Board Thread:Policies/@comment-18172179-20170103063927/@comment-3020860-20170108225624

I certainly don't require any convincing on this, the fact that the template's links were manually-generated alone made the very idea of it unworkable and subjective. Something like that simply doesn't scale, and no matter how motivated a particular person may be to maintain such a setup, that doesn't make it a good use of their or anyone's time. It's each person's own decision how they choose to spend their time, of course, but in a collaborative system our efforts affect and are affected by others'. To "fix" the current APNs by expending even more time and effort on additional manual maintenance, hand-connecting pages together with links... would be the editing equivalent of "throwing good money after bad".

Especially when APN is such a limited-utility feature. The only time it's really particularly useful is on extremely irregular characters, where their previous appearance within a title may be dozens or hundreds of issues earlier. But we already have appearance listings for each character in the database, automatically-populated and comprehensive. Being able to navigate to the "previous" or "next" appearance of (for example) the Anti-Monitor, as an individual page, still seems far less useful than just visiting Category:Anti-Monitor (Antimatter Universe)/Appearances

The Appearances list isn't ordered "chronologically" according to the character's personal timeline, no, but as pointed out that's mostly because no such ordering actually exists, and attempts to impose one are going to be subjective and prone to mistakes. The one advantage APN offers over any other presentations of the same information is in reality an imaginary advantage, and it requires a hellish amount of work to keep up that false front.