It Ain't Heavy, It's My Chapter Weight

Heya folks! Melanie E. here, comin' atcha with a quick tutorial on something that's been on a few folks' minds lately:

Weights.

For those who aren't familiar with the way the site's systems work, we have multiple tiers of organization stories can go through -- author pages, book pages, etc. This helps keep things neat and tidy so that readers don't have to skip around trying to find what the next chapter of a story is, or if there are other stories by any particular author.

Explaining that whole system is its own thing (and I plan to cover all of this in more depth when I get back to working on my BCTS guide,) but within the sorting stuff is another option that pops up, and that's weight.

Most of the time, if you add a story or chapter as a child page to something else -- like a book page under an author page, or a chapter page under a book page -- those things will automatically sort alphabetically, which is great! This is usually Good Enough for most purposes, up to and including stories with only a few parts (say, 9 or less.)

However, sometimes stories need a bit more complicated organization, or they go past 9 parts... and this is when "weighting" comes in.

A story's weight changes its priority in sorting, making it either take higher priority than other things, or force itself further down the list.

The most common way that you'll see this used in stories is when a story reaches part 10.

Because of the way that alphabetical sorting works on the site, when it automatically sorts parts of a story, the site wants to put 10 after 1 -- because 1 comes before 2 normally, right? But this isn't what you want a story chapter to do -- you want 10 to come after 9!

So what do we do? We adjust the weight.

By default, all (weighted) content on BC has a default weight of 0. As we increase the weight value -- 1, 2, 3, etc. -- we force a story to a lower priority in the sorting, and if we drop the weight -- -1, -2, -3 -- we lower it. So, if we want chapter 10 to come after chapter 9, we look at their weights: by default chapters 1-9 will be weight 0, so we set chapter 10 to weight 1, and bam! It's at the end of the list!

Easy peasy, right?

But what about chapter 11?

Here's where people get confused sometimes.

If chapter numbers are all you're looking at when weighting a story, then you only have to change the weight value each time the first digit of your chapter numbers is a 1.

So, in our above example, 1-9 was weight 0, and chapter 10 was weight 1. Every chapter after 10 -- up through 99 -- would also be weight 1, since the first digit of the number increments up in numerical order again for this entire sequence.

Once we get to 100, we have the same situation as we had at weight 10 -- if the weight is left at 0, then it will automatically sort to after chapter 1. But if we set the weight to 1, then it will automatically sort to after 10! So, at 100, we get our second increment on the weight value -- to weight 2 -- and we keep that weight value from 100 all the way up through 999, and then at 1,000 we would once again bounce that weight up another increment, to 3, and stick to that until we reached 10,000.

At this time, there is only one story on the site that -- numbers-wise -- has ever reached a need to use a weight or 3, and that's Angharad's Bike opera.

Pretty simple, right?

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My stories are out of order even with "correct" weighting?

There are a lot of things that can lead to the site's sorting system getting screwy, many of them things that are invisible or hard to notice if you're not used to looking for them. If you've got a story that's not sorting correctly, never try to adjust weights repeatedly in order to "fix" a sorting issue. Instead, look for one of the following common issues:

--Extra spaces. These are super common, especially in stories with a lot of parts where the author is copy/pasting parts of the title over and over again. The sorting system *does read spaces,* even if our system only ever displays a single space no matter how many are there, and spaces are always a first priority on sorting parts, so an extra space will always play heck with the order your stuff sorts in. To check for these, go into the "edit" option on your story and go through the title with your cursor, counting the number of cursor taps you have. These guys can be super sneaky!

--Unicode Weirdness. This is another copy/paste issue, in that some fonts will encode certain characters differently. If your title has something like quotation marks in it, and you copy your text into the title box, and say you changed fonts or the program you were writing in between posts, then the nature of those marks can change the way the story will sort. This one is harder to check for than the spaces one, and may require you doing something tedious like replacing every such mark in your titles just to make sure they're all uniform to sort. Likewise, this is usually an issue for things like quotation marks, accent marks, or other quirky punctuation.

--Typos. We all make them, from the simple flip of an "I and an "E" to forgetting to include letters entirely. These are very common gotcha's in the world of title sorting, so always double-check your titles to make sure they are, if not spelled *correctly,* at least spelled consistently. This also goes for capitalization -- always capitalize things the same way, or the system can get a hiccup in it too.

