Hi everyone,

As you're all probably very well aware by now, we have been experiencing major site issues on the Duck over the past few days, all of which were directly related to our attempting to switch over from the old (current) version of DrunkDuck to the new design, which we've been discussing for the past couple of months.

I sincerely apologize for any problems and inconveniences you guys may have experienced over the past few days as a result of our site's problems. I made a news post about it HERE but also wanted to create a forum topic for anyone who wanted to raise any questions or concerns that I'd hopefully be able to address.

In hindsight, we made a mistake in keeping the site live as long as we did but we felt at several instances that were were close to, or had, resolved the most critical issues, which obviously we hadn't. I want to reassure everyone off the bat that if and when we decide to implement a redesign on the site again, it will only be after a full and thorough public beta (that will not replace the current DD but run simultaneously to this one) and that in addition to solving the bug issues, the biggest design criticisms we received via the feedback and your posts will also be addressed.

Thanks.

Just want to say that as a former coder I totally understand what it's like for an update to not go as planned.

I think everyone should cut the admin, mods and coders of Drunk Duck some slack. It's not as if anyone is PAYING for the use of this site. Yeah, I know other people say that too and it is a dismissive argument… but it's also true. If you'd like to drop a very large, robust community of good supportive people to go make your own site, pay for your own bandwidth, and try to do the advertising/marketing to bring in an audience of your own… go right ahead.

Oh, and this is someone who's bought his own web space and has had it for some time. There is a very good reason I stick with the Duck primarily – the community. And the mods are great.

If I may be critical for a moment, it's always a good idea to run a beta simultaneously alongside the original. Every time someone thinks ‘nothing possibly can go wrong’ that's always when all the hidden bugs crawl out of the woodwork and everything goes wrong.

But, there's no point in crying over split milk. I will note that user look-ups still don't appear to be working… but right now, I'll take being able to update and read my regulars over nothing.

So keep up slugg'n away! Won't speak for anyone else but I still love the Duck!

I tweeted this before but I'll say it here too Daz 3d (click home on the top to see the beta link that's a referral link, I'm trying to make a tiny bit of money) has the right idea on how to actually redesign their much used and often bought models and software. They have a huge database of customers, the club members amount to at least 2,000 people last major poll count and you can opt in or opt out whenever you like :D heck, twitter is another fine example, although i really hate the new twitter design.

can you write an API for the new site so tools similar to the old dd alerter can be used ?
from what i can decipher from the code ( i got the dd alerter code ) it used to decipher the pages from the site
and it way to much coding work to do such again for some one who is not one of the dd core programmers

gnume
can you write an API for the new site so tools similar to the old dd alerter can be used ?
from what i can decipher from the code ( i got the dd alerter code ) it used to decipher the pages from the site
and it way to much coding work to do such again for some one who is not one of the dd core programmers

We will make sure that all the current features on the site are working on the new site, including the alerter.

srhdt
We will make sure that all the current features on the site are working on the new site, including the alerter.

You are opening up a can of worms there, because people have never been very satisfied with the Alerter as a tool. It would be more functional to build some of the alerter features (like telling you how many favorites you have) into the control panel on the site, so everyone can access them. Although there will still be people who miss having a pop-up when a comic updates or they get comments, so if it's possible to keep a version of the alerter around, then yeah.

gnume may need to explain this better than me, but an API would ensure site security while tapping into things the site offers- for example twitter and facebook based games (which update your progress on the game via your twitter/fb account) use those sites' APIs to do that sort of thing. APIs also let people do things like write apps for phones, and do things like the alerter was trying to do. Theoretically if DD has an API then people could receive their comments on their phone, or something (if someone writes an app to do that).

Yay! I can't wait till all of this hassle is over and the new DD surfaces!
You guys & wowio are giving this place the changes it deserves and we're loving it!

skoolmunkee
You are opening up a can of worms there, because people have never been very satisfied with the Alerter as a tool. It would be more functional to build some of the alerter features (like telling you how many favorites you have) into the control panel on the site, so everyone can access them.

I think so, too.
I only used the alerter because of that function, and while it worked it was a nice little gadget to have on your desktop. But, to be honest, it is nothing I couldn't do without just as well.

Bummer that the new design doesn't work so well. I was rather fond of it, actually, when I finally saw it in action. It's good to know someone cares about this site.
I know bugger all about website programming, but I know a few people who do and, having seen them at work, I think I can imagine what a tedious job it must be to put all this together. I don't think I'd be patient enough myself. Thank you so much for your efforts!

I just read the latest news report and approve the whole “redoing the whole code from scratch” approach, while taking my hat off to you guys for being willing to do such a massive undertaking. I'm certain we'll end up with a much more stable site as a result.

I've already mentioned my opinions regarding the new site design and it's mostly positive but the thing I'd like to change the most is that you go from this:


To this:


I just don't like the idea to have the featured comic list all the way up where the advertisements usually are, where people might me more inclined to ignore them.

I dig the new design the bugs are a bit annoying but I appreciate the effort to re-vamp the site. With that being said the only bug I've noticed yesterday was that I couldn't access (it didn't show) the “My Favorites” link menu and I had to go back to the home page to have access to , and pardon the redundancy, my favorite comics' updates.

