Yeah! This place used to be wild.

As a matter of fact, I was even willing to meet them halfway: I offered to stay off of the forum entirely of my own accord if they would at least allow me to continue to host my comic with them, but that discussion went nowhere.

But yeah, I was just thinking about the entire situation again the other night, and if I could get myself into this much trouble on their forum just by sharing a couple of memes (one of which was extremely common on social media for a while) and making a couple of immature jokes, I probably would've gotten into even deeper trouble if I shared some YouTube Poops with much of the same kind of humor.

That kind of thinking… It's a weird sort of McCarthyist, Stalinist thought policing- everything a person does is suspect based on one thing they did, or rather based on one person's interpretation of that thing.
It's pretty evil.

Well apparently, my posts bothered more than enough people into reporting me to the forum mods, which is what made the admin decide to ban me, and according to him when we were discussing the issue privately, my ban is less about anything personal against me, and more that they're erring on the side of caution because they've had actual unsavory characters infiltrate their site before, and they don't want to take any chances, even inspite of speaking in my defense and explaining myself. I suppose in a sense, my forum conduct was akin to yelling “FIRE!!” in a crowded building and thinking it's funny, when it's not.

Having it explained to me like that, yeah, I suppose I could see how I unwittingly and unintentionally set off some red flags, I'll agree, and I do admit that I may have overstepped some boundaries and crossed some lines, but again, even explaining the fact that I was sharing a common meme, and that I wasn't even being serious with my crass and immature sense of humor, I'm still banned, even though I really wish I wasn't.

Pardon me,

I do wish to add that my experience on CF for about a year and half went downhill because some people became relentless with their own toxic behaviors which made depression much worse.

I was never banned, but I just left because I did not want to deal with toxic people on CF anymore. However, I do know someone who was banned for CF over something dumb.

This all makes me want to avoid the forums over there.

We used to have a lot of toxicity here- not just people who we have personality clashes with or who's outlook is different, but socially toxic types who liked to bully and harass others and cause trouble in the community.
I think we imagine we avoid that now because were reasonable and sensible here, but the reality is that we've just been lucky because it's not too busy here and that's boring for those people XD

Now, if you really want to play with crazy memes, we have a place for it:
https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/13167/

:)

I've been hearing more about stuff like this through the grapevine just since I've had to migrate over here, which has me trying to look at both sides of the coin on this issue.

On the one hand, I still feel my ban, while justifiable, was quite hasty and harsh (and nice to see some people see my side in this matter), and as I said, what really hurts me the most is that my whole comic was deleted, because despite having only been in reruns for a few weeks, it got much more attention and traffic on ComicFury than it ever did during its original run on Smack Jeeves in 2011 and 2012, where it was practically unnoticed; on CF, I had close to a dozen subscribers, regularly received solid 5-star ratings, and people were actually commenting, and as a struggling Content Creator who rarely receives any kind of feedback on any of my work, it was really refreshing to see people actually enjoy my comic's reruns, and had me so excited about how well the upcoming second season (which visually will definitely be an improvement compared to the rushed first season) would do on their site . . . plus, again, I do miss how CF had so much more features and functions in building and maintaining our comics' websites, compared to the limitations of The Duck (again, I really mean no offense, but it feels like what CeeLo Green once sang about, going from X-Box to Atari).

On the other hand, I have been hearing more about the admin's habit of swinging the banhammer willy-nilly for even such minor and inconsequential infractions, and considering how finicky the forum community also seems to be regarding certain people they single out for one reason or another, maybe in the big picture, it might have been in my better interest to be here instead of CF, I don't know . . . it's still hard for me to accept that possibility because I'm still so focused on what I've lost in my ban from there (again, mostly the overall maintenance of my comic). I will admit some people get along with me better than others, so who knows, there may have been situations or scenarios arise over there where I and certain other members may have eventually butted heads, which may have led to a ban for other reasons entirely.

