ozoneocean wrote:
Check your PQs

And now we play the waiting game.

Just want to say that I think there's some very positive potential here. Hope you hear something while you still have some flexibility in your schedule to actually do anything.

Good Luck!

God bless DD, everyone!

that avatar is too cute Eyes .
anyway , i just stopped by to check on the duck.
well , i still have my memories of what a good webcomic site this was …

The very best part of DD has always been the people Lothar, not the site tools.

ozoneocean wrote:
The very best part of DD has always been the people Lothar, not the site tools.

But just think how great it would be with the people AND improved functionality :

Anyways, still haven't heard from Lawrence; it's the holidays, after all. I also wasn't selling myself for more than I'm worth, so I don't know if they'll be interested to begin with. I am, after all, still studdying this stuff.

ozoneocean wrote:
The very best part of DD has always been the people Lothar, not the site tools.

Well, that's too bad a lot of your old user base has moved on…. :p
Anyway, Lothar's arguement would have been valid 2 years ago. At least wowio has invested SOMETHING in this place. That's more than I can say for previous years.

I think it's natural to feel a certain attachment to The Old Days no matter what, because we all have a certain amount of investment in them we'd like not to see go down the drain. With time, however, those who stick around will end up just as invested in the new site. I really missed not having HTML coding capabilities on my page, but right now I'm working on a redesign and bonus pages for my comic, and I have to say I'd be pretty upset if they switched things on us again after I did all that!

Is there any news/movement on the future of the Duck? Or is it still adrift?

It seems, at this time, we are in a holding patten. The Duck still flys…but just circling around to land. Living in hope that we land soon.

MrHades wrote:
Is there any news/movement on the future of the Duck? Or is it still adrift?

Anubis wrote:
It seems, at this time, we are in a holding patten. The Duck still flys…but just circling around to land. Living in hope that we land soon.

Yup, that's it. :)
RE- the development of DD… It's like most sites these days in a lot of ways, in that they were nicely functional, started by enthusiasts, then later coproates bought them up, had them redesigned them using paid programmers who were outsiders and had no first hand experience of the sites they were re-making and the end product turned out not as the users really like it?

I just registered but I read a few comics here back when the site started up around 10 years ago. Once upon a time, I too was going to make a webcomic, and for whatever reason I decided on KeenSpace over DrunkDuck. It was right around the time they rebranded as CG if I recall. Wow, bad time to start….or was it? I haven't decided what's worse, having an established webcomic wrecked by technical problems or not being able to start one due to them.
Technically, I was able to start one, but even 6-7 years ago it was like trying to cross one of those old rope bridges in adventure stories. You had to know exactly what planks were safe and one wrong step would find you falling into the chasm below. They had a thread about two years ago about the place being a ghost town, so I logged in and, sure enough, the site must've been on auto-pilot the entire time I was away. It has gotten so bad that, when I couldn't remember my password and the password resetting page was broken with a missing PHP include, another user sniped back that it was my own fault for forgetting my password!
Anyway, I check in on both sites every now and then to read the forums and check out new comics and, alright, watch them slowly drift. Both sites have pretty much the same problem, a pronounced feeling of abandonment (you've got one over CG for having a working news page though). Heck, there was a period of about a year or so after this place got rebranded to “The Duck” that I couldn't even get into the forums because the layout was so garbled and even then I wonder if jumping to a new version of Safari is what made the difference.
Over at CG, the people with access to make any coding changes are long gone and the moderators that are still around can barely police the forums. From what I've read, that description wouldn't be too far off the mark here either. What I don't get is why. The coding for webcomic management, especially if you cheat and use a pre-packaged forum, is elementary (I'm a programmer). The hardest part of a community-based site is the community. I could copy this site, plus most of the missing features, inside of 6 weeks and never get a single hit because I don't know how to market anything.
The problem with saying that a site is its people and not its tools (a statement I completely agree with by the way) is that it makes it easier to neglect the tools and frustration with them eventually starts turning those people away…

rip in peace drunk duck

Wow… Just finished reading this thread. I am new here, and picked this place to set up my comic page after a positive review in “How to Make Web Comics”, but that was a few years out of date. DD looked very slick at first but various missing elements have increasingly become an issue, and the quietness of the forum seems odd and noticeable. I looked at ComicFury initially but liked the overall look of DD better - Now I may have to set up a page at CF as well, just to compare the two.
Out of curiosity, can anyone suggest other web comic communities that might be geared towards a somewhat older audience?

