On any Story or Collectable listing page, you can use Filters to narrow your view of the contents.
If you don’t have them set to always display (which you can do in your Account Customisation), you’ll need to click the “Filters” button to toggle them. Here is what they may look like when opened:
This is a rundown of all the filters available, and how to use them!
Note that several filters have a (?) icon next to the title, which you can hover over for more information
Default Filters (Stories)
You can customise which filters to display in your Account Customisation, up to a maximum of 12 visible filters for standard members, and no limit for Patrons. Below are the default filters everybody starts with:
Media
This is a filter to narrow down results to a particular media type, for example TV, Audio Drama, Comic.
Range
This is used to narrow down stories into broad ranges, for example “Doctor Who” or “Torchwood”. We are still working out the best ways to categorise these, so in future there may be more or fewer ranges.
A much more specific way of finding particular ranges would be to use the Sets filter, which you can read about further below.
My Personal Filters
Available to Patrons only, this powerful feature lets you narrow down any list into only stories you have completed, rated, skipped, favourited, and more!
Creating these indexes is resource-intensive, which is why it is exclusively for paying members. Please support the site to gain access to this feature!
Doctor(s)
Click the dropdown to see a list of every Doctor. You can scroll inside the list, and there is a search box to quickly narrow it down.
Selecting “The Doctor” (the first entry) shows any story containing any Doctor.
This is an OR filter, which is the default for most filters - it means if you selected Tenth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor, it would show all stories featuring the Tenth OR Eleventh Doctor (or both).
Selecting more Doctors increases the results, not reduces. To instead only find stories featuring the Tenth and Eleventh Doctor, please use the “All Characters (and)” filter, which you can find further below.
Companions
Just like Doctors, this is a dropdown you can scroll and search. It shows every character we have classed as a “companion”.
Villains
Just like the other two above, this is a dropdown you can scroll and search. It shows every character we have classed as a “villain” who appears in at least 2 stories.
Ratings & Reviews
You can filter stories by their average rating, in star and half-star increments. You can also only show stories with have reviews, or which do not.
Writer
You can scroll or search this list, it contains every writer.
Time Travel
Narrow stories down based on if they are set in the Past, Present, Future, Alternate Reality, or if it is Unclear when they are set.
Set
We organise stories into Sets, for example every First Doctor TV story belongs in the “First Doctor” set. You can easily narrow down stories that are just from certain sets using this filter.
Release Date Range
You can select two dates, and it will show stories that fall within that range. There are shortcut links to common date ranges - Classic Era, Revival Era, Wilderness Years, and Modern Era.
Release Year
A simple dropdown containing each year, selecting a year narrows the results down to stories released that year.
Optional extra filters
You can select which filters to display in your Account Customisation area. Drag filters from the “inactive filters list” to the active one, and then save changes at the bottom of the page.
Standard members can have 12 active filters at a time. Patrons have no limit to the number of filters (although the more that are visible, the slower the pages may load).
Series
As well as using Sets (above), we try to organise stories into their respective series, you can use this filter to narrow your results to just that series. There are separate drop-downs for TV, Audio, Book and Comic series.
Has Quotes
You can narrow stories to only those that have quotes saved against them, or ones that do not. Useful if you want to add quotes to those that have none!
Added to the Site
We started keeping track of when we added some of the backlog stories to the site, so that people can quickly find what is new. This filter can help you find newly added stories.
Once the backfill is complete, we may remove this filter.
Actors
Narrow down stories to only those that feature certain actors. Note that adding these is still a work in progress, and it may not contain every story yet.
All Characters
Click the dropdown to see a list of every character that appears in at least 2 stories. You can scroll inside the list, and there is a search box to quickly narrow it down.
This is an OR filter, which is the default for most filters - it means if you selected Ace and Tegan, it would show all stories featuring Ace OR Tegan. Selecting more characters increases the results, not reduces. To instead only find stories featuring Ace and Tegan, please use the “Characters (AND)” filter, which you can find further below.
All Characters (AND)
This works just like “All Characters”, except selecting two or more characters means only stories that feature ALL of those characters will show. The more characters you select, the fewer stories will be found.
Real-life Characters
Filter stories by those that contain “Real-life characters”. Not necessarily real people, but characters from real life.
Available for free
We try to keep track of stories that are available to watch/listen/read without purchasing. This may include things on YouTube, stories posted in blogs, and audio dramas or audiobooks that are available on streaming services such as Spotify.
Director
Narrow stories based on who directed them.
Location
We store information for thousands of locations, most of them only used a single time. We will eventually be adding a way to freely browse these, but for now the filter allows you to narrow down stories that are set on:
- Earth
- Exoplanets (planets that are not in our solar system, there may be many missing here as it is a big job to categorise them all)
- Gallifrey
- Parallel Universes
- Skaro
- Space
- TARDIS
Showrunner
The term “showrunner” has come to mean different things over the years, but narrow down stories based on who was in charge of the main show.
Inventory
We keep track of when certain inventory items feature in stories - from staples such as the Sonic Screwdriver and Psychic Paper, to weird and wonderful things like Spoons and Fezzes!
This filter is just for fun and is not usually an exhaustive list, as it is a huge job to work on these. They will improve over time!
Tropes
Tropes are things that happen often in stories, such as a “Base Under Siege”, or a story about how “Capitalism is bad”. It’s also a place to find things like every story featuring The Romans or The Nazis. We have hundreds of tropes defined, and soon there will be a list explaining them all.
Again, this is a big job so it’s incomplete. You can help!
Story Arc
Filter stories by a certain story arc. These are a work in progress.
Story Type
Things like Regeneration, Anniversary Special, Bottle Episode, Doctor-lite… lots of different story types to filter!
Missing Episodes
Some Classic stories have missing episodes, because the BBC wiped the tapes back in the 60s. This filter lets you find only completely intact stories, or stories with missing episodes.
Pages
A slider that you can use to filter by number of pages for books and comics. Slide the left slider to the right to increase the minimum number of pages. Slide the right slider to the left to decrease the maximum number of pages. All results that fit within this range will be shown.
Runtime
A slider that you can use to filter by runtime (minutes). This works for both visual and audio-only media. Slide the left slider to the right to increase the minimum runtime. Slide the right slider to the left to decrease the maximum runtime. All results that fit within this range will be shown.
The Pages and Runtime filters are incompatible with each other, as no story would have pages and a runtime.
Collectable Filters
Here are some filters that exclusively show for Collectable listings. They are always visible, no need to turn them on or off:
Collectables Category
Narrow down the collectables on show to just their category, e.g. Books, DVDs, CDs, etc.