How Far Back Can We Go? Eighth Edition!

I would be very surprised if there is no 9th edition this year; it would require either some really good activity on the 7th (where my estimates keep suggesting that the 13th century would be extremely hard even if we get there at all), or the 8th stopping for a long time because a particular year depended on a rare participant who didn't show up.

(I can't think of any plausible cases of the latter offhand, but I hadn't actually checked fully.)

My very thoughts..... the clock is ticking

So further investigations leads me to strongly believe that my coin is in fact a 782 AH or 1380, not the 781 AH or 1379 as played in the 7th edition. This brings into doubt the viability of the 7th edition.
To go back a few steps, I take very poor photos of my coins and so on many occasions I rely on the seller photos,as I have with this coin. I have discovered that sometimes the appearance of some pics is improved by playing with the Auto Level function of paint.net.
Despite my picture being quite OK for display, I gave it a shot with Auto Level. On this occasion the result was not good, the picture was dark and shadowy. But it seemed to highlight a "smudge" on the rim of the coin (circled in red) which seemed like the left side of a V or 7. Once I saw this, the third digit now seemed to possibly be a 2, and not a 7.
So now I have a possible 782 as opposed to the sellers 187 (or 781 retrograde)
Further inspection of the coin and with a lot more familiarity with Arabic script, I now see the words above the date as "beled azak" (minted in Azak, a region in the Black Sea area).
I have trawled through Zeno, as well as the catalogs Sagdeeva and Pyrsov. It seems that of the main stream dangs on Zeno minted in Azak, the earliest is 782. Zeno even shows the Azak minted coins of Toqtamish starting in 782 AH. Pyrsov (#299) lists an Azak 781, however, both sides are framed in an arched square, and mine is not that type. Sagdeeva (#366) shows the same type, dated 881 which is a blundered date for 781 apparently. This is the attribution provided by my seller way back when.
I can only apologise for this, and I could have let it slide through, but to what point?
So jbuck, I reluctantly hand this can of worms over to you.

Yay!

...I am worried about the 7th edition, actually; it would be really awkward to be forced to close it like that.
I feel like we've had it happen before that years were counted on "datable" coins that were later invalidated, but I don't recall any straight-up misread date cases.

Technically the 6th edition had the same coin as well, so does this mean that the 7th and/or the 8th is just entirely illegitimate?

Well, we at least have that.

20 days.

I'm not 100% sure of your meaning, jbuck.
For example 1379 CE, to substitute AH coins then you're asking for full coverage of the CE year by AH dated coins, given that may require two AH coins, and in some circumstances up to 3 coins? Is that what you mean?

but I'm not sure how it would interact with undated-but-datable coins.

Also I think we might want to relax it if the conversion is clear; if an AH year only covers a small part of a CE year (and is mostly in a different CE year) it shouldn't be required unless that other CE year isn't covered either.

[EDIT: for example, 2014 CE is covered by AH 1436 and AH 1435, but AH 1436 only covers a small part of it. If for some reason no 2014 CE coins are posted, but an AH 1435 coin is, and 2015 was covered by a CE dated coin, we shouldn't also need AH 1436 to regress to 2013 CE / AH 1434.]


That sounds like a bad idea? A lot of people have extensive collections of specific years.

But something like "wait a few hours or until someone else had posted, whichever is earlier" could work; force them to spread it out a little without making them only post the one.

[You'd probably also want exceptions for matched sets in one post.]