None that I can really recommend, hopefully DD will get ack on its feet in a little time. CF seems to have a younger user base than DD, it's the old fogeys who are hanging in here. mirror here and there and see what happens.

Thanks! Yeah, I don't plan to actually move shop yet, but setting up an alternate page over there might be an interesting experiment. My main thing is - I'm an older cartoonist, I do this strictly for fun, my comic is targeted towards a 35+ audience, and I'd just be very out of place on a site populated entirely by 12 year olds. But it is fairly disheartening to have just signed up on here and only afterward to learn about the DD buyout, site changes, declining participation, etc.

Four months on from when I last asked this, is there any news/movement on the future of the Duck?
The lack of news, or anything, from ‘the top’ isn't filling me with bags of confidence. It's been about a year since the change over and it seems like we haven't progressed at all since.
I still cant help but get the feeling that I'll try to visit this site one day in the near future and it
just won't be here.
EDIT: WHY DOES THE SITE KEEP GETTING RID OF MY F**KING HARD RETURNS!! ARRGH!!

Mr Hades, there hasn't been. From what I understand Wowio is working on making DD and a couple of their other holdings public, so they'd get investment money or something? I dunno how that works. It's something like that, but whatever it is, it's been in the works for a long time. 7 or 8 months now I think. I dunno how long that kind of thing takes.

If you want the text thingy to keep your hard returns, you gotta put a space in your blank line. Otherwise it thinks it doesn't need it and omits it. :]

skoolmunkee wrote:
If you want the text thingy to keep your hard returns, you gotta put a space in your blank line. Otherwise it thinks it doesn't need it and omits it. :]

DUCK LEGEND :)
Thanks Skool

Hi everybody, I used to come here, everyday. I loved Drunk Duck. It might very well have been my favorite thing to do for a long time. I loved posting on the forum and being involved with other creative people, I loved finding people's contact information and talking to them, trying to make contacts with others who wanted to make comics. I loved seeing great things people made, I loved seeing the really awful things some people put out, I loved it all. It was a fine website, far better than Geocities and much more accepting than Keenspace, who were a bunch of cunts without a sense of humor or any passion. They became Comic Genesis, around the same time BuzzComix dissapeared and Drunk Duck was sold to Platinum Comics. Those were the dark ages, I thought.
I started off doing comics as a silly fun thing. I took sprites of video game characters and jokes from crappy comedy movies I saw, like the one with Method Man and Red Man attending Harvard. I thought I was brilliant, hosting my little comic on Geocities were maybe a few hundred people saw my work in the six months I did that. It never felt as real as coming to Drunk Duck, once I moved here and drew my own work, still using my copy pasting method, but switching from video game art and unoriginal material to trying to do my own melacholoy comedic slice of life thing, I really felt like I tapped into something by being here on Drunk Duck. I tried to do a bunch of different comics, ones about super heroes and office workers, but I never really felt fullfilled until I gave up trying to do anything other than make myself laugh and have a good time making comics, when I did Penis.
An elaborate joke layered with every B-character I came up with in the several years I spent with Drunk Duck, I felt so accomplished. People read my dumb comics. I loved that. I loved the instant satisfaction of it, knowing that people were actually looking at what I did. Even if my work wasn't that great, I still feel like Drunk Duck was a great place to learn how to write, if nothing else. I played in every genre with every type of story I could, and I love this website for letting me do that, with an actual audiance. I got nominated for best writing once for the Dtoid Awards thing, and I still laugh about that. I had such a good time here, but I've become busy. I grew tired of dealing with lots of relationships with online characters I didn't really know. I also just grew disastisfied with my own work, not writing or drawing anything until last year.
I'm not such a good person, I'm kind of an asshole. But I loved it here. It was fun, I had fun conversations with a lot of people here, who I'd like to hope are still around somewhere. I don't want what happened to Top Web Comics and later Buzz Comix to happen to this place, but it looks like I'm too late. I don't know what I can do to fix any of this, I don't know what went wrong with Platinum Comics. More like, I don't know what went right with Platinum Comics, they seemed like a bunch of assholes every time I tried to talk to them about publishing anything fun that I worked on, they seemed to always be vauge and wishy washy with me. I hate that. I like definites, if you're going to answer a question, yes or no are the only answers I can reasonably accept. Not a, “Oh yeah, we'll look into expanding the relationship between Platinum and Penis.” What a bunch of lying fucks they were.
It looks like the site got sold to another company, who are even worse than Platinum. I'm so happy that Platinum had that movie that failed misrebly. To take such a B-movie idea and throw so much money at it, is exactly why the movie buisness is fucking retarded and will eventaully burn itself down to nothing.
We can't let our site burn guys. We can't take this lying down. We have to figure out some way, maybe a kickstarter to save the site and buy it for ourselves, so we can at least run it into the ground on our own terms with actual real answers, not vauge bullshit. I've no time for bullshit. I thought I would come back here and recconect with some people I missed and maybe draw some comics, but I'm so busy, all I can do is lurk. And now I find this thread and see what's happened, and I have to comment. Because I'm stupid, I lost the password to my old account and made this new one today.
I love this website, I love you guys. The only example of my old stuff on the site, is This story I did for the drunk duck Zombies and my sily werewolf comic that I loved doing. You know this is me, because only I would be enough of a jerk to plug my own shit in the middle of a post like this.
I want to write stories and draw pictures and show everybody how silly I can be, but without Drunk Duck, I have no platform for that on my own. At least, that's how I feel. Without Drunk Duck, I feel a certain emptiness that I can't really explain. Seeing dudes like KC Green not becoming super famous bums me out, they did good work and I'm eternally thankful for this website showing me their work. I don't know how to save the site, but I'm willing to throw my two cents in and try.
Matt B.

