The author list on the site is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, as the English say, and while some of that may be unavoidable there are a few issues that seem like they lend themselves to relatively painless cleanup. (None of this “has to” be done, of course, and should be prioritized against the site’s other needs. I’m just throwing it out there, with an explicit offer of whatever help I can give, but no expectations of or demands for any particular response.)
Lowest-hanging fruit are all of the authors in the listing that have no stories associated with them. Examples:
That’s far from a complete list, just some I’ve stumbled across so far. I could go through and find more, if it’ll help, but I suspect the complete list could far more easily be obtained via a single well-crafted database query.
I don’t know what makes the most sense — remove those authors entirely, or update the Author List so that it displays only authors with one or more story? Perhaps even both.
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Part II are the duplicate authors, some with exactly the same name, sometimes with minor but clearly unintentional variations. A lot of this seems to come from the original site, or partly involve imported old content, which explains how it happened but hopefully doesn’t prevent it being addressed?
This one’s actually a bigger deal, too, because in some cases the “authors” have related stories, or even multiple parts of the same story, that end up getting split across their multiple identities. That makes it impossible to see the whole series listed together, except perhaps by searching for the title. (And hoping they wrote it the same way every time, which is… not something you’d want to rely on, in my experience.)
Again, selected examples:
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DannydDaLionKing and DannyDaLionKing are clearly the same person.
- Ditto astrolub and astrolüb.†
- Also Project 09 + NCMC readers and Project 09 + NCMC readers.
- Presumably, all of Nicky Noxville, nicky.noxville@gmail.com, and Nicky Noxville are the same, and the second of those contains one chapter of “Penetrating Flesh”, the rest of which is under the first entry.
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BadColinBaxter lists 9 chapters of “Fate or Coincidence?”, but you won’t see Chapter 10 unless you look for Bad Colin Baxter.
- “Automaton” parts 2-5 are posted by BY Randi, but the first part is under simply Randi.
- The split on “Area 51” is a weird even/odd, like the quality of 1980s Star Trek movies. topaz172@aol.com got chapters 1, 3, and 5, while chapters 2 and 4 are listed under topaz172.
- Most of Titan’s stories are together, but one chapter each of two different stories defected to Titan.
- The second part of thom21’s “A Class to Remember” is found at Thom212.
- Again, I saved the weirdest one for last: both Stories by jawhite_miller - Gay Spiral Stories and https://www.gayspiralstories.com/newAuthor/show/14065 are author “jawhite_miller”, and they both show the same list of stories, so it appears they’ve been aliased to each other in the database. But because there are still two separate author entries, it shows up twice in the Authors listing.
Now, unlike the previous list, with most of these accidental splits/dupes I doubt there is any more expedient way to find them than simply going through the author list page by page. So, again, I’d be happy to do that if it’ll help them get cleaned up.
† – (That one has a third dup, “astroüb” which Discourse won’t allow me to use as a link title. That one has no stories associated with it, and the URL is https://www.gayspiralstories.com/newAuthor/show/1590)
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