Once again thank you for the effort done to make this happen.

thank u, thank u, thank u! for reverting the site! ive read these posts and am glad u guys are doing all that u can do but if at all possible, can u plz not alter the look of the site if not at all at least as minimally as possible? i like this site the way it is: when i joined this site, the look and layout, in my mind, is the best site on the web! and then u changed it to crazy green, yellow, and blue surfboard/Old Navy looking thing! sorry, that's wut it looked like to me. I give props and appreciation to all admins on this site, u guys r awesome, dedicated and the best. I would just like to cast my vote for improving things on THIS version of the site, and not changing the look. to me, this IS the look of the duck. sorry, i love change, but some things shouldnt change. like, when GAP tried their new logo: it was reverted within 20 hrs due to public outrage. okay, ill shut up now =)

1. One of the major complaints outside webcomics authors have about DD is the clunky code which irritates anyone with enough savvy to try to design their own webpage. So, redesigning the code from the ground up, to be more friendly to both users and to you guys, is a great idea.

2. Since you're revamping from square 1… I state again: The pictures for Featured, Top 10, Quail's Random, and Just Updated are all too small (in the Beta).

Banners are meant to attract viewers and showcase the site's content. Tiny buttons cannot do that. The pics cannot get any smaller than current.

Look at this site's comics banners, for example: http://palaceinthesky.com/silver.php

I don't care if you cut down the rows of 10 to rows of 8 for everything. I don't care if you cut Featured back to 4-5 pics only. The individual pics have to remain current size.

8 current-sized pics each row >>> 10-12 tiny shrunken pics each row.

Jabali
I dig the new design the bugs are a bit annoying but I appreciate the effort to re-vamp the site. With that being said the only bug I've noticed yesterday was that I couldn't access (it didn't show) the “My Favorites” link menu and I had to go back to the home page to have access to , and pardon the redundancy, my favorite comics' updates.

Once again thank you for the effort done to make this happen.

Where were you when you were trying to access your favorites? (It's never worked if you're on your own profile page, btw)

Considering how much better the revamp looked I'm sure starting from scratch is going to be incredible, i'm really excited here. :)
And i second PaulEberhartd, it's good to know you care.

I fully understand start from scratch and write the code because the patch and bridge job using the old code for base is insane. Been there done that, don't wanna do it again even if I got two bright shiny new atta-boy plaques. One thing I do ask when it comes to colors please tone them back a notch or two or look to something less jarring to the optic nerves. I looked at the site from my work computer and no biggie, at home with a top line monitor and high end graphics card, the colors were actually painful to look at.

I'd like to see the featured comics switch places with the top 10.

I think RSS feeds might be a good way of future proofing the DD alerter. Generate a feed for a comics comments. If it's something standard like RSS then you don't have to worry about a lot of things. You can build the DD alerter to pick up the feeds, and people can also use their own feed program for it.

nsterken7983
thank u, thank u, thank u! for reverting the site! ive read these posts and am glad u guys are doing all that u can do but if at all possible, can u plz not alter the look of the site if not at all at least as minimally as possible? i like this site the way it is: when i joined this site, the look and layout, in my mind, is the best site on the web! and then u changed it to crazy green, yellow, and blue surfboard/Old Navy looking thing! sorry, that's wut it looked like to me. I give props and appreciation to all admins on this site, u guys r awesome, dedicated and the best. I would just like to cast my vote for improving things on THIS version of the site, and not changing the look. to me, this IS the look of the duck. sorry, i love change, but some things shouldnt change. like, when GAP tried their new logo: it was reverted within 20 hrs due to public outrage. okay, ill shut up now =)

Um, two things…

1. This site needs a visual update, and as the few days when the new design went live tells us, a major re-code. Honestly the closest thing to this site I can think of is the look of a BB forum if you stick to the default settings. The thing about logo's is that they act more like a company's signature, so it's a bad idea to update it, unless it is really out of date.

2. Old Navy? Really? Old Navy stores tend to stick with a primary color scheme (red, yellow, blue), The new design uses greens and blues. the only thing I can think of that is remotely like Old Navy from the new design is the circles. I like those personally, they remind me of screen tones. Oh and here's Old Navy's site just so you know. And here's the like to the pics of the new design.


As long as you guys are looking for suggestions and support, I really like the new design. I also like that you were willing to revert back to the old design when you saw that it wasn't working like it needed to. I figure as long as the main part of the site is being updated, could you update the forums as well? Also, would you mind redoing the templates? I honestly don't know if it's possible to do that without breaking all the custom templates, but I was thinking of having the default/custom template be as bare-bones as possible, just a place for the comic, navigation buttons, comments, and the comic drop-down. Then you could have the current default as a different template, and then all the other templates.

skoolmunkee

Jabali
I dig the new design the bugs are a bit annoying but I appreciate the effort to re-vamp the site. With that being said the only bug I've noticed yesterday was that I couldn't access (it didn't show) the “My Favorites” link menu and I had to go back to the home page to have access to , and pardon the redundancy, my favorite comics' updates.

