As of right now I have no idea how I'll set up my layout to even look similar to my current layout using these tools. I'm assuming this is the beta version though. I'll try again when/if it's reported that they've improved it.

Tim Wellman
Oh, I also see where a few are still attacking me… not sure why, just got to check when they joined, I guess… but still, the majority of you fought for what you believed in and you won. Good job! We didn't get everything, but we got editable sites with our own banners. And I think we all showed Wowio that we couldn't be pushed around quite as easily as they thought.

I knew you guys would eventually stand up and fight, even if your leaders were huddled in the bushes making white flags.

Henceforth this day shall be known as St. Wellman's Day.

And users of The (Drunk)Duck now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their usernames cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Wellman's day.

Bill Shakespeare, Henry The Duck V.

Ironscarf
Henceforth this day shall be known as St. Wellman's Day.

And users of The (Drunk)Duck now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their usernames cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Wellman's day.

Bill Shakespeare, Henry The Duck V.

This band of water fowl!
Prince Harry the Duck?

Ironscarf
That fought with us upon Saint Wellman's day.

Bill Shakespeare, Henry The Duck V.

Rather than Shakespeare, Wellmen's antics call to mind a Scaramouche from the Commedia Dell'arte: a puffed up braggart who talks a big show, lies, tells fantastic tales of his own invention, runs away from danger and then comes back to try and claim all the credit.

The archetypal fool.

JustNoPoint
As of right now I have no idea how I'll set up my layout to even look similar to my current layout using these tools. I'm assuming this is the beta version though. I'll try again when/if it's reported that they've improved it.

No. Utterly impossible.
The tools so far are basic, only to be used to add very basic editing functionality. It will be a while after rollout till we get anything more advanced. It's all envisaged, but it takes a while to code it all up.

ozoneocean

Rather than Shakespeare, Wellmen's antics call to mind a Scaramouche from the Commedia Dell'arte: a puffed up braggart who talks a big show, lies, tells fantastic tales of his own invention, runs away from danger and then comes back to try and claim all the credit.

The archetypal fool.



A word of advice to Mr. Wellman, if you don't stop all your ranting and accusations, you won't have to worry about making threats to leave, the admins will just outright ban you.

Not to be Wellmany, but I have reached a new level of frustration.

(a) I still don't know where to look for the Wowio “to do” list – what they Are working on, what they Will Be working on before the move, what they will be working on after the move.

(b) I'd like to check said list to see where uploading image files presides. In the getsatisfaction, I noted – 25 days ago – that I did not see how we can upload image files other than comic pages, avatars and thumbnails. There's been no replies


— No reply, no comment. Maybe I'm the only one who will miss seeing the pictures-of-DDers thread, or the silly picture thread, or how same and Product Placement like to occasionally punctuate theirs posts with an image (me, too)

© Since I have no idea of what they're doing, I can't understand why my preview account keeps changing: no longer has an avatar, has only one of my 2 comics, no longer has the friends that were added during earlier weeks, but the PQs seem untouched.

(d) We were given a heads up (but not much of a heads up) that the move was occurring this past Weds. I'm not complaining that we didn't move ESPECIALLY since now we're being asked to test the new customized tools, but does anybody else around here think they should have asked us to test the tools BEFORE announcing an imminent move? What is the damn clock on this?

(e) Drunk Duck is an enjoyable hobby fro me. I like hangin wid youse. But I've got other things to do than to drop everything to test features because we might have - only a week? - before the move. If the features don't work and the move occurs, does fixing the features crash the site?

Skool and Oz - you Know I'm not blaming you. I think when you're given the green light, you're posting what news you know of at any time of day. But the communication still has a lot to be desired. I think it's a great idea that the programmers are asking for input, but how much input is enough?

It took a couple of weeks before getsatisfaction got a lot of action going, and it might take a couple of weeks before there's enough feedback on testing the new tools to actually represent the population here.

I really would like a status update from the programmers on each of the problems reported in getsatisfaction before there's another imminent move announced.

