This new site looks like such a garbage pile . i keep coming back to see what is changed , and of course ; NOTHING HAS CHANGED !!!
MAKES me so ANGRY !
drunk duck has provided me with countless hours of intertainment for free , and as a loyal fan i think it owes me !!! get back here you fucking duck and hatch from that egg and go get drunk ! because the world tottaly sucks when everybody turns into mindless clones and conformos and starts chasing the dollars !!! i know that the bills need to get paid to make the servers go and shit , but corporate owned ad-barf dystopia they have created is crashing into the sewer of the internet and all the ducks drowned in the toxic water ! why dont they just change it back the way it was before they fucked it up . its like they are all retarded or something ! or maybe nobody is there ? ghost ship , crashing into the sun . what this site needs is fewer features , less scripts and pop ups and pointless add ons . it needs to function as a comic site , Not Fucking facebook or myspace ! it looks terrible . it's worse than what they did to the smurfs !!!
WOWIO - YOU SUCK !

The site still has some bugs, and we're probably stuck with them for a while, but overall I'd say it functions about as well as the old site did. This place was never perfect. What does bother me is how the forums seem to have pretty much died, which is a real shame.

I'm actually very angry that everything hasn't been fixed and I've been gone a month and that no one's really here anymore. :(

Guys, there is nothing on the internet worth getting mad about. :]

Child porn doesn't piss you off?

Don't get too mad. It won't help change anything.

I'm trying to make a genuine effort to post on the forums. I wish there was a ‘new post’ button, that'd let me see just what was new, or be told/reminded when a someone has posted in response to me. At the moment, I have to keep manually checking, which takes a lot of time and makes me lose interest. Does the forum have any of that functionality?

Well said, that can be applied to comments on comic pages too.

No, for the most part we're at basline functionality right now. They do have big plans, but those got delayed (and surely will take a bit of time to do, once they can start again). We do really appreciate those people who are making the extra effort to post in the forums, maintain a DD mirror, etc. though. We know how frustrating it is when a service changes and isn't what it used to be. We're hoping things will change for the better soon. I'm just saying, hang in there guys. :]

Just want to say hi to the guys I see over at CF when I feel like posting because posting is much easier there than here – mostly, I think, because it's easy to see which threads are active.

Yeah, drunkduck has been in a stupor since it closed down 1 July for the new site move.

If I heard right, DD was still on a Platinum server and Platinum made it clear that it wouldn't tolerate any squatting. skoolmunkee will correct me if I'm wrong.

From what I can tell, the move simply was not planned well, beginning with a proper study of what was good and bad with the former site. Word came down from high without nearly enough prep time.

I hope that the analysis that should have happened first is happening now. For me, I rather see it as a hibernation state. Hope it won't be too long before we can all wake up.

so …. let me get this staight , wowio does not have even one person on staff who can work on the code ? how is that possible .
i like the community here,
i'm just not getting the feeling that they care about us.

this is why i think i will remain at Comicfury ,
if you ever saw Dune , wowio is like the Harkonens and Kyo is the Atreides . thats the best analogy i can come up with .

lothar wrote: so …. let me get this staight , wowio does not have even one person on staff who can work on the code ? how is that possible . i like the community here, i'm just not getting the feeling that they care about us.

this is why i think i will remain at Comicfury ,if you ever saw Dune , wowio is like the Harkonens and Kyo is the Atreides . thats the best analogy i can come up with .

Lol - so who is the Emperor Shaddam IV?

ayesinback wrote:
If I heard right, DD was still on a Platinum server and Platinum made it clear that it wouldn't tolerate any squatting. skoolmunkee will correct me if I'm wrong.

That was about a third of it, it's also most of the reason why Wowio wasn't able to make the old DD available after the changeover for a short time like they had wanted to do.

The other thirds were the cost of the old site to run (huge), and the pressure to get something new running which would look good to investors, because Wowio needed investment to continue developing DD.

lothar wrote:
so …. let me get this staight , wowio does not have even one person on staff who can work on the code ? how is that possible.

I'm afraid I'm not comfortable talking about most of what little I know about Wowio's company problems, but when the US banks got re-rated it ended badly for Wowio and that's when the initial ‘hibernation’ announcements got made. Wowio does have one person on staff who could, Lawrence, but he's in charge of all the Wowio stuff now. What little time Lawrence has had for DD, oz and I have had to ‘take’ with some backend and admin problems, like the wave of spam signups oz is currently fighting. They lost some people (Kinh, Dan, and others) because of the funding issues, who I imagine they hope to get back when the company is on its feet again.

