrong, nor is reading through all the stories focused on a given individual or group in internal chronological order, but it may help explain why taking additional steps to make this easier to the end user which are not required for standard functionality of the site, and which would require individual attention to update or modify if the site structure were to change, is incredibly low on the site admin's list of things to consider.
The software used to organize the site doesn't support automatic linking between pages other than order of creationm within a topic, so the back/forward links generated by it would link in release order of all stories within Gen1 or Gen2, etc., not release order within a specific story title. Links within a given story title would have to be manually inserted within each html file upon creation, and modified when the next chapter was released so that the forward link would function properly, and if the site structure were to change, none of those links would update automatically, they'd _all_ have to edited manually to reflect the changes in the site structure. Actually, I may be overly optimistic in saying that it would limit automatic links within a specific sub-section of the site, given what Kristen said about having to turn the function off to allow unmoderated posting of What If? stories.
_If_ a plug-in were developed that could generate and update links within a specific story arc automatically based upon an identifier that was easily created and inserted into each html page at the time it was created, I suspect consideration would be given to adding such a feature, given the caveat that it would be necessary to manually add such an identifier to each page already existing, unless it were able to parse the required relationships from information already being entered during creation of the already published stories, and that's a very big caveat given all volunteer staff and exceedingly few individuals with the authorizations to do such editing. But without the ability to automatically update those links after they've been created, it's not going to happen. Period. Full Stop. Just _not_ going to happen.