Tim Wellman demands it.

The updates section in Getsatisfaction says the to-do list was delayed, I can only presume they've forgotten about it. A lot of what you said here would be worth repeating to them on GS too I think. I don't think Skool and Ozone can do anything about it.

Looks like Tim Wellman's (not so) good name is well on its way to being a meme here.

On topic. It's cool that they're giving us a little bit of control over the appearances of the presentation of our comics, even if I haven't had a chance to take a look-see, but I feel that a lot of artists are going to be more than a little miffed about not being able to change or make a custom layout. I'm not trying to be a downer and rain on the parade, it's just how I feel.

Going back to what was said earlier, if the reason for not having full custom HTML is because of the possibility that less savory people can upload malware using the HTML editor and by uploading script files, then why not have a “doorman” check the files? I suggested scanning files as they're uploaded to check for malicious code, or behavior. This would probably kill upload times, but it'd be worth it if it actually works. The main problem would be testing for homebrew viruses, I think. I could be wrong, but if it helps, I don't think I'm too far off if I am.

Another solution is to disable scripts altogether. This would be a pain for those that actually use them, but I really don't think there's another way to do this.

Dave7
Pretty much all he said in response to Wellman's post.

I completely agree.

Tim Wellman, I was going to write you a response(or an attack as you name them) to the post you made yesterday, and then I read the last one you wrote… I'm trying real hard to stay polite here, but I just hate that kind of attitude.

We've been giving feedback to Wowio and you condemned us saying it was useless and we should stand up like you did, which means leaving(or pretending to). We've been ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING, while you watched and spit venom at us and Wowio. Abd when some of our concerns are addressed because yes we're fighting(I'm not including you in the we by the way) for a better drunkduck, you're patting us in the back? And trying to get merit because you encouraged us to do so? If you're trying to keep your dignity or something, you're doing it the wrong way. And I bet if Wowio screw anything up, you'll go back to smash our heads telling us how we are gullible sheeps and we should have followed you to the holyland of ComicFury(where you are a lot less talkative than here).

And that's as far as I can go without getting too angry/vulgar/harsh.

I truly wish that you're a troll or something of the like.

The PNG converter just took a 211kb jpeg and resized it to 2.01mb. That is classic. I tip my hat to the genius who thought that was a good idea.

Alright, I have left comments on the Get Satisfaction page, but also wanted to mention it here as well.

1. The navigation buttons are too far spaced out and there is no way to fix the spacing, also they are now at the top and bottom of the page and no way to make it one way or the other.

2. The links page doesn't really allow for “Top Sites” links. It's just a standard “insert link here” kind of deal. You need to be able to input the html code for the “Top Sites” links to work, and what's on there now doesn't let you do that. It just lets you put in a url to another page and a graphic if you don't want just text.

So now that I've played with the comic controls and seen what customization is possible… Yeah, I'm a bit worried about all this. So far it's a Wevolt without the massive sidebar.
And what the heck is the deal with that Videos section? Did they really think we'd give a crap?
Tutorials are back and are as useless as ever with images having to be hotlinked.
And the Store… Any bets on how many months the Store link will be there before they realize they can't be assed getting it to work and take the link away?

Drunk Duck is running incredibly slowly again.
This usually means the powers that be are trying to change something.
Is this a sign that the change is currently underway?

Ksteak I don't like being so negative, but yeah…basically what you said.
I really liked the store but it got shut down and forgotten about without warning and it seems like its never coming back.
Weirdly that means the Harkovast mug I bought my wife is now a one of a kind collectible…weird!

ksteak
The PNG converter just took a 211kb jpeg and resized it to 2.01mb. That is classic. I tip my hat to the genius who thought that was a good idea.

Yes, I explained over and over to them that this is what PNGs do but it's like they've never done anything with image files before.

We DO need to move onto a new code base, and there are things about the new site which are really good, but there's a lot of things there that are beyond basic at the moment.

