@MrHades: It's true that a lot of people have left, many of them artists who comment more readily than the casual readers do, so their absence is very pronounced. That said, you may be overreacting a bit. There are plenty of pages in your comic from well before the changeover that had less comments than what you're averaging now. The level of comments on my comic fluctuates a lot too, but I've always just assumed that's normal?
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
i miss DRUNK duck !!!
I'm gonna chime in to defend The Duck.
First, I've been around different communities and while the Duck's taken some hits, it's still a decent place. Also when I first saw Comic Fury I wondered if they knew it was 2011 – the design is pretty freaking horrible. I started on Comic Genesis and I can safely say that between the 3, the Duck's the prettiest. Never been on Smack Jeeves so I can't weigh in there. The big difference has been in the community. Now in my case I had a few people who recognized my work from CG and were welcoming, but initially the Duck was just a mirror for me. The people won me over though, and the Duck became my primary hosting site.
That hasn't changed. And I have my own web space, too.
I don't think the grass is any greener on the other side. I'm not here for the free hosting, I'm here because of everyone else. That's probably why the Duck changes (aside from lack of analytics code) don't phase me. It more or less works, it does most of what I need (let's face it, if I really wanted to I could host on Facebook!) and I like the people. Face facts: no comic hosting site is going to give you tech that you can't get for free elsewhere. It's all about the community, and I still have faith in the Duck's.
El Cid wrote:I didn't want my comment to come off as moaning about lack of readers, etc. Alot of my comments i used to have on Vanguard were just the '5' rating, but they were all lost on the update. Maybe the loss of an easy 'I've read this' button, like the '5' essentially was, is contributing to the perception of fewer readers?
@MrHades: It's true that a lot of people have left, many of them artists who comment more readily than the casual readers do, so their absence is very pronounced. That said, you may be overreacting a bit. There are plenty of pages in your comic from well before the changeover that had less comments than what you're averaging now. The level of comments on my comic fluctuates a lot too, but I've always just assumed that's normal?
That said, I can use Energize as an example, which used to get tons of comments, but now roughly gets half a dozen a page. It's a great comic BTW :)
The duck got downsized.
What bothers me the most is the lack of progress, sure I get that they have finacial troubles but it feels liek they have pretty much abandoned it. I struggle to believe it would take up massives amiunts of time (and therefore money) to fix a few of the issues.
Genejoke wrote:Yeah, seems weird, doesn't it?
The duck got downsized.
What bothers me the most is the lack of progress, sure I get that they have finacial troubles but it feels liek they have pretty much abandoned it. I struggle to believe it would take up massives amiunts of time (and therefore money) to fix a few of the issues.
The intention is still there though, just no money at all for it. When they missed out on their round of expected funding they lost a couple of their key programmers, who happened to be the ones who did all the coding on DD, so without them; no progress.
I'm not really sure what I can say exactly- but without Dan working there there's not much they can do. I don't think Lawrence understands or specialises in the sort of coding that's needed, so they basically need money to hire a specialist to do the work or nothing gets done.
There have been encouraging sounds from Brian (Wowio boss) on Twitter and Lawrence has said some promising things, plus Skool at least has received one of her payments… So maybe something is in the offing? :)
And that is all I will say publicly.
ozoneocean wrote:
The very best part of DD has always been the people Lothar, not the site tools.
But just think how great it would be with the people AND improved functionality :Þ
Anyways, still haven't heard from Lawrence; it's the holidays, after all. I also wasn't selling myself for more than I'm worth, so I don't know if they'll be interested to begin with. I am, after all, still studdying this stuff.
ozoneocean wrote:Well, that's too bad a lot of your old user base has moved on…. :p
The very best part of DD has always been the people Lothar, not the site tools.
Anyway, Lothar's arguement would have been valid 2 years ago. At least wowio has invested SOMETHING in this place. That's more than I can say for previous years.
I think it's natural to feel a certain attachment to The Old Days no matter what, because we all have a certain amount of investment in them we'd like not to see go down the drain. With time, however, those who stick around will end up just as invested in the new site. I really missed not having HTML coding capabilities on my page, but right now I'm working on a redesign and bonus pages for my comic, and I have to say I'd be pretty upset if they switched things on us again after I did all that!
Anubis wrote:Yup, that's it. :)
It seems, at this time, we are in a holding patten. The Duck still flys…but just circling around to land. Living in hope that we land soon.
RE- the development of DD… It's like most sites these days in a lot of ways, in that they were nicely functional, started by enthusiasts, then later coproates bought them up, had them redesigned them using paid programmers who were outsiders and had no first hand experience of the sites they were re-making and the end product turned out not as the users really like it?
I just registered but I read a few comics here back when the site started up around 10 years ago. Once upon a time, I too was going to make a webcomic, and for whatever reason I decided on KeenSpace over DrunkDuck. It was right around the time they rebranded as CG if I recall. Wow, bad time to start….or was it? I haven't decided what's worse, having an established webcomic wrecked by technical problems or not being able to start one due to them.
Technically, I was able to start one, but even 6-7 years ago it was like trying to cross one of those old rope bridges in adventure stories. You had to know exactly what planks were safe and one wrong step would find you falling into the chasm below. They had a thread about two years ago about the place being a ghost town, so I logged in and, sure enough, the site must've been on auto-pilot the entire time I was away. It has gotten so bad that, when I couldn't remember my password and the password resetting page was broken with a missing PHP include, another user sniped back that it was my own fault for forgetting my password!
Anyway, I check in on both sites every now and then to read the forums and check out new comics and, alright, watch them slowly drift. Both sites have pretty much the same problem, a pronounced feeling of abandonment (you've got one over CG for having a working news page though). Heck, there was a period of about a year or so after this place got rebranded to "The Duck" that I couldn't even get into the forums because the layout was so garbled and even then I wonder if jumping to a new version of Safari is what made the difference.
Over at CG, the people with access to make any coding changes are long gone and the moderators that are still around can barely police the forums. From what I've read, that description wouldn't be too far off the mark here either. What I don't get is why. The coding for webcomic management, especially if you cheat and use a pre-packaged forum, is elementary (I'm a programmer). The hardest part of a community-based site is the community. I could copy this site, plus most of the missing features, inside of 6 weeks and never get a single hit because I don't know how to market anything.
The problem with saying that a site is its people and not its tools (a statement I completely agree with by the way) is that it makes it easier to neglect the tools and frustration with them eventually starts turning those people away…
Wow… Just finished reading this thread. I am new here, and picked this place to set up my comic page after a positive review in "How to Make Web Comics", but that was a few years out of date. DD looked very slick at first but various missing elements have increasingly become an issue, and the quietness of the forum seems odd and noticeable. I looked at ComicFury initially but liked the overall look of DD better - Now I may have to set up a page at CF as well, just to compare the two.
Out of curiosity, can anyone suggest other web comic communities that might be geared towards a somewhat older audience?
Thanks! Yeah, I don't plan to actually move shop yet, but setting up an alternate page over there might be an interesting experiment. My main thing is - I'm an older cartoonist, I do this strictly for fun, my comic is targeted towards a 35+ audience, and I'd just be very out of place on a site populated entirely by 12 year olds. But it is fairly disheartening to have just signed up on here and only afterward to learn about the DD buyout, site changes, declining participation, etc.
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