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AO3 backdating
There is definitely a bug affecting the alteration of publication dates of stories on AO3 with only one chapter. You have to correctly backdate them to the day of original publication at the time of upload, because if you alter them afterwards the changed date simply doesn't show up. At least, to be more precise, it shows up on the story chapter itself, but it doesn't alter the 'completed' date for that story, which is what appears on the list of stories by that author, and nor does it affect the order in which those stories are listed -- so it's entirely possible to have a story which is dated as being written in 2015 when you click on it, but still displayed and sorted in the overall database as having been 'completed' in 2021.
I ended up having to email support and ask for the dates on a couple of my POTO one-shots to be changed at the database end in order to reflect the original publication date, but I really can't keep on doing that time after time again.
Because the bug doesn't affect multi-chapter stories -- which can be successfully backdated -- today I resorted to adding an extra dummy chapter to my Micaela-story, The Girl He Left Behind Him. This simply resulted in a listing which displayed chapter 1 as published on "2015-09-22", chapter 2 as published on "2015-09-23", and the story as a whole being completed on "2021-03-10"... What did subsequently work, however, was going back and deleting the unwanted chapter, which appears to have reset the whole thing!
I think it's possible that there is a certain amount of server cache/database lag involved and that some actions cause a forced flushing of the cache whilst others don't show up until some kind of daily update takes place (fanfiction.net used to have an issue where only the first edit to a user profile would show up and subsequent changes appeared to have no effect, which you could work around by switching between desktop and mobile view to force it to load the different versions). Otherwise, I can't really account for the fact that changing the dates on an existing two-chapter story causes the overall story completion date to change too, whereas adding an extra chapter to a one-chapter story and editing the date on that doesn't. But it's a potentially viable workaround.
It is, however, a massive pain, so I'm not going to go through and do all of them right now... (So, as of the time of writing, it is still possible to observe the fact that, for example, while the publication data at the top of The Opportunist states correctly that it was published back in 2019, in the overall list of works by Igenlode, it shows up as having been published more recently than "Appraisal", which actually is a new work!)
I ended up having to email support and ask for the dates on a couple of my POTO one-shots to be changed at the database end in order to reflect the original publication date, but I really can't keep on doing that time after time again.
Because the bug doesn't affect multi-chapter stories -- which can be successfully backdated -- today I resorted to adding an extra dummy chapter to my Micaela-story, The Girl He Left Behind Him. This simply resulted in a listing which displayed chapter 1 as published on "2015-09-22", chapter 2 as published on "2015-09-23", and the story as a whole being completed on "2021-03-10"... What did subsequently work, however, was going back and deleting the unwanted chapter, which appears to have reset the whole thing!
I think it's possible that there is a certain amount of server cache/database lag involved and that some actions cause a forced flushing of the cache whilst others don't show up until some kind of daily update takes place (fanfiction.net used to have an issue where only the first edit to a user profile would show up and subsequent changes appeared to have no effect, which you could work around by switching between desktop and mobile view to force it to load the different versions). Otherwise, I can't really account for the fact that changing the dates on an existing two-chapter story causes the overall story completion date to change too, whereas adding an extra chapter to a one-chapter story and editing the date on that doesn't. But it's a potentially viable workaround.
It is, however, a massive pain, so I'm not going to go through and do all of them right now... (So, as of the time of writing, it is still possible to observe the fact that, for example, while the publication data at the top of The Opportunist states correctly that it was published back in 2019, in the overall list of works by Igenlode, it shows up as having been published more recently than "Appraisal", which actually is a new work!)