===============
I will let you all on to something:
Sometimes it's as if there isn't a working site here for them to base the functions off. It's as if everyone is working from scratch and can't be bothered using this site first to see how something should work before recreating that feature on the new site.
So instead I have to painstakingly explain and explain and explain how things should go and how people use them and what they're for. It gets exhausting. Like communicating with an alien race about how earth society should run or something.

I can't tell you all how grateful I am that you are continuing to use the Get Satisfaction thing and are reporting these issues and problems and issues.

To view the preview site with minimal suffering around firefox addons -

RequestPolicy
-Allow requests to amazonaws.com

Adblock Plus
-Delete the filter for ||drunkduck.com/media* if you have it.
(I think this was the problem for justnopoint and fukujinzuke, who screenshotted an unformatted frontpage earlier in this thread. Like me, you probably added a filter to block the preview banner on this site at first. You needn't disable adblock completely though, it's just the one filter~)

NoScript
-Allow drunkduck.com

This was all I had to do to register, make a comic, upload an avatar and page, comment on it, change my profile, and make a forum post with formatting. Dunno how relevant it is to most people, but if two other people had the same issue, why not.

Nicotine
Now that I've got the time, I've been testing the new site. Semi-custom html for the main page? That's a start, and there are some good tools there. But, I'd still like the liberty of having other pages; a lot of other comic site allow users to create custom pages with the tools already laid out on the new site to create main pages. I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard for the team to allow us to have customizable extra pages that way…?

I put this on the feedback site as well, but I completely agree with this, especially about extra pages. To the point where, while I won't leave The Duck over it, I would not have put my comic here in the first place had there been no option for extra pages.

(No, I haven't taken advantage of the extra pages here yet, but I'd been starting to work on a custom layout when the April Fool's Crash hit, and just put it on hold to see what happened with the preview site. At this point, I can't be sure I'll have the time to finish it before the site switch, and if I can't update the character page, it's kinda pointless, since I'm not ready to list certain characters.)

I think we're all getting a bit frustrated at this point. You guys because of the wonky communication and timescales and things promised but not yet delivered, and us because we keep telling the same things to the same people and don't seem to be getting very far any more. And I suspect the people at Wowio may not be having the best time either, dealing with increasingly grumpy users and admins, their own wonky deadlines and restrictions, and so forth. I think anyone can deal with a short period of annoyance/frustration but the last 5 weeks have really started to drag on me and oz (and probably others I can't speak for).

ayesinback
(a) I still don't know where to look for the Wowio “to do” list

As ksteak said, they probably forgot about it. I've tried to follow up with them a few times and don't get a response. I suspect it's a case of “I could spend time doing that, or I could spend time actually making that stuff”… the problem there is that we still don't know what's coming.

Would it be useful to make a clear list of the stuff we're most concerned about, and getting some kind of yes/no responses at least on those?

So it might look like,

1. Further page customization options
2. Side pages
3. Area for uploading images

?? what else? (I think we'll have to distinguish some line between ‘stuff we need’ and ‘stuff we want’, I suspect most ‘stuff we need’ is going to be stuff that already existed on the old site?)

© Since I have no idea of what they're doing, I can't understand why my preview account keeps changing: no longer has an avatar, has only one of my 2 comics, no longer has the friends that were added during earlier weeks, but the PQs seem untouched.

This is just a guess, but I know they've periodically been ‘pushing’ updates to the code, which may have an effect on those things. I'd say that any mysterious changes like that are just down to things they're doing on the backend, and not bugs or issues to be reported.

(d) We were given a heads up (but not much of a heads up) that the move was occurring this past Weds.

To be fair that was a “probably” date which I was careful to say. :] This launch has already been delayed a few times and I think there is some ‘buying time’ going on behind the scenes. Most of the people directly involved with the preview site would probably be happy to have it delayed more. Probably the best way to show them that the site is unready is to continue detailing just how unready it is.

