Backdating entries in communities

[autumninpluto]

I noticed some people make their own closed communities to post/archive their fanfiction, and decided to try it out myself here: ficsimmy

I am trying to backdate the fics to when I posted them, and it generally works, however, the home page still shows the posts in the order in which I posted them. E.g. the most recent post is dated November 12, then the next one November 13.

Is this intended behavior? If so, does anyone have a workaround for similar use-cases? 😟 I have some fanfiction from 2013 that I want to back up here, but I do not want it at the top of my page in fear of people thinking that's still representative of how I write today 😅

I did find this FAQ article related to backdating + the "don't show on reading pages" button which says "This option is not available for community accounts", but I thought this just referred to the hide from reading page button.

It's a bit weird that I can backdate it, but it will show up in the wrong order on the home page, and in tags. Checking from the archive looks fine, they're all in the correct date I set them as.

Comments

[wychwood]

I ran into this! So let me know if you find a solution...

[incomplete_ruler]

It is definitely intentional from my experience. You can backdate easily on journals but not so much on communities (probably to do with security but that's just what I assume). Personally when I ran into this problem, I deleted all the entries that were out of order and started adding the rest chronologically. Another thing you could do (that's a bit more mind-fucky) is to swap the html/dates for each entry around so that they appear in order. Definitely more of a hassle, but it should be easy to tell which order they should go in from the homepage (if not then you can look for the entry id before the '.html' in the url and sort them from lowest to highest). There may be a third or fourth option too, but these are just the two that I'm aware of. Either way I hope this helps!

[autumninpluto]

Ahhh that sucks!! By swapping html/dates, do you mean editing the oldest entry and then putting the html of the oldest fic there?

If so, it might just be better to delete and repost chronologically considering I've only posted 3 so far (better to redo while I'm not far ahead yet...)

[incomplete_ruler]

Yeah it would be like copying and pasting everything into another entry. It's definitely not worth it if you've only got a few posts up.

[autumninpluto]

Gotcha, thank you so much for your insight!

[incomplete_ruler]

No problem! :D