As many of you know, with the board update, we finally have the ability to add multiple prefixes to each thread (we told you this would happen… eventually). Back in 2014, it was decided that multi-prefixes would be the best way to deal with the Disney VS Legends divide (info here). Unfortunately, because the update took so long, we had to come up with a fix in light of the new movies (info here) however now we have a plan to make things make a little more sense (… hopefully).

Note: D-Canon refers to Disney-Canon which includes everything LFL considered G-Canon (Episodes I-VI), the 2008 The Clone Wars movie and TV series before the buy-out, in addition to everything created by Disney.

Step 1 will be converting EVERYTHING back to their base Before/Saga/Beyond prefixes. We can batch change thread prefixes. We know many older fics won’t get re-prefixed (and re-prefixing thousands of pre-2014 stories individually with an additional assumed "Legends" prefix isn’t feasible) but we still want people to have some sort of sense of where a story would belong.

Step 2 will be adding individual “Legends” “D-Canon” “PT” “OT” and “ST” prefixes in addition to the existing Before/Saga/Beyond. So, for example, a story about Darth Revan would be prefixed as “Before” and “Legends” and a story about Mara Jade as the main focus in The Last Jedi would be prefixed as “Saga”, “ST”, “D-Canon”, “Beyond”, and “Legends”.

Step 3 will be (obviously) re-vamping the posts in the Fanfic FAQ and Welcome New Users threads regarding the new system. And then letting everyone who is still around re-prefix their older stories, and then going forward with the new system.


We know this isn’t a complete confusion-free plan. While we now can require threads to have at least one prefix (something we will turn on), we can’t pick options for required prefixes. So we might very well get newbies prefixing stories as simply something like “D-Canon”. We will try to encourage the use of at least the core Before/Saga/Beyond, just to save some headache for our index-creating users, but with the changes to the Awards category system, having a strict Before/Saga/Beyond system is no longer critical. Plus we now have tags (YAAAAY!! More info here) to help further let readers know when a story is placed.

Keep in mind that this might take a few weeks to implement. We know users currently can’t edit their own their own thread titles and we are working on other projects as well. We just wanted to let everyone know what the plan is.



If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Bri and Mav

 

We've decided to leave this off as it isn't that common and can be covered by a tag as opposed to a prefix as it is more of a genre rather than an era.

I just looked and we can put a limit on number of prefixes, so Mav and I will discuss what is reasonable.

Mav and I have gone back and forth on a multi-era. The prefixes are already quite broad and the few stories that would need it could just use the 3 broad before/saga/beyond so that their story which is set in all 3 eras show up when people search for each era.

Edit. And now I'm confusing a bunch of conversations Mav and I have had over the past week(there's been too many). We are open to the idea of a multi era prefix. Tagging @Chyntuck so you see this late edit.

 

Okay, Mav and I have discussed it and we have decided we will add a "Mash up" and "Multi-era" prefixes. However any headaches this may cause for indexing or awards is out of our hands.

There will also be a limit of 5 prefixes per thread.

 

I'm not sure, but this week isn't going to be the best week to address such issues.

 

Whoops. This is why two procrastinators shouldn't be put in charge. We'll take a look at this and see if this course of action still makes sense.