I have multiple books in a series that I want to show in order with different titles. Can I use weighting to do this?

Yes, you can... but you probably shouldn't.

If you have multiple books in a series, and want to make sure they fall in order within your author page, then the better option is to give them all a title that precedes itself with a series title that's numbered.

Say your book is called "A Secret of Silver Threads", and it's book 2 of a series, with the first book being "A Secret of Silver Wings". You would get the book to sort better on your author page by calling it, say, "Silver Secrets Book 2: A Secret of Silver Threads", and book 1 "Silver Secrets Book 1: A Secret of Silver Wings", than if you tried to use weighting to force it to fall after the first book, because once you've weighted it, it wouldn't *just* fall after the first book, but *every other book or story with the same weight as the first book.*

So, you've got the two Silver Secrets book, and also a book called Three Witches, and a book called Wonderswan or something. If you gave "A Secret of Silver Threads" a weight of 1, then it would come at the very end of all of your stories.

If you wanted to make a master book page for the "Silver Secrets" book *series*, then yes, you could use weighting under the series' page to keep books in order... but I hope that you truly do understand the weighting system well if you choose to do that, because for every tier of sorting you use, it complicates things that little bit more, both for you and for site administration, who might decide it's not worth trying to fix for you if you make a mistake!

What about if I number my stories with roman numerals?

This is generally something we discourage, for the same reasons listed above -- the system sorts alphabetically, so roman numerals start adding a lot of complication very quickly.

As a writer you can alleviate a *little* of this complication by sticking to classically formatted numerals -- like VIIII for 9 rather than IX -- but you're still looking at needing to fix weights more often than when using arabic characters, since the order of the roman numeral hierarchy -- I, V, X, L, C, D, M -- doesn't follow our alphabetic sorting order.

Is there a way to number my parts so I don't have to weight things?

Yes! And it's quite simple too!

Weighting is really only needed each time the first digit of a chapter number changes to 1 again, right? So if you can number your stories in a way that the first digit doesn't have to do this, then the weighting system never has to be used.

The most obvious way to do this is to figure out ahead of time how many parts you expect your story will likely be. If it's in single-digits, then you're good, since 0-9 will automatically sort normally. If it's double-digits, then take advantage of that sorting of 0, and just number the first few chapters as 01, 02, 03, etc. rather than just 1, 2, 3. When you get to 10, you're still not changing the ordering priority with the shift from 0 up to 1, so you're good up 'til chapter 99 like this! And for hundred-plus chapter stories, just tack an extra 0 on there -- 001, 010, etc. -- and you're still good.

This isn't as clean looking as using the weighting system, but is still easy enough, and a good low-maintenance alternative.

Now that we have the basics of the weighting system and chapter sorting out of the way, I would like to give a few tips on making things easier, both for yourself and for others who may have to help with your stories.

--Put chapter numbers early. "Tony 3: The Awakening of A New God" is a lot easier to sort than "The Awakening of A New God (Tony Chapter 3)" for a number of reasons.

--Keep chapter titles simple. In the above example, giving the chapter a title of "Tony 3" works better than "Tony 3: The Awakening of a New God," because when adding chapters to an outline, you only get to see so much of the resulting titles of other parts. Keep the extended bit for text in the story block.

--Try to avoid special characters. Most basic punctuation is safe, but once again, once you get adding a lot of extras, like quotation marks, parenthesis, or anything that can see formatting weirdness depending on font, you will start to see things go a bit wonky. Keeping any punctuation limited to things like periods, dashes, exclamation points and question marks -- and maybe the occasional colon -- will keep things easier to sort. Even then, prioritize keeping titles simple: "Joy of Angels: Book 2 of 8 "An Angel's Requiem" Chapter 9, Part 2 "In the Arms of an Angel" (Demo) (Revision 3)" is always going to make an admin twitch just a bit the moment anything goes wrong on sorting it.

--Never hesitate to ask for help. If you want some guidance on the system, there are plenty of us willing to show you the ropes on a more one-on-one basis, either via DMs here or even over on the BCTS Discord server!

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That's it for now! If anyone has any questions, or even something to add, leave it in the comments below!