Really, the only personal issue I had with the forum as a whole was the occasions of Mood Whiplash over there. During my brief time there, we had a number of threads about things we hate, whether it was tropes, character stereotypes, cliched storylines, etc. . . . After a while, some felt this was bringing too much negativity into the community, so to counteract these threads, we also ended up with threads about these same topics, but about ones that we loved instead. Otherwise, I didn't really have too many issues with any of the people over there (though I do with one particular person now that they apparently felt the need to completely block me from their comic, even as a guest, which I don't even know how that's possible, because I never did a damn thing to them, and in fact, was very much a fan of their comic), and there were plenty of great comics I had subscribed to - at least they had a nice variety of really creative and unique comics, as opposed to Smack Jeeve's endless sea of Westernized Manga, stolen sprites, and LGBTQ+ comics.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
plus, again, I do miss how CF had so much more features and functions in building and maintaining our comics' websites, compared to the limitations of The Duck

Could you tell me more about these please?
What features would you like to see here?

As a matter of fact, I just recently offered up my suggestions:

https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/176834/?page=2#3009497

My Personal experience is as follows:

Hawk and Flo Adventures Flopped on Webtoons completely and utterly. It's a series that regardless of being for the most part family friendly is too off brand for the site because it's not a romance story or a generic anime.

On the Duck Hawk and Flo do a lot better it's in the top 10 section frequently it got featured just last month hit 5 milestones in a week and in general launched to positive reception. It was featured music a week before It became a featured story.

Webtoons is the very worst of Nintendo and the very worst of Sega rolled into an unholy package. They're elitist like Nintendo was in the NES/Snes days and incompetent like Sega was in the Saturn/Dreamcast eras.

The rating system is completely broken, everyone hates it. You can rate yourself 10/10 which means every time a new series is made it's practically automatically rated 10/10 that and it's very prone to trolls coming in and review bombing you for no reason other than ‘oh you’re doing well now'. Fun Fact before I was featured on the Duck Ice Cream Truck had a 9.4 average after I went down to 9. I also have a friend who got review bombed all the way to the 5s because he got featured on the site.

Webtoon originals suck so hard, they're generic bland, derivative, soulless, at least when Nintendo was Elitist they made classic games and were genuinely trying to improve the quality of Console Gaming because Atari oversaturated it with garbage. Webtoons is even worse They push the wrong stuff all the time like Master of Villains a Korean series that was badly received that they decided to put money into translating it. It is one of the worst webcomics ever made, It's the equivalent of a triple A video game company remaking Big Rigs over the Road Racing and making it worse.

In order to get anywhere on Webtoons you have to self-promote, which is why I've thrown in the towel with webtoons and i'm going to focus more on other sites I mirror my comics on. There's no recent updates section on Webtoons either so many other sites have this and through genuine hard work and passion you can get yourself noticed through it. On Webtoons if some elitist Oligarch doesn't notice you you're basically screwed.

They can't market to save their lives either ‘the show before it streams’ hacked off everybody who were genuinely passionate about making comics. Every day every week they find someway of screwing up they're like the Usain Bolt of Fucking up.

Yeah, I've learned the hard way in the past that self-promotion does nothing but piss people off and make enemies for yourself, so I never do it. I mean going back to YouTube for example, you'll notice one thing that the big partner channels always do is beg for more subscribers at the end of all of their videos: “PLEEEZ! I needz MOAR subs! PLEEEZ subscribe! Help me reach 100,000!” But, if little guys like me even so much as ask anybody take a look at our content if they're interested, then we get attacked and accused of desperately crying for attention, then people go out of their way to dislike bomb our content as a result.

As I said, VAMPIRE GIRL went virtually unnoticed when it was on Smack Jeeves in 2011 and 2012, mainly because it didn't fit in with their zeitgeist, which was an endless sea of Westernized Manga, stolen sprites, and LGBTQ+ comics . . . I even remember trying a little gimmick to get more attention one week by having a particularly suggestive lyric from Jonathan Richman's song in the site banner on their homepage: “Is she in Heaven? Is she in Hell? Is she a sex industry professional?” Didn't work. Like I said, I was very much surprised by how much attention the comic had gotten on ComicFury, even for a few weeks of reruns - that was quite a morale booster for a struggling Content Creator whose work largely goes unnoticed.

Okay, see, this particular panel from BRITTANY HYPERSTYLE had me audibly laughing out loud because of those comments coming from the crowd (especially “Pee pee hard!” like seriously, I was guffawing over that)!



See, this is how crude, crass, childish, and immature my sense of humor can get at times . . . and indulging in this kind of humor on ComicFury's forum is how I got banned.

That had me laughing too :D

THAT sort of thing got you banned? wow…

Honestly, the more I get used to this place, and the more I hear stories and testimonies from others who are no longer with ComicFury, the more it feels like I essentially just got kicked out of a high school clique.

