I'm sure it'll come around again soon.

Excellent hosting site with lots of customization options.

But the forums.. an unpleasant place with very thin-skinned people.
Like they're afraid of something. Pretends to welcome everybody
when in reality it's the same handful of people jerking each other off.

Yeah, as I've said before, losing the customizations and other features that ComicFury (and even Smack Jeeves back in the day) had to offer and accept the limitations of DD was perhaps the biggest sacrifice I ended up having to make . . . but after a while, I was able to sort of work around DD's limitations and built a presentable site to host my comic on.

The funny thing is that DD used to have a lot more customization back in the day.

I'd completely forgotten about that. If you knew your html you could go in and do more or less whatever you wanted. Some creators really went to town with it.

I took Web Design for a year in middle school, back when the internet was still relatively small compared to now, and almost every website had to be built from scratch with HTML coding, so I knew a thing or two about the very basics, but over the years, I did have to teach myself some of the more advanced stuff. I had built and maintained a couple of fansites in the mid and late 2000s through the mid-2010s when the host that I used for my sites decided they didn't want to offer their services for free anymore, and you had to pay for a subscription to continue to host your sites, so I let mine die since they both had fallen pretty dormant anyway.

But yes indeed, while I was on Smack Jeeves and ComicFury, I really did go to town with VAMPIRE GIRL's site; obviously, I wanted it to look as visually interesting as possible to garner potential readers' attention . . . didn't really work on SJ, because as I've said before, you had to fall into their zeitgeist to get any notice over there, and I never did (people tended to only read Westernized Manga, stolen video game sprites, or LGBTQ+ comics over there), but I did garner quite a bit of readership and subs on CF during the very brief time I was there - and VG was only in reruns at the time, I sometimes still wonder what the traffic would've been like if I was able to publish the second season there.

I had an experience with comicfury, now I don't.
I felt relief when it ended

At least DD has history and reputation. I've looked into alternatives, and so many of them like Tapas, Webtoons, and other have the same problem that Smack Jeeves had after they were bought out and revamped: they're so cold and impersonal with this industrial, streamlined layout and appearance they have; you can't even customize your own comic's site, and that has always been one of the big selling points with me with services like Drunk Duck, ComicFury, Smack Jeeves, Keenspace/ComicGenesis, and others that have been around for ages.

I did use Webcomicsfeed as a backup archive, but it's basically nothing: you can't comment, you can't like, and you can't even see your stats! It's more-or-less just a straight-up archive . . . they claim you can monetize with them, but I've looked into the pay service they use, and it's sketchy AF.

Ironscarf wrote:
I'd completely forgotten about that. If you knew your html you could go in and do more or less whatever you wanted. Some creators really went to town with it.

To tell the truth it pissed us off when Wowio decided to get rid of HTML editing.
They had a valid argument in that it was to protect the site from hackers, spammers etc. But I didn't like the other rationale which was to make the site have a streamlined appearance and so it would be more appealing to advertisers- F**K advertisers, they come second, the members come first!

But they introduced editability so you can get a pretty decent look if you experiment.

Unfortunately the world has moved on and in 2024 we can't go back to the old HTML editing because we have WAY more to fear from hackers and spammers now, and the whole HTML thing has drastically changed, it's a lot harder for people to manually edit now. Bloody standards people and programmers ruined it. Back in the day it was easy and you could do amazing stuff, now you need to be trained in order to understand it.

Ozoneocean wrote:

Unfortunately the world has moved on and in 2024 we can't go back to the old HTML editing because we have WAY more to fear from hackers and spammers now, and the whole HTML thing has drastically changed, it's a lot harder for people to manually edit now. Bloody standards people and programmers ruined it. Back in the day it was easy and you could do amazing stuff, now you need to be trained in order to understand it.

It's a bit like the early days of aviation when if you wanted to fly, you built a plane. Now you save up, buy a ticket and take what you get.

That said, we were so used to elaborate site designs back then it was almost expected and in some cases, they overwhelmed the comics. I remember the first time I stumbled on the (now defunct) ACT-I-VATE site, which was a collective of comic pros. There was nothing there but comic pages. I looked at the plain white background and thought ‘this is amazing!’.

Ironscarf wrote:


That said, we were so used to elaborate site designs back then it was almost expected and in some cases, they overwhelmed the comics. I remember the first time I stumbled on the (now defunct) ACT-I-VATE site, which was a collective of comic pros. There was nothing there but comic pages. I looked at the plain white background and thought ‘this is amazing!’.

So you're saying that the actual comic is somehow more important than all the internet site magic one can create around it?
It's like that super fancy, beautifully wrapped gift box and inside is just a pair of socks and not even top of the line Gold Toe but normal socks like you could get anywhere.
A lot of those hyper programmed pages hid some really lackluster comics.
If the comic is truly good it doesn't need the window dressing and can stand on its own.
It's lingering with some comics where it was this huge banner and great background and you had to scroll past that to get to a tiny little comic that was usually on hiatus.

Thing about the aviation analogy– it was really hard for the DIY guy to take passengers. That required lots of people working together to assemble an airplane capable of carrying that kind of payload. Look at Igor Sikorsky's pioneering work. You needed someone to build something everyone could use and afford. That took two world wars. Just remember that nearly every WW2 bomber was either developed from or had a passenger plane counterpart.

As someone who's been intensively reading hundreds of webcomics for maybe 16 years now (because I've been doing featured comics forever), as far as I'm concerned plain what pages around comics are acid to me eyes. I hate them.

Plain black is THE best default but generally any colour that's darker than the page is good.

I really like the customization options on CF but honestly it's a hivemind of politically left leaning people who show zero tolerance for anything but “the message”. There are a few users who are decent but the majority of the site is unpleasant to engage with. If your comic isn't Pokemon/furry you're going to struggle to get and maintain an active audience.

I don't hate the people there but I've just decided to stop using it since it clearly doesn't work for me.