AO3 backdating (part 2)
9 December 2022 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeMemo to self: the only part of the backdating process that is actually necessary (and indeed the only part that finally produces the desired effect on the author's story list) is changing the number of chapters from 2 back to 1 again.
So you don't have to create and then delete a spurious second chapter. All you have to do is to go to 'Edit story', tick "This work has multiple chapters" and define the one-shot as being 'Chapter 1 of 2' when setting a different publication date, i.e. change the total number of future chapters without actually creating any. Then in order to update the overall record for the story as a whole, all you need to do is redefine the original single chapter back to 'Chapter 1 of 1' again.
Now that I actually have some followers on AO3 -- which I didn't when I was originally struggling with this! -- I hope that I haven't annoyed too many of them by updating with spurious new chapters :-(
(I'm also assuming that simply redefining the potential number of chapters doesn't generate a new chapter alert, but I don't see why it should...)
Of course what I ought to be doing -- and what the software presuambly assumes that you will be doing, hence the bugged behaviour -- is backdating my uploads at the time of publication. But I did try that experimentally back at the start and got almost no hits at all on the newly-uploaded stuff, so I'm afraid I'm continuing to resort to the dishonest approach of uploading them as new works and then quietly (or, rather, with great labour and gnashing of teeth!) backdating them to reflect their original place in my œuvre once a few months have gone by.
So you don't have to create and then delete a spurious second chapter. All you have to do is to go to 'Edit story', tick "This work has multiple chapters" and define the one-shot as being 'Chapter 1 of 2' when setting a different publication date, i.e. change the total number of future chapters without actually creating any. Then in order to update the overall record for the story as a whole, all you need to do is redefine the original single chapter back to 'Chapter 1 of 1' again.
Now that I actually have some followers on AO3 -- which I didn't when I was originally struggling with this! -- I hope that I haven't annoyed too many of them by updating with spurious new chapters :-(
(I'm also assuming that simply redefining the potential number of chapters doesn't generate a new chapter alert, but I don't see why it should...)
Of course what I ought to be doing -- and what the software presuambly assumes that you will be doing, hence the bugged behaviour -- is backdating my uploads at the time of publication. But I did try that experimentally back at the start and got almost no hits at all on the newly-uploaded stuff, so I'm afraid I'm continuing to resort to the dishonest approach of uploading them as new works and then quietly (or, rather, with great labour and gnashing of teeth!) backdating them to reflect their original place in my œuvre once a few months have gone by.