Yup, that's what online communities eventually turn into usually.
We try to keep it open here.

Yeah, you're not wrong about that. When it comes to the internet, I'm old school: forums, message boards, and the like were how I connected with people - the only social media platform we had when I was younger was MySpace (man, do I miss MySpace), and the closest thing we had to Discord was a thing known as Instant Messaging, but even so, I've been on my share of such forums where yeah, things do end up becoming quite “high school” at times, and it really wasn't uncommon for certain groups of members to form their own little cliques and sometimes single out certain other members for one reason or another; in some cases, I was also the victim of this, but in others, I was in a position of authority (either as a mod or an admin) and had the power to put a stop to it.

After some time has passed, I feel I've grown rather content with being here on DD instead. Granted, I still miss all the various features that ComicFury had to offer for authors and creators when it came to building and maintaining their comics sites, but I really am feeling more and more that the community here, while incredibly smaller and less active, really is more open and accepting, as opposed to how somewhat cliquish and conditional CF's community was . . . at the very least, I suppose I feel more as though that I actually fit in over here than I did at CF, despite my attempts to mingle with and get comfortable with their community.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
After some time has passed, I feel I've grown rather content with being here on DD instead. Granted, I still miss all the various features that ComicFury had to offer for authors and creators when it came to building and maintaining their comics sites, but I really am feeling more and more that the community here, while incredibly smaller and less active, really is more open and accepting, as opposed to how somewhat cliquish and conditional CF's community was . . . at the very least, I suppose I feel more as though that I actually fit in over here than I did at CF, despite my attempts to mingle with and get comfortable with their community.

Ha it's weird… They grew out of us originally.
Their founder was a super problemchild here who got himself banned for life. We've since buried the hatchet and had a few good chats over the years (long time ago now). He's grown up a lot from the kid he was.

But a lot of that site was based on the old DD (not the code, Pretty sure all that is original), so a lot of the website building features are just things we used to have I think.

When DD went down seemingly for good years and years ago a lot of people left and just stayed over there. It was really disappointing…
We cant expect loyalty though, we're not a cult, haha! People should always go to he place that's best for their comic.

The real blame lies with a person who used to work at Wowio… He supremely F***ed up. Just incompetence on a huge scale. It lost us our community. The work it took to resurrect this much was immense.

I'm glad you like it here man. I like to think of DD as the mature adult webcomic site.

Ooh, the plot thickens!

To be fair, yeah, as I've said, he and I had discussed my ban privately, and I will commend him for being polite and professional about the entire situation, which is why I do partly have very little ill feelings about my ban . . . but at the same time, hearing through the grapevine since then about his tendancies to swing the banhammer willy-nilly makes it seem like a bullet I probably would've gotten for one reason or another eventually anyway.

I had no idea about the problems DD has been through - it almost sounds a lot like what ended up happening to Smack Jeeves, just . . . not as bad. I mean what happened to Smack Jeeves was just awful, so awful that the entire site as a whole just ended up completely dying altogether, and appears to have been replaced with a new host that seems like just another Tapas or Webtoons . . . at least The Duck still has its distinct identity, albeit with a name change (again, I do remember when it used to be Drunk Duck). Even in spite of the limitations it has now, I'm at least still greatful there's still so ability to customize the appearance of our comics - I don't think I would be 100% happy on a host where every comic has a uniformed and streamlined look to it.

The renaming isn't so much a rebranding as the Duck realized he had a problem and went into treatment. He's several years sober and never been happier. 😉

Ozoneocean wrote:

I'm glad you like it here man. I like to think of DD as the mature adult webcomic site.

I think this means we accept adult comics and the site has been around for a long time, not that the adults here can be expected to display any kind of maturity.

Ironscarf wrote:

Ozoneocean wrote:

I'm glad you like it here man. I like to think of DD as the mature adult webcomic site.

I think this means we accept adult comics and the site has been around for a long time, not that the adults here can be expected to display any kind of maturity.

I have to project maturity and professionalism in my RL job if I want a steady paycheck and a positive work review.
What I do here requires none of that. Slap a mature rating on the comic and be as childish and infantile as I want. :P

I got banned at Comicfury over my comic, which contains a lot of very adult stuff, more than placing peg A into slot B.