As to ‘how much is enough,’ I suspect it's going to be some time… however long it takes for them to see that the way people use the site is just as important as the stuff they want people to be able to do. Some of the things they've put in already, and have planned, are great- but it's the usability (which is ALWAYS an issue with any new development) where there are a lot of roadblocks. And describing usability issues is a lot more difficult than describing than a neat feature you want, since it's more dependent upon preference and habit.

I really would like a status update from the programmers on each of the problems reported in getsatisfaction before there's another imminent move announced.

I'll remind them about that. I suspect that some of their noncommunication would be down to having to spend so much time trying to get as much working as possible. Reading and replying to all the stuff on there can get pretty time consuming. I think their internal bug reporting system has had some problem too, which has made things a little more difficult for them.

Salsa
Going back to what was said earlier, if the reason for not having full custom HTML is because of the possibility that less savory people can upload malware using the HTML editor and by uploading script files, then why not have a “doorman” check the files? I suggested scanning files as they're uploaded to check for malicious code, or behavior. This would probably kill upload times, but it'd be worth it if it actually works. The main problem would be testing for homebrew viruses, I think. I could be wrong, but if it helps, I don't think I'm too far off if I am.

Another solution is to disable scripts altogether. This would be a pain for those that actually use them, but I really don't think there's another way to do this.

We've suggested all kinds of alternatives to them, and Oz is very good at sending them all the bad ad reports and saying “look, it's the ads that have the security issue, not the html”… but everything we've been told is that Lawrence is adamant that html scripting will not be allowed. The three things (there may be more, but I can't think of any just now) that they have never budged on is that the name stays, the html coding is going, and users can't have ads (and we still haven't heard back about PW).

ksteak
The PNG converter just took a 211kb jpeg and resized it to 2.01mb. That is classic. I tip my hat to the genius who thought that was a good idea.

We warned them that their PNG idea was ridiculous and wouldn't work. Maybe now they have seen it they'll be willing to rethink that one. That is extra stupid because a 2.01mb image is above the image upload limit for comic pages. so, sorry folks, you can't upload images bigger than 2mb because that is OUR JOB! Haha. :]

harkovast
Drunk Duck is running incredibly slowly again.
This usually means the powers that be are trying to change something.
Is this a sign that the change is currently underway?

They've been migrating data (mostly all image files of course) for the last week or so. I suspect that's the cause of any slowness. I've experienced it too, at odd times of day, so it's not the normal traffic.

It may even be the data migration which is causing the delay in the changeover.

I'm certainly very confused and frustrated because we've been told that all our layouts, banners, buttons, links etc. will be transfered over with no changs, but now we're being asked to test out the new customization tools for adding all that stuff which as I said above should just be transfered over, and yet it's all buggy with spacing issues and as I stated in my previous post their tool for adding links makes it look to me like when then change over takes place I'm just going to get a list of text links to voting sites rather than what the links are supposed to let people do which is actually vote for my comic.

I have had a look at the site customise thing…. To be honest I would rather stick with putting it together in sharepoint, then copypasting the code to the HTML editor on DD.

darth_paul
I'm certainly very confused and frustrated because we've been told that all our layouts, banners, buttons, links etc. will be transfered over with no changs, but now we're being asked to test out the new customization tools for adding all that stuff which as I said above should just be transfered over

I asked the same thing. Supposedly it is happening in parallel- people with custom html should have it transferred over. The layout tools can still be there to be used by other people.

That was as of Monday though. I'm not certain that the plan won't change if the changeover continues to get delayed and they think they are adding ‘enough’ functionality.

I added a test comic to the preview site
http://preview.drunkduck.com/The_Village_Guard/

but I can't see how to get to my stats page. Where is that link now?


EDIT: Something I just learned to support some earlier things I said. The site converted my jpg images to png… and, for example, this page

http://media.drunkduck.com.s3.amazonaws.com/temp%2FTim+Wellman%2Fcomics%2FThe_Village_Guard%2Fweb%2Fthevillageguard-cover.png

was a 247kb jpg… it turned into a 614kb png (that's huge for a 600 pixel wide image)… and, examining the png image with hex editor, a VBS script has indeed been embedded into the image. I can't tell what the script is because it's encrypted.

