Cast order through API

Both the website and API return the cast entries sorted by their number of appearances.

What you are seeing occurs when multiple cast members have an identical number of appearances. At https://www.tvmaze.com/shows/712/the-tudors/characters you can see that the first two entries both have 38 appearances. This currently means the ordering between them is undefined, both on the website and API, and can indeed even differ between them (due to different caching layers).

Thanks for your reply!

Ok I see.

Maybe it'll make sense to sort them by number of appearances first, then tvmaze_id second, if appearances are equal?

That way the "main" / more prominent actor for this series will get better billing as most likely they were entered first?

For all the cases I checked (where there are discrepancies between the website and the API) - when sorting by tvmaze_id - the casting order is perfect.

I'll definitely consider making the sorting based on TVmaze ID, to make the sorting more deterministic. Whether that makes it any "better" or "worse" is probably completely subjective and arbitraty though.

David, how about alphabetical order ? That's less arbitrary and will sometime, if not often, coincide with the on screen credits.

I meant to have the sorting primarily based on the number of appearances, sorting only by ID when the number of appearances is equal. I don't want to change the sorting from number of appearances to alphabetical.

Well, my bad and pity.

This is done, although you'll still see cached versions for the forseeable future.