Actually it goes a little deeper about that, I was talking about embracing my inner Koichi Ohata and go full on producing ranchy, terrible sex filled, gut spilling comics. I had a few people talking about how it sounds like a fun idea, or while it wasn't their thing they were okay with it being on there until somebody got offended and threw a hissy, said I was a very evil person and actually chased me across several sites like this one and deviantart, in turn everyone just turned on me on a dime and I got banned.

It was actually scary, I thought was going to get doxed.

Furwerk studio wrote:
I got banned at Comicfury over my comic, which contains a lot of very adult stuff, more than placing peg A into slot B.

You mean a furry Death Porn? Drunk Duck already had that. Other adult comics on here that go that far too. That's why there's a “most deliciously offensive” award in the DD awards.

bravo1102 wrote:

Furwerk studio wrote:
I got banned at Comicfury over my comic, which contains a lot of very adult stuff, more than placing peg A into slot B.

You mean a furry Death Porn? Drunk Duck already had that. Other adult comics on here that go that far too. That's why there's a “most deliciously offensive” award in the DD awards.

I have no idea what that term means, but basically my comic has incest, transgender transformation, homosexuality, heterosexuality, and does touch on some dark subjects like slavery and abuse in the character's background but never shown on screen.

In truth I kind of felt tame compared to a lot of OVAs from the 80's that inspire my stuff.

I did put up huge warnings on the page, in the post and such.

Death Porn was a hugely popular comic here on the Duck that had explicit sex, parody and extreme violence. It was beloved of readers and its creator was a big advocate of free expression. So this site is about that. The site already has been about adult comics with mature themes. Hense, there is an award for most deliciously offensive in the awards! This site likes offensive.

You're not alone in wanting to do heavy stuff. I'm mainly a satirist but I have done a few heavy things and really disturbing images over the years. In fact I had a few readers drop off a comic I did before my CF ban because the violence was so extreme. Also got censured by the CF staff for the stance of some of characters about free expression just before I was permanently banned. I doubt any of the exploitation movies in Belle's Best would go over on CF. My stuff is more Go Nagai with some hentai thrown in and I have reined myself in recently. I discovered my pushing the envelope was merely doing what so many had done before. Lol.

Oh and those disturbing OVAs from the 1980s? I was among the first in the USA to see them back in the 1980s back when it was VHS tape exchange from Japan with no translations but synopses.

Well, like I said, mine is an Everyone comic, and even like Ozoneocean pointed out, I at least tried to appeal to CF's admin about that and offered to stay off of the forum entirely of my own volition if I could at least continue to host my comic with them, as it broke no rules or guidelines (and even if it did contain anything such as language, violence, gore, or sex, I would have rated it accordingly), but apparently he wouldn't go for that. But even so, I didn't think such comics would be so problematic . . . I mean one author on CF has a “comic” that's literally nothing but sketch book pages with various depictions of sexual relations, including visible penetrations and such - it has hundreds of pages of such, and nobody seemed to have such a problem with it.

But, to reiterate, it was my immaturity on their forum that did me in, but after learning more about the admin's past, this really does put the entire situation into a whole new perspective for me.

I wasn't immature but dreadfully uninformed and even hurtful with some of my posts about LBGT issues. This was so long ago Q+ hadn't been added yet. In fact I go back in LGBT rights to when it was just LGB and the T hadn't been added yet. But I still managed to be very insensitive even unknowingly repeating some homophobic and transphobic propaganda. Did a lot of soul searching and research to understand what I had done.
I still stand for free expression and taking on hate speech with direct confrontation and education as opposed to censorship. Over the years even put my money where my mouth is and spoke out directly. But these days with the stupid turned up so high we have real life flat earthers again. I pick and choose my battles. Even deleted my Twitter rather than get into another fight over Nazi symbolism. Just no more. I do have a comic on the Holocaust I'm planning. I'll shock people there with the stuff that people don't know about what happened.

bravo1102 wrote:
The renaming isn't so much a rebranding as the Duck realized he had a problem and went into treatment. He's several years sober and never been happier. 😉

Unfortunately, it was that problem that turned off a friend of mine who was looking for another site to host his comic on after he became fed up with how buggy and glitchy KeenSpace/ComicGenesis had become. That, and Jeeves's violent tendancies didn't exactly instill any confidence in him either.