Once again thank you for the effort done to make this happen.

Where were you when you were trying to access your favorites? (It's never worked if you're on your own profile page, btw)

I wasn't on my profile, as you said the fave links has never worked in the profile window. I'm talking about the top-menu that appears in the top of all comic's pages, the one where you choose to Fave a comic, set a “bookmark”, ect. For some reason it didn't have the Favorite menu button.

It did. It was hidden. You had to click User Control panel, and then the link for favorites would show up.

Jabali
I wasn't on my profile, as you said the fave links has never worked in the profile window. I'm talking about the top-menu that appears in the top of all comic's pages, the one where you choose to Fave a comic, set a “bookmark”, ect. For some reason it didn't have the Favorite menu button.

The fave menue button was removed. What we had instead was a “my controls” text link, along with all the other text links.
You clicked on that, which brought up a little box that had two things in it. From memory it was
“My account”
and
“My favourites”

You then had to click on either one to expand them. :)



Seems to have proved rather hard to find by most people. I knew it was there but even I kept forgetting.
Same with the comic controls on your account page; I kept forgetting they were hidden in the little side box on the right. :(

Niccea
It did. It was hidden. You had to click User Control panel, and then the link for favorites would show up.

Yes. That! :)

I guess the best foot I can put forward is… Thanks for the week off. Not that I stopped making comics… I have four already for next week. =B

skoolmunkee

srhdt
We will make sure that all the current features on the site are working on the new site, including the alerter.

You are opening up a can of worms there, because people have never been very satisfied with the Alerter as a tool. It would be more functional to build some of the alerter features (like telling you how many favorites you have) into the control panel on the site, so everyone can access them. Although there will still be people who miss having a pop-up when a comic updates or they get comments, so if it's possible to keep a version of the alerter around, then yeah.

gnume may need to explain this better than me, but an API would ensure site security while tapping into things the site offers- for example twitter and facebook based games (which update your progress on the game via your twitter/fb account) use those sites' APIs to do that sort of thing. APIs also let people do things like write apps for phones, and do things like the alerter was trying to do. Theoretically if DD has an API then people could receive their comments on their phone, or something (if someone writes an app to do that).

here the wikipedia article :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface#Web_APIs
relevent section :

wikipedia
Web APIs
Main article: web service

When used in the context of web development, an API is typically a defined set of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request messages, along with a definition of the structure of response messages, which is usually in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. While “Web API” is virtually a synonym for web service, the recent trend (so-called Web 2.0) has been moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based services towards more direct Representational State Transfer (REST) style communications. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple services into new applications known as mashups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service#Web_API

The news post asks us to report any bugs, so I can only guess this is the appropriate place to point this out.

I found the http://www.drunkduck.com/community/view_topic.php?tid=51976 charset=UTF-8\\\“ />


@import \”http://www.drunkduck.com/gfx/template_gfx_new/global.css\";


( )





Good thing I made a layout test comic, or my comics would be screwed. XD; Thanks to that, no real harm was done, but I thought this should be brought to attention. And I'm curious - what is causing the backlash epidemic?

Elanor Pam
Well, it turns out that the Raw HTML box sticks backlashes EVERYWHERE when you paste the code and click send.

That will be probably part of a retrofix because content that was linked to without the backslashes wasn't showing up, so there was probably code written to auto-insert them into links in templates…

Questions:
1. is it still doing that?
2. does does that content (linked to with backslashed links) show up within a template once it's rendered on DD?

…I should prolly try myself…

Here is my newest attempt :( but I wasn't expecting an improvement so soon - I actually created the new comic and posted the code this very morning, and when, after 3 unsuccessful tries, I became aware of the multiplying backlashes, I came to the forum to post about it straightaway.

As for how the backlashful code is parsed by DD… see for yourself: BORKED

I just tried doing a custom template myself and it worked perfectly…? Maybe it's fixed now.

Please try again for me?
Sorry

Alright, I've located the issue:

When I use the sidebar's button to paste the layout code, it works like a charm.

But if I go to Account -> -> “Miscelaneous: Edit Design Template” then paste the code in the available box, it gets backlashed all over the place.

The problem was in the place I was uploading the code through. That particular path seems to be the problem.

Both those methods take me to the same edit window and I still can't replicate it. :(

After some screencapping:

- First step: Go to account
- Second step: edit comic
- Third step: design template stuff

And when I paste the code in that box, it gets full of backlashes.

That's the path I used at first. When I used the button in the sidebar, I was taken to a completely different (and working) design template editor.

OMFG…?
I didn't realise people still had access to that old interface o_O
How are you getting to that? That one is out of date, the CSS isn't even working for it anymore. Freaky!

Thanks for the screenies BTW.

The other path I was talking about was to click on “my account” (under your avi on the right)
That takes you here: http://www.drunkduck.com/account/overview/

Then click on the “edit” button next to your comic, then click on the “layout” option, then click on “raw HTML”.



You seem to have gotton to the old outdated one here http://www.drunkduck.com/account/
But what link did you use to get there? Or do you have it bookmarked already?