Board Thread:Policies/@comment-3361105-20170223213832/@comment-3361105-20170301220734

Lawrence, that's an important point. I think converting seasons to months was a compromise we made a long time ago. I'm not sure how intensive the recoding would have to be to change it.

Seems like what makes sense would be to categorize and display the actual season using the cover dates, while using the actual publication month (if we can find it) for publication categories. I don't know if the latter can be done automatically.

Furthermore, the template that handles that aspect of the template is a little confused: ["spring"] = "March", ["springx"] = "Spring", ["summer"] = "June", ["summerx"] = "Summer", ["autumn"] = "September", ["fall"] = "September", ["autumnx"] = "Fall", ["fallx"] = "Fall", ["winter"] = "December", ["winterx"] = "Winter"

(The template that converts months to numbers for calculations is set up as you describe, using March for Spring, June for Summer, September for Fall, and December for Winter).

Can you suggest an appropriate rule to automate this? Is it true that every case of a "Winter" issue is published in the following year for January/February? If it's inconsistent, I'm not sure how we can best deal with it.