Allow abritrary ordering of submission/publication authors

[calvarado194]

Currently, the site sorts publication authors prioritizing names that match existing TASVideos accounts first. For most submissions with multiple authors, this often would not match their perceived preference, which is usually sorting authors by relative participation or contribution to the movie file.

I've been told the old site kept the provided order as given in the submission authors fields. Could this be done?

[kierio04]

Just copying this from Discord:

Yeah I think the TASVideos users taking priority in author order is a bit odd and definitely cause for confusion that may never reach back here. Same kind of reasoning as the "why are there times listed for playarounds?"

The solution I would suggest is having the order be fully customisable, i.e. as listed, and then sortable after the fact. In small groups, that sort-by-contribution is fairly easy to conclude manually, but then in large communities it becomes less and less important, since there are so many contributors, and alphabetical makes more sense.

TASVideos-first order doesn't really make much sense if we want to expand beyond TASVideos's current reach, since the majority of TASers don't have TASVideos accounts. This creates serious problems if several minor contributors have TASVideos accounts, but then the main contributor gets listed after them.

Obviously, the main problem is that the site infrastructure doesn't allow you to enter both account and non-account holders in the same place, so some kind of discussion around that would probably be needed to fix this.

[Masterjun3]

Just wanted to note that the current workaround is to, you know, just create a TASVideos account.

[SamsaraTAS]

Sure, but we can't expect everyone to make an account they'll almost certainly never use just so their name can be positioned differently in a list of authors, especially in cases where people are completely unable to make accounts due to technical difficulties, or where people just aren't reachable for one reason or another.

[Masterjun3]

For anyone attempting to implement this, it's going to be quite complicated, which is why we decided upon the current solution in the first place. The previous issue ticket is #431 and the PR I made is #576 .

For the implementation, the complicated part is that users without an account do not have an entity in our DB, thus we can't easily assign ordinals to them. Any approach to add the new kind of ordinal needs to be careful of:

• the existing ordinals
• what happens when any author in the sub/pub is edited to be different
• what happens when an author is added or removed
• what happens when a site account is renamed
• what happens when an non-account is newly registered

I'm not saying to implement new code for all of these, I'm just saying we need to know what happens if these occur, in particular, we need to know the site doesn't explode.