A thought occurred to me.

Do we want dates associated with our works? As in, when they were accepted into the Archives?

The only real advantage I can think of at the moment is being able to see an author's (or our work as a whole) growth over time - though that still might be a ways down the road.

Thoughts?

Eh, I don't think it's really all that necessary.
Not to mention that we tend to be able to see when something was posted in the first place.

New boards.

New posting dates.

This doesn't strike me as overly important. Growth over time is maybe interesting, but we will pick up on that regardless and our audience (as much as it exists) might not care that much.

It's something that occurred to me because of series that have multiple orderings:
Discworld
Haruhi
Drizzt

You can watch/read them in the order they were released, or in the order the events occurred in; and with us (especially with that Raleris prequel Keeper is floating around) you can't actually do that.

Mind you, I don't think we have any out-of-order stories that aren't events in a single work yet, but we may eventually.

I realize I sound like I'm arguing for it, but I just want to say why I thought of it in the first place.

I think it might be more useful to have suggested reading orders, since probably going by dates alone isn't going to give readers an optimal sort of walk through the archives.

Hm, maybe if that app works out for mapping the connections we could use it for mapping various reading orders both for our stuff and for Canon?

Actually, it might be interesting to create a reading order that incorporates both M:EM and Canon works. Some of our stuff does depend upon main storyline concepts, after all...

You've definitely got a point. Okay, reading order it is. Ooh! We could even make it up like the Discworld reading order!

Of course, every now and then we'd need to update it.

As for Official storyline stuff, I don't know how much we really depend on our audience having read first-hand (at least in what we already have). I mean, a lot of our stuff* depends on readers knowing about The Mending, but I for one have never read the Time Spiral block novels and yet I get along fine.**

*At least as far as our Creative Canon goes.

**If you're talking about our Expanded Canon, though, I can see your point. In that case, I think a simple distinction between "works expanding on the story" and "works expanding on the world alone" would be very helpful. I mean, while you wouldn't need to have read any story for Barinellos's Meeting, something like RuwinReborn's Zachari Levar, The Good Pontif needs a deeper understanding of Ravnica (though it doesn't necessarily build upon events presented in the novels).