Story Arc Reading Order

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wmwadeii

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#1  Edited By wmwadeii

This bug was brought up after the launch of the new site but so far hasn't been fixed. Or if it was its broken again. I'm going to use X-Termination as my example because it was released after the launch of the new site. So if you look at the page it shows the reading order wrong. I verified the dates and the cover dates are all for June. The in-store date is however different for each issue in April.

I tried playing with the cover date to see what would happen. If I make an exact date for the cover for example X-Treme X-Men #13 - X-Termination, Part 4 as say 06/10/2013 it moves the issue to the end of the list. I believe this has something to do with another topic http://www.comicvine.com/forums/bug-reporting-2/fuzzy-dates-bug-1449455/#29 where the system doesn't see and edit of a 1st of the month date to a fuzzy date as a change, that's because I believe the system sets fuzzy date to the 1st even though it doesn't who it. I tried editing the date from 6/10/2013 to fuzzy and the issue was placed out of order again.

Being that the system now thinks all the dates are June 1st, I looked to see what next would be common denominator to order the issues. The only thing I can see in common is the issue # itself. For example it has X-Treme X-Men #13 - X-Termination, Part 4 before Age of Apocalypse #14 - X-Termination, Part 3; War of Two Universes because of course 13 comes before 14, and you can see the same thing happen with X-Termination #2 - X-Termination, Part 6 - Conclusion; Final Reckoning is before Astonishing X-Men #61 - X-Termination, Part 5; A Final Goodbye again because 2 comes before 61.

The only way to get them to be in the proper reading order is to manually change the cover date on each issue to an exact date. This will however still be an issue if two comics come out the same week, making the only work around setting one of the cover dates to one day prior. The problem with the method is two fold, one I myself have been working on changing dates to fuzzy dates since this is the method/rules set by CV for cover dates. Two if we have to manipulate this date field to make the order correct it causes false data, something that shouldn't exist on a wiki.

The only two solutions I can see is either 1 use the in-store date instead. This will resolve probably 90% of the issue, excluding when two issues are released on the same month. Those will resort to the second verification method the issue #. To solve this instead of looking at the issue # maybe it could be coded to look for the words "part 1, 2, 3" etc. The second solution is to put the order system back in place that was in the old CV. I'm unsure of the length and amount of coding to get that functional so I would say the first solution would be the easier as it's just telling the code to reference a different data field. A third option I just thought of would be if it needs to use the cover date, that when switching from exact to fuzzy it would use the month and year set with the fuzzy but use the day of the in-store when creating the date on the back-end. This would solve not only the story arc reading order issue, but also the problem we have with changing to fuzzy and getting no edits are made.