Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-1350697-20190910044948

Thanks, and, yeah, there doesn't seem to be an immediately applicable rule -- T:OFF REL is clearly about paper prose fiction, of the kind Amazon can physically deliver to your door, and doesn't meaningfully keep ebook releases of any kind in mind.

No such rule has been needed for BBC site short story releases, which seem to be are considered valid and get coverage the moment they come out, which means the closest applicable rule are the ones for audio and TV, the only ones to keep a digital release in mind:

Emphasis my own:
 * "For Big Finish audios, the moment of public release is when a story is made available to download by the official Big Finish website."
 * "Class episodes premiere on BBC Three at 1000 BST/UTC every Saturday morning. Even though they air on BBC One later on, the online release on BBC Three is the premiere broadcast."

(I left out of the second quote the bit about not covering Class until the end of the hour, which is clearly a TV-specific rule, and not applicable to digitally-released prose fiction.)

Both of these establish a clear precedent: '''A story is valid once it's made available digitally. Later forms of release do not factor into this.'''

(Perhaps changes to the rules for comics and prose fiction to that extent would be appropriate, to preemptively head off some potential weird situations -- ebooks from smaller publishers occasionally come out some time before a paper release, comics might hit Comixology despite a global distribution delay, etc.)

I, again, do not see anything here that would invalidate a story for having been released as part of a blog post. There does not seem to me to exist in the rules as they currently exist any such bar for a story to clear.