So it does feel fairly similar to the Platinum situation, however DD is a hell of a lot more important to Wowio than it was to Platinum (when you consider the two companys' holdings and focus) so I believe them when they say they'll recommit when they can.

I noticed Brian Altounian, the company's CEO (or whatever title) made a very postive and somewhat cryptic tweet last week “Mark this week down - big week for several reasons! It's finally going down! Thanks for hanging in there, folks.” so I'm a little more hopeful than I was a few weeks ago.

I won't deny, I miss the old one for obvious reasons… I'm trying to maintain a tolerant sense of perspective here.

You mean that Wowio had great plans for this and then had to put them on hold because of bad financial planning?

Good grief the Real World has impacted upon a comic hosting site.They had to let some people gobecause of money problems. Let's string'em up because a corporation with Real World responsiblities can't devote all their time to DD.

These things happen and we have to face the fact that the world does not revolve around DD and we are not the priority we like to think we are.

Now hiring more guards so I don't have to work the 12 hours shifts and everything doesn't go into absolute CHAOS if someone calls out is a priority!

Now everyone go read the comics that are still updating and entertainthe creator who are still herewith your wit and wisdom, o' comic reading public.

Bravo sir!

lothar wrote:
this is why i think i will remain at Comicfury ,
if you ever saw Dune , wowio is like the Harkonens and Kyo is the Atreides . thats the best analogy i can come up with .
-Probably, maybe, sooooooon things will start up again…

Terrible analogy because you don't have any Arrakis in it. Where's the pannet? Logically DD would be Dune (Arrakis), and if Wowio are the Harkonen then Kyo couldn't be the Artradies because he has nothing at all to do with DD. If anything he'd be the Ordos or something like that- the trader clan that're off-world.

The Artreides would be the Admins and mods here in DD, and the DD users would be the Freemen, and the webcomics would be the Spice! ^_^

ozoneocean wrote:
…

The Artreides would be the Admins and mods here in DD, and the DD users would be the Freemen, and the webcomics would be the Spice! ^_^

Let the Spice flow!

WHo're the sand worms?

The spammers?

ozoneocean wrote:
and the webcomics would be the Spice! ^_^

Webcomics didturn my eyes blue.
My eyes may or may not have been blue before, but you can't prove that!!

In some aspects, the site is worse off after the changeover.

There are some neat features that were incorporated, like how the PQ system was essentially turned into a private mini-forum, where you can follow the chat history with the person that you're communicating with and the site is faster than it was before but the price tag is so, so high.

I don't like that they changed the name, essentially without consulting the fan base at all and told us to deal, I don't like the color scheme, at all, and I certainly don't like all the missing functions that used to be part of this site and all the bugs that came with the changeover. Yeah, they created a pretty neat looking comic page editor but at the expense of severely limiting what we can do to edit our comic pages. "Oh, look at this. I can change the background color, although I'm now unable to post chapters, like I used to, maintain a comic home page, like I used to, participate in a link exchange program, like I used to and so on.

Most of all, I don't like the mess they made out of the forum. It was one of few working functional features of drunk duck and I honestly don't understand why they had to mess with that. Why couldn't they simply have kept the BBcodes instead of creating this ugly, unwieldy wysiwyg editor that doesn't even work? You can clearly tell that people aren't using this forum anymore because of it and the forum was one of the greatest things that DD had.
Edit: And editing sucks, so, so, so, much!

I'm not seeing any ads. No offense, folks, but that's really not that hard to take care of.
I dunno, I'm fine with the new site it looks better, and most of what's here at the moment runs more smoothly than it did before. For my personal use, I just wish moving pages around had been changed because it's something I actually need, and it still takes forever.
However… I think the current total absence of pageview stats is a big problem for the site as a whole. Potential new creators may or may not be going elsewhere with their stuff (I'm just here because I've always been here, really), and for readers, it's more than a little awkward that it's not possible to sort by popularity. How is the current top 10 even determined if it's not possible to do this in individual categories? Is it just the top 10 from when the changeover happened? I dunno, this really feels kind of broken.
I also get the feeling that the community has slowed down, but maybe that's just because I'm not here as often as I used to be.

I have to admit, I'm also a bit frustrated by the current state of this site. It certainly isn't terrible, and I never understood why some people were so quick to flee, but for the most part, the old site just worked better. I know it's unfair to compare the current site to the old one, since the current one isn't what it was supposed to be all along. But now we've been stuck with it for quite a while, with no word on when it's gonna improve.