I don't think there is a link. If there was a to-do list I'm sure it would be on there, but….

Tim, I can't find anything on the web that says you can hide script inside a png file. The website you linked earlier describes how to hide malware inside a pdf-png, not a png by itself.

Embedding code inside png images is a hacker's trick and there's not too much openly written about it. But, major web ad spammers know all about it.

Try here
http://www.iamcal.com/png-store/
http://www.academictutorials.com/applescript/applescript-imageinformation.asp
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090416150703AABjZLW
I'm not sure if this was linked earlier
http://www.data0.net/?p=267

png images are so ‘fluffy’ (so many spaces with no code at all) that they can be easily manipulated. This is a new field and one hackers are using to spread virii right now (check Norton's and other antivirus websites for the info). You embed a code in a png, then call the code from a separate script.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1993780/virus-warning-hits-windows-media-player

You can also find several hacker websites with infected png images

I just had a look at the page layout controls.

I'm a hollow man.


I am saddened. NO! I weep. I weep for they are pathetic. I mean seriously pathetic. They don't even cover visited and active links, nor do they allow us to move things around. The part I'm most miffed about is the fact I can't try a really slick idea I had a little while ago.

That said, is there even a remote possibility that they'll allow full HTML editing in the very near future?

Salsa
I just had a look at the page layout controls.

I'm a hollow man.


I am saddened. NO! I weep. I weep for they are pathetic. I mean seriously pathetic. They don't even cover visited and active links, nor do they allow us to move things around. The part I'm most miffed about is the fact I can't try a really slick idea I had a little while ago.

That said, is there even a remote possibility that they'll allow full HTML editing in the very near future?

They've said to us that they want to have a more robust system, just that it takes time. So this is (hopefully) just the first stage of basic stuff.

As for allowing full HTML editing- everything they've told is is an adamant no. :I

Can you supply us with an email address so we the users can petition them outselves. That way they can get a feel of how much HTML editing is needed by their content providers.

Anubis
Can you supply us with an email address so we the users can petition them outselves. That way they can get a feel of how much HTML editing is needed by their content providers.

you could join the discussion we (DD users) are having with them directly here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/drunkduck/topics/no_raw_html_editng.

If you do, don't forget to click the button to increase the number of people asking for it.


There's a topic discussing the current “layout tools” they put in the latest preview too:
http://getsatisfaction.com/drunkduck/topics/comic_page_layout_links_tools_on_the_duck_preview_site

the HTML thing realy bothers me .
if there is no HTML editing i will prolly be making DD my mirror and not my main
i lik it the way it is now, i like playing with the page layout myself , templates and stuff like that feels like those plastic scissors you have to use in preschool, BORING !

2004 was more fun

lothar
templates and stuff like that feels like those plastic scissors you have to use in preschool, BORING !

Yup. Very true.
The idea is to code in much more advanced tools that's much more WYSIWYG, so it won't always be as basic as that.

Even so, I love having that sort of easy template editing functionality for basic users, but all of us more savy types should be catered for as well (with full html access). There's no reason for us ALL to have to sit at the kiddy table.

All I can do is repeat that the tools will get a lot better.




…Now I just wish the change over would go ahead so we can get all the grumping over with. My prediction is for Monday or Tuesday.

Anubis
Can you supply us with an email address so we the users can petition them outselves. That way they can get a feel of how much HTML editing is needed by their content providers.

It is a good idea because they kinda need to understand that banning HTML editing is kinda a deal breaker for allot of users. While the name change is annoying enough, this is gonna be the thing that will drive allot of users away.

As for the customizable tools they promised to replace html editing, they have to understand that in order to make something that offers even half the freedom that HTML editing offers, they're going to have to construct one hell of a site editor (maybe not as intensive as Joomla, but close). That's going to take allot of time and effort on their behalf. Are they really up for that?