Reading order, first appearances, and missing faces

Your character timelines can follow your reading order - the "Story Arc" on a character's page lays out the books they appear in. It used to group them by sub-series in a fixed order, which read oddly for characters who cross several threads. Now, if you're following a reading order it lays the books out in that order, and for a world like Discworld - whose books weren't published in series order - it falls back to publication order. So the arc reads in the sequence you'd expect.

Your reading profile shows the order you're following - if you follow a whole world's reading order, such as Discworld in publication order, your reading profile now shows it clearly at the top with your progress through it. Previously only series-level orders were shown, so a world-level one looked like it hadn't taken.

More accurate first appearances - we improved how a character's first appearance is worked out, especially for worlds like Discworld where the books weren't written in series order, and corrected a few wrong publication dates that were throwing it off. Over a thousand characters across the site now point to their true first on-page appearance.

Telling same-named characters apart, across spellings - when a name also belongs to another character, we show a short note pointing you to them. It now spots names that differ only by an accent - so on Hurin's page it will point you to Húrin - and when a name belongs to several characters, it lists them all rather than running them together.

Characters that were missing from their casts - a batch of characters had a description but weren't linked to any of the books they appear in, so they were invisible in cast lists. We checked each one against the source and added their appearances, so they now show up where they belong. We also fixed a handful of characters whose appearances had been mixed up with a same-named character from a different world.