Board Thread:Policies/@comment-18172179-20170103063927/@comment-3361105-20170104014406

Lawrence King wrote: These appearance lists can be sorted alphabetically by comic name, or by "most visited". Would it be possible to also be given the option to sort these appearance lists by comic date?

SforHope has addressed the fact that this aspect is out of our hands.

That said, it isn't as though we haven't tried to create some kind of page/code that could do what you want, but every past attempt has been hampered by a missing variable in the code.

To get technical:

It is possible to sort the items within a category using manual sorting options by entering a category and adding (after the pipe) a letter or string of words/numbers. This will sort within the category by that letter or string.

The only way to sort appearances in a standardized and automatic way would be to use the Date related fields of the comic template as sort strings. In order for that to work with A, the template would have to know what has been entered into the Day, Month, and Year fields (if they are filled out).

Because the A template is not part of the comic template, it does not have access to the variables, , and , that are used by the comic template, so there's no way to tell it to use them for sorting. If it were part of the template, then our Appearances sections would be a lot less versatile, and every appearance (even garbage entries like "Unnamed Henchmen") would be required to have an appearance category. This is not ideal.

Just now, even, I tried an alternative method, which would use DPL to call on day, month, and year values without needing to be part of the template. While it is able to call on those variables successfully, it also requires that the DPL call knows the pagename that it's being used on, and it can't. One method I tried was to have the aforementioned DPL template call on a variable and then make that variable  within A (which, I had determined was a possibility by forcing every instance of the template to output  in plain text next to the character's name).

That method failed, however, because for reasons unknown to me, the DPL template will not work on the same page from which it is calling the variables (even if you type in the page name instead of using the magic word like I did above).

I don't know if it's doable with Lua, but it doesn't appear to be doable with any of the MediaWiki compatible parser functions at hand.

Basically: there is no way to do this automatically, unless someone better at wiki-coding than I am has some special knowledge that I don't.