My major gripes are: The editor (the one I'm writing this text in right now, which is the same for page comments and forum posts), the complete lack of pageview statistics, our inability to post ads (not that important for me, but I read that really hurt some people financially, and I felt that made the problem quite pressing), and the forums. However, I think the forum problem is more of a community problem, and not so much one of functionality. For some reason, people just refrain from posting, even though the main the forum's one true function - being able to communicate and discuss - isn't impeded by the current state at all, I'd say.

I have a pretty high frustration tolerance, but a few days ago, I couldn't even properly comment on my own comic page. It just butchered my comment for no apparent reason, and I eventually just had to give up. Things like that aren't pretty.

However, for me, dd has always been about the community. I feel appreciated here, whereas on ComicFury, I'm basically just another person posting comics in anonymity - much as it was on smackjeeves, before I joined dd. I'm not one to advertise my own stuff a lot, and the only thing I can really do is try and make good comics, and hope people will appreciate them.

The dd community is the best I've ever found on the net. It's just that right now, it isn't accommodated all too well.

I'm also on the whole “Like the community” boat. That's why it's so important to maintain a fluid and functional forum. When people find themselves in situations like yours, Abt_Nihil, where posting something becomes so much of a bother that they end up on just giving up, the community suffers.

When someone updating a good comic decides to pack up and leave, because the comic editor doesn't offer them the same artistic freedom that they used to have or that their revenue has been cut, the community suffers.

If the community dies, the duck dies. That's the last thing I want to see happen. So I for one would like to see this site fixed as soon as it's possible.

ah. the community. It's why I'm here.

and I've had some very disparaging things to say about the new site
(btw: has anyone seen:http://www.platinumstudios.com/film-and-digital/digital-publishing-drunk-duck/?),
and I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't need a lot of work, but I, for one, am only repeating myself at this point.

Meanwhile, I heard this song, and I propose it for the DD community anthem.

ayesinback wrote:
Meanwhile, I heard this song, and I propose it for the DD community anthem.

Ah, what an awesome video!

However, for me, dd has always been about the community. I feel
appreciated here, whereas on ComicFury, I'm basically just another
person posting comics in anonymity - much as it was on smackjeeves,
before I joined dd. I'm not one to advertise my own stuff a lot, and the
only thing I can really do is try and make good comics, and hope people
will appreciate them.

One thing you have to remember is that when we started on DD it was the same. It took months to years before we felt “welcomed” by the community. And in my case since DD was the 1st place I posted my comic even 1 commenter made me think this place was awesome.

I know ppl on CF that feel the same way. They tried DD and it was like posting in a sea of anonimity. But they think CF has the best community ever. It's just which ever community you get to first and which one notices you 1st. I made a lot of friends on DD but I'm doing that on CF too.

There is a specific flavour and tone to each community though that is unique.

DD was always more “adult”, in a grown up and mature sense (not sexual), and a little left leaning, when compared to other sites, we also have a very low tolerance for rude behaviour in general, but with conversation that is more “real” and “human”.

On some other sites the focus is entirely on industry stuff, with people “selling” their own work and finding out how to “sell” from others, with the personal stuff squished down to a minimum.

On still others, like Smack Jeeves for example the average user-base was a lot younger, maybe in the late teens as opposed to the 20s and 30's range like DD, so the tone of things varied accordingly.

Keenpace/comic-genesis was gigantic compared to DD. The age range there was reasonably mature, but the userbase was just so colossal that you really were just a drop in the ocean on that site.

Then there's moderation styles to consider; on some sites being a dick is tolerated more and that changes the tone of things overall, on some the mods are too severe so people feel way too restricted, and so on, so every place IS quite different and it's not just a case of waiting until you get used to it, but what you actually prefer.

That is true. But for the most part CF feels like the old DD to me in it's forums. It's the comic related things that make it different. It seems a lot harder to get comments on your comic there. But I think that's because they have a lot less people that go there. Also they don't have a feature system. For the lucky people that get featured here I bet it makes them feel like the site appreciates them a lot more.
When I came into CF it was a lot different. But after it banned the people causing that infectious attitude and the swarm of DDers came in, the forums changed a lot. I just wish I could think of a way to do that with the readers :P
Then again, me and Abt both did/do SEVERAL community projects here. So that also helps get you a nice following inside a community,

You know what the real difference between CF and DD is? aside fromt he big company vs small independent thing that is.
Here you have admins actively pushing the community and helping promote comics, on CF it is much more user run.
DD is windows and CF is Linux.