I saw the authors themselves can make some changes to their stories but I was wondering - if users point them out - do you make corrections to the stories/authors/series too?
For example, these two authors need merging:
and this story:
belongs in this series:
If I see two stories that should be joined in a series, I’ll usually just correct that.
Having said that, there are some stories, especially those which were imported from the old NCMC archive, which are broken in some way, so I cannot join them because of some error. The ManTrap story you linked is one of them. I’d have to check out what’s wrong with them and fix the code to be able to cope with that.
And of course there are many many instances I just don’t know of. With the massive amount of stories in the archive, I’m just not able to fix them all.
About the author “The Slaver.” and “The Slaver” - all of those stories were imported from the NCMC and there’s no proper user account for their author. That’s why I cannot join them. Neither can the author, cause he can’t authenticate himself. The only way would be that the author contacts me directly, so that I could reupload all of his work properly and delete the old entries.
I get that there are a lot of broken stuff from the old system, because you didn’t inherit a proper database, but the part i’m suprised about is that you say you cannot change something because of an error? Obviously I don’t know what the right fields are in the tables but something like this should work:
#reassing all stories from author 610 to author 35
UPDATE story SET story.AuthorID = 35 WHERE story.AuthorID=610;
#delete author 610
DELETE author WHERE author.AuthorID = 610;
#set story 793 series to 8728.
UPDATE story SET story.SeriesID = 8728 WHERE story.StoryID=793;
Lol, of course I can do that, I’m actually quite good with SQL myself 
What I meant is that the current interface doesn’t allow me to do that because of an error. Something in the old stories causes an exception when I try to change anything with them. And instead of putting time into fixing stuff manually in the database, I’d rather fix these errors.
Actually, neither author “610” nor author “8728” are actually in the database. I.e. the foreign keys in the stories referring to the author are simply broken. I don’t like this at all and I suspect that this is true for most if not all NCMC imported stories.
Maybe I’ll write a routine that recreated all those authors (based on the author name stored in the story). This way the database would be consistent again.
I got too caught up on the wording. And it was too bizarre as well. I kept thinking that nobody can write a site like that and not know sql… but I giess anything is possible. There will come a day, not to distant from now, where students are going to come out of school with only ORM level experience and no clue what “sequel” is…
…
Martin inherited an SQL database from me that I inherited from someone else. There are a ton of stories, many of which are formatted differently and have different levels of anonymity built-in. It’s not lack of knowing SQL that’s ever been the issue. The data isn’t particularly consistent from the older stuff, and authors aren’t terribly consistent at how they submit stories. The original NCMC didn’t support editing at all, and authors were linked by text name only. Typos done ten years ago (literally) can show up the way you’ve found. Typos from last year, submitted by an anonymous, non-logged in author, can cause that (because how should the system know how to coallate the stories? It could do a check for similar sounding author names and ask the user submitting, but that would take time to code and possibly be irritating to users and yada yada yada).
Individual cases can be eyeballed and fixed, but coding tools to detect and automatically fix his stuff takes time. Better yet is if authors submit new stuff via their accounts, and/or don’t have typos in the first place