Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1257201-20161227233458/@comment-6369172-20161230132128

LK >>what are TBC links?<<

They're links embedded in the text at the beginning and/or end of a story synopsis that link directly to a prior or subsequent story synopsis. In the example, of that "Chuck Dawson" summary, there's "Chuck has overheard the 4-G Ranch's owner John Burwell talk to his hired gun," and "Butch arrives and spots the rope that is dangling off the ledge." Those go directly to the individual story synopsis of the "continued from" or "continued to" story. This is actually an improvement over the arrows (which only take you to the comic's TOC, and then leave you to hunt for the story you want).

LK >>I think that removing the previous/next information would be an awful idea. As a user of this site, I use them all the time.<<

Me too. This approach preserves that information, and is already in widespread usage on ordinary continued stories. (I thought it wasn't, but in another discussion Hatebunny set me straight about that.) These badboys are just as useful for cross-title, time-travel, and other continuity-scrambling stories. Construction is a little bit more laborious than just typing an issue # between two pipes, but not much.

LK >>my other point: Since there is only one "Notes" section for an entire comic on this wiki, moving the appearance data from the arrows to the Notes will lead to massive confusion any time that a comic contains multiple stories.<<

This also covers that. Each synopsis (and each "Appearing In" section) of a page has its own URL, right there in the blue TOC at the top of the page. These can be copied and pasted into your TBC link. So if there are, for instance, two Johnny Thunder stories in a given issue, this eliminates the ambiguity of which one it's continued from.

Best way to capture those URLs is to visit the page of the "continued from" or "continued to" issue, click on the appropriate link in that issue's TOC, which takes you directly to the synopsis; the URL is displayed in the navigation bar, above your edit screen. Copy that and paste it into your square-bracket link, et voila.