If you contact Ozone or Skool, they might be able to reset your password for you.

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be much we can do to help the site right now. A lot of important people left after The Relaunch, and it's not easy to keep new people when everything's so buggy. And due to some short-sighted design decisions on Wowio's part, there's not much we as creators can do to improve the viewing experience for readers or remedy the lack of essential webmastering tools. This place won't be truly viable again until they fix the programming, which may well mean completely redesigning everything from the ground up.

Also, you have to drop the ‘http’ part when you type a Drunkduck url in order for it to work here. That's a bug.

I'm looking around trying to find people, the site is a nightmare. It feels like I walked through the wrong door and found everything I used to love in ruins. People are gone, with barely any trace of them having existed at all. I found Black Kitty's sympathy page, where we all left her well wishes, which I did in a hilarious and jerky way, but not her? Where did she go? Where did Ronson go? Randal? I'm lost. I'm absolutely lost here, looking at my old stomping ground in shambles, this is incredibly depressing. We can't just take it lying down, there has to be something we can do to keep a registry of where everybody left, what is and isn't working with the site. It's scary to see something I saw flourish ten years ago, something I was here to see grow, just fall apart completely.

Holy crap, it's Marine! I was wondering where you'd gotten off to!
Indeed, it is dire days here on Drunk Duck. I'll just leave it at that for the moment, because I think everything that's been said has been said. (Oh wait, I COULD say more, but I don't think it's a good idea for me to get into that right now!)

Playing with the queen of hearts,
knowing it ain't really smart
The joker ain't the only fool
who'll do anything for you

Laying out another lie,
thinking ‘bout a life of crime
That’s what I'll have to do
to keep me away from you

Hahaha, The lyrics of Juice Newton's Queen of Hearts… just for fun, but those lines do remind me of Marine a bit ^_^

BK, Ronson, Spang, all up and moved to Facebook. Ronson is the proud owner and manager of his very own comic store now. Spang… DJs and things… Very good at it so I hear. He still hates you too I'm sure… :)
BK is a teacher in Canada, but she's currently on holiday in Brazil again with her partner and his family there… Skoolmunkee is doing gangbusters at her academic whatsitthingamajig job in Britain and is on Twitter constantly…
Randal is driving trucks all over the USA still and he's Facebooking away about stuff… KC Green, I dunno, he's on FB too but not in my friends list.

Marine, your password for Marine has been PQed to you. SO if you want to unmaroon Marine go head.

El Cid wrote:
Also, you have to drop the ‘http’ part when you type a Drunkduck url in order for it to work here. That's a bug.

SHHHEEEIT

I wondered why those links would never work!

Now I know… and knowing is half the battle

Aw Marine. <3
I peek in here very occasionally. (Veryoccasionally.) I am not really used to how the website looks, but I assume it's because I don't come here enough to get used to it.

I'm used to the look now, but not the bugs :(

So far I'm not aware of the bugs so my experience is all okie dokie~

I think the only thing that bothers me are those pop up ads. They're just very distracting. But heeey, at least I remember my password still! Yay!

Well you've overcome the linebreak but nicely already I see! ^_^

i still check this place out from time to time .
hi everybody !!!