Hi Martin. I don’t know if there’s much of a broad use case for something like this, but I was wondering if it would be possible to implement something like a series of series.
The use case for me, specifically, is that a lot of my serial works take place in the same setting. It would be useful to have a means of grouping them together by setting but I don’t think there’s any way to do that right now. Again, I’m not sure how broadly useful this would be and I can definitely do without it, but it would be a nice quality of life thing for authors who make related series that they might want to group together.
@thedirtyspiders suggested a tree like structure for stories, which would also allow for a narrative with selected pathes. It could also be used for what you’re suggesting.
However, I wonder if it’s really worth the effort. Right now, I have to be a bit more conservative with new functions. I have little time (as we’re just about to start to build our new house which is extremely time consuming) and I still want to get those sister sites public.
For what you need, I’d recommend to use a common name for your universe and preface all series’ names with that prefix. Series names have to be unique, but if you prefix them all with something people remember, they’ll link them easily. Also if you sort your list of series by name, you’ll find them all in listed together, too.
Like for example, one could prefix all stories placed in autodream’s “Island” stories like that. Even if they’re written by different authors, by using a common series-prefix like “Island of Hypnotists:” or sth like that.
I’d also be able to make use of something like this in a future series (of series), but I don’t consider it at all critical, and can readily make do without. Naming and/or explanatory forewords will get me to the same place in the end.
I definitely don’t consider it a critical feature either. There are plenty of ways to work around it; I just thought the feature would be something nice to have in the future, whenever that might come to pass. I can appreciate how much effort it takes to develop new features, and especially with building a new house on the way, I can’t imagine it would be worth the resource expenditure at the moment.
Another simple way to do some of this would be to create a custom tag, perhaps on the lines of “Universe Pig Town” or the like.
This would a) require no extra coding and b) could be applied retrospectively if an author comes up with a new story in a setting that they had not intended to continue.
I’m in the same boat as some of the others in this thread. It would be useful to me to be able to link up a lot of the stories that take place in the same setting, but there’s no reason why I couldn’t accomplish that with either a setting specific tag, or by just grouping more stories under a series tag, and titling each chunk of the story with an additional subtitle, to denote subseries.
I did struggle with this one a bit, with The Pigtown Chronicles, whether to post the entries one by one, or in large chunks. There were substantial drawbacks to both of them, really. If I post them one by one, I’m essentially spamming the main page for weeks on end with short chapters, but by grouping them in larger chunks…I don’t know if there’s much of an appetite for 20,000 word stories much these days, or at least, judging from the lack of engagement, there doesn’t seem to be much of one.