Buggycas wrote: I've been a Whately fan since nearly the beginning. My habit for years has been to read everything available at Crystalhall.org, pause for a month, then read everything available again,
Wow, that's a lot of reading.
When they came up with a new order I was ecstatic, now I could read it by place in the timeline!
To be fair, when I renovated the story order on the CH.org site; it wasn't actually new or by any means original. It was created by fans and built into the fan supported WIKI. Unfortunately, that sort of thing takes a LOT of time to keep updated especially on top of creating and formatting all the html web pages necessary to do weekly releases. We've been talking about switching over to a CMS (content management system) for five or six years... so when the hackers brought the site down, it seemed like the time to make the transition. Doing this frees up time for writing more stories, coming up with more innovative ways to handle releases, and so on. At the moment, we're still building up the structure... at some point in the near future all the existing content will be in place and we can get serious about refinements (like special sorted lists, tagging, and so on).
Just remember, while 'judging' the new site relative to the old... CH.org was the gradual growth and evolution of a decade of work. This site has only been live for 3.5 months. We'll get there... and eventually, you'll wonder how we ever managed with that clunky old site.
Now that everything's moved here, and CrystalHall.org is down (Was it part of the move or just money problems?)
The hackers still had their hooks in the old server. These were being used for phishing and mail spamming and resulted in the entire server being shut down by outside organizations. In order to recover use of the server, Erin and Piper at BCTS had to put the domain on redirect and cleanse the server of the accounts involved.
I've no idea what to do, do I start over again? There isn't a sort by reader Preference here, I could restart and read by release date, but I'm not sure how complete it is here. Please help me with this!
While I haven't yet implemented any method of 'sort by reader preference' here, that's only because it isn't my top priority. It's low priority for two really big reasons: One... until we get all the stories copied over, any such sort is going to have holes in it. Two... the order DOES exist on the WIKI site. Specifically:
ON THIS PAGE HERE
. From that table, you can sort by a number of reading orders... directly access the wiki pages for characters, stories, authors and so forth... and follow the links to the stories.
Now, admittedly, while CH.org was up; those links worked whether we had migrated the stories or not... and that was a big factor in my consideration of priority. But now? There are only about 60-70 stories for us to copy over. That SHOULD theoretically take less than two or three more week at the pace we've been going... and then, once the WIKI team has updated things, those links will all work and be pointed at the new locations here.
In the meantime, numerous readers and some of the authors have offered to mail people copies of stories and those of us who are migrating stories are happy to prioritize things that are in people's current reading path. So panic is really not necessary.
Finally... I'm open to the development of many different fan created sorting orders. Really, all these require is people to generate a tabulated document with the appropriate links and such that I can then put into a collection of such things. The biggest difficulty, of course, is creating ways that such things can be done and stay updated without someone having to manually make changes every time a new story is released. The old site did not have that potential. We would ALWAYS have to make additions manually there. This site has the potential for such things to be automated. It may take time because EVERYTHING takes time to create and fine tune... and no one is on a payroll here. We get some money from ad revenue and we pay some money to have a server and software running on it. At the moment, the former is greater than the latter... but not so much so that it comes close to compensating me (or anyone else) for the time spent maintaining things. So everyone works other jobs... we write stories to freely share and time spent enhancing the site draws from time spent on stories.
Just keep expectations reasonable and trust that we're working on it.
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