People sort

[bgrimm]

Tis may have been brought up before, but the forum search is not cooperating in finding topics (to broad). But...

The people section in story and world almanac should have a way to chose its sorting, I'd prefer to list my people sorted lastname, firstname.

Or at least have the capability to tell it what field (custom) to the list by.

[Parody]

The problem is that Topic/Article titles don't designate a first and last name, so you run into all sorts of issues figuring out how to break them up.

As a workaround, you could use "Miller, Michael" as the topic title and alias "Michael Miller" in for linking.

[Dr_Automaton]

What I've been wishing for is a solution similar to software like iTunes, where I can open my "Michael Miller" topic and from tools menu open a dialog box and set a hidden Sort Name field to "Miller, Michael" that only affects the sort order in the Almanac.

[AEIOU]

Real life albums have authors and authors have a pretty straight forward naming convention. Given that some fantasy and sci-fi names don't quite fit the norm, it would probably be pretty hard to develop code to determine that niether Dr Automaton, The Doctor nor Aleski Carbono Siail Sando have last names as part of their entries in RW....

The prefix field is what should probably be used to provide the sort order you are seeking.

[Romaq]

Howdy! I'm not clear if this is a new bug or what may be going on, but I have a container for "People of Sandpoint", and I have the following list. Items in ()'s are in the "Identifier" box:

Aesrick Battleorn (Battleorn, Aesrick)
Father Abstalar Zantus (Zantus, Abstalar)
Mayor Kendra Deverin (Deverin, Kendra)

I've been picky to make sure the identifier is in the identifier box, and I do note my places are sorting properly by number (1 through 10 then 11 and so on, instead of 1, 10, 11, 12... 2, 20, 21... it works properly without a leading zero, yay!)

And triple checking "sort by identifier" is flipped on, it clearly works for "places", and I've toggled it off & on. So I still get a sort on Aesrick, Father then Mayor rather than Battlehorn, Zantus then Deverin. Known bug? "New Feature"? I'm just starting out as of this September entering in RotRL stuff, so I may have missed something.

[Farling]

Romaq, different types of topic are configured differently for how they react to the "prefix" options (I've never understood why it was done that way). Perhaps People is another category that were never designed to be sort by prefix.

[Romaq]

Geck... gack... erk... uhm...

Sorting by the identifier box on People is exactly the place where it makes the most sense, especially where you have cultures that use the FIRST name as a surname, and then you have titles as part of the name, and so on.

What... the... heck! I hope there is some clarification to this.

[Romaq]

Since I really need to have names sorted for identifying family relationships, I'll put the surname in front to sort for "Deverin, Kendra Mayor (Deverin, Kendra)"

Can I confirm this as a bug, or is it already in the bug report? I'd *really* like to remove the double-surname and have it sort by identifier.

[rob]

Some categories treat the identifier field as a prefix, while others as a suffix. This is a known limitation right now that we plan to change. It was well-intended and works well for about 95% of cases. There are some usage scenarios where it fails - like this one - that we didn't think of at first.

That being said, using the identifier field as a solution for this problem may not be the best approach IMHO. You're probably better off specifying the topic name as "Last, First". Then add an alias with name as "First Last". This will give you the sort order you want AND will give you automatic link detection of the normal form, but it won't make the list of topics a mess by always showing both formats.

[AEIOU]

Thank you, Rob.