Sort by date?

I may be missing the obvious, but is there no way to sort an author's stories by the date they were written? Many authors have stories that are loosely connected, but not marked as such; besides which I find it interesting to see how an author evolves over time. If there is a way to do this, would someone enlighten me? And if there isn't, may I humbly request it as a feature?

Tracking an author's evolution is a commendable aim!

I think the closest you can get to a by-date listing at present is via the "Latest" list which shows up first thing on an author's page. That gives you the most recent 25 texts by that author.

More than that might require Februs magic.

You can sort by date added but not by date written.

You can run a search and when the results are retrieved, you can then sort them by date added, title, author etc. To do that, just click on whatever word you wish to sort by.

As regards the date stories were written, our experience is that the vast majority of site members aren't interested in it. The information entered for each library submission is already quite burdensome so adding yet further to it by asking authors to supply dates of authorship and then having to enter them is not something that has any appeal at the current time.

Well, "loosely connected" stories are generally indicated, at least if the author has informed the Library staff about such a connection so that it can be mentioned at the beginning of those stories.

An individual author might be willing to enlighten an interested reader (via a 'popup' exchange) RE the timeline of particular stories of his/hers--it presumably couldn't hurt to ask, anyway... --C.K.

Other than my post-2010 stories that have been loaded as written, I doubt I could do better than "early," "middle" or "later," and not even that with great accuracy.

I keep a list of my stories and the date they were first posted, (which is close to date of writing) but that was really to keep tabs on where I had posted stuff so that I would know if I had submitted a story somewhere before so as not to duplicate posting or irritate the moderators in making them reject the same story multiple times.

Of course, many writers edit their old work when they re-read it years later and think how dreadful it was.

I keep a list too (a spreadsheet, actually) containing dates, length, etc. One reason I do it is to avoid using the same character name too often and the other is that I'm a detail freak. I usually post stories shortly after I consider them finished, which may be a long time after they were begun. It might span a period of months or even years.

My very early stories were so horribly written I would never post them without extensive editing. So, would the date written be the actual date they were first scribbled down or the date I thought they were ready to share? And what difference does it make?