The Duck PREVIEW Site is now Live!

http://preview.drunkduck.com

After months of development and a lot of hard work, the new DrunkDuck site—now just called, "The Duck"—is LIVE as a public PREVIEW.

While the new site is not yet finished, it has reached a state where we feel comfortable allowing you, the Duck community, to take a look at the various design and feature improvements we've made and offer your feedback! The Duck community is of paramount importance to us, and we've really made an effort to not only massively enhance speed and stability overall, but also make feature and design improvements with an eye towards ease of use and accessibility for both creators and readers who visit the site. Our goal is that fans will have an easier time finding and following the webcomics they want to read, and comic creators at all levels of experience will be able to publish and manage their work on our site with as little hassle as possible.

Some of the technical highlights of the new site include:

- 100% NEW code-base rebuilt from the ground up in Python and utilizing the Django framework.
- Significant speed improvements across the entire site.
- Improved comic image delivery system using the Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3).
- Very speedy site search.
- NEW: Front-facing content tags.
- NEW: Videos section.
- Security: Improvements to prevent the delivery of malware and spyware.
- Security: Improved user authentication system.
- Security: Improved user registration system.
- Comic Page Customization: We give Comic creators the ability to customize their pages without using insecure user-supplied HTML code.
- SEO: Improved Comic Page search engine visibility.
- Backup: We now have double-redundancy in Comic image backup.
- Social Media: Improved Twitter integration.
- Social Media: Improved QuackCast integration.
- Faster, more robust & efficient database architecture.
- We've implemented Get Satisfaction for better community support management.

The various Feature enhancements on the new site are perhaps too numerous to list, but if you'd like a detailed assessment of many of them on a page-by-page basis, please refer to the first post of the thread HERE

THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE PREVIEW SITE:

1. Much of the content currently found on DrunkDuck has not yet been migrated over to the preview site. Again, this is simply a preview version of the new site, and so only a fraction of the actual site's content (comics, profiles, forum threads, accounts, etc) have been brought over to give users a glimpse of how they will be displayed in the various sections of the site.

2. You can register for an account on the preview site, upload comics, make forum posts, create tutorials, etc. Just keep in mind that at the end of the preview period, all data added to the preview site will be completely WIPED, and the data on the current DrunkDuck will be migrated over to the new version of the site. We're giving users the ability to add content to the preview site in order to test out functionality, UI and bugs, so just be aware that NO CONTENT WILL BE SAVED.

3. Not all of the features of the final site have been implemented in the Preview. We will be rolling out additional features of the site during the preview period, which we will announce to the community.

4. Any and all feedback you wish to provide is GREATLY APPRECIATED. In particular, any bug or formatting issues you may encounter is something we'd definitely like to know about. When reporting bugs or issues, please provide your OS version, browser (with version number if possible) and what steps you took before experiencing the bug, so that we may try to replicate it on our end.

For ongoing community discussion regarding The Duck PREVIEW Site in the Forums, click HERE

Thank you for your continued patience and support as we have been working to develop the new site. We hope you enjoy it!