Comic Genesis Forums

I was thinking, couldn't you contact this site: http://sourceforge.net/index.htm and ask them to remove the program from thier site, since it appears that this is the main place where it is hosted, and where people download the program
just search for dailystrip in the site.

by the way, Greetings, usually a lurker, but figured that this would be a good reason to join.

its moments like these im glad no one reads my comic...

Amen to that JV

Waitaminute!

I had a reference a while ago from a "malevole" and "artplayboy". Neither one of these site feature a link to my page. Did these bastages hack me out?

If not then what the heck *are* they doing?

I don't think so, Razi. Referrers can also include the last site someone was on before they went to you. Found this out when I had a nonsensical Japanese site as one of my referrers a couple months back and put the word out to my dozen or so readers to see if they knew where it came from. A few days later, a friend of mine told me that he'd been to said site before coming to mine.

How odd. I've never before had this situation...although it is nice to know where people are coming from!

There's something you can do with the code in your page that will make it seem like the referrer for the very next page a vistor goes to. There are a number of sites that do this.

Back before Counter.com went pay they showed you the referral stats but they had a bug in the system so instead of showing whatever page referred a person to your site it would just show the very last page a person visited before they went to your page.

I check my refs every now and then just to see where people are coming from and what sites link to me and what people are posting about me on BBSs and Blogs, etc. The Counter.com system was a little disturbing until they fixed it. There were a couple of times the referral link would take me to a south american kiddie porn site or a dutch bestiality porn site. If there's two types of porn I can'ts stands its the kiddie porn and bestiality porn. I guess my ultimate turn-off porn would be kiddies having sex with animals.

Of course the most disturbing thing was seeing that some people had visited the official Nsync webpage before coming to mine. I'd like to think that none of my fans are also Nsync fans.

Some people will use a proxy program to submit false referral information. One of the more well known is the one that submits the webpage for Shonen Knife as the referral page. I covered this in my strip.

Still, even with all the fudging I like to check my refs every now and then. This is how I learn when the people on MegaTokyo are talking about how much they hate me.

And I thought my diaper and tampon fetish referrals were bad.

So what's the trick to making the last page show up as a referrer? Showing up in other people's stats page sounds like an interesting way of promoting your comic.

It can also be an interesting way of getting angry webpage owners e-mailing you telling you to stop forging the headers. This is why Shonen Knife eventually made the producer of the knifeware proxy stop using the band's webpage as the referrer. They had just gotten tired of the hassel of angry webpage owners.

As for the Dailystrips. I notice that Keen had once threatened the author of the strip with legal action and that he almost stopped distribution and support for the software but then appearently Keen simply let it all drop and now we have Dailystrips to deal with again? What's up with that Keen? You had the guy by the balls and then you let him go? As my stepfather, who is a lawyer, always says "when it comes to litigation, don't bark unless you intend to bite". You should have nailed his punk-ass to the floor then picked off the other sites using the software one at a time. Why'd you let him off the hook?

I really can't understand why someone would take such glee in ripping off webcomic artists. Apart from "I'm a lazy bastard who can't be bothered to visit the artist's sites" I can't see any possible rationalization for it. I mean shit, we're giving this stuff away for free? It's not like we're some manufactured pop band who expects you to pay $25 for a CD which has only one or two good songs on it and a bunch of crappy filler tunes. This stuff is free! All you have to do is visit our webpages and look at it. How hard can that be?

Ass-monkeys!

Probably for the same reason I let it go a year ago-- the author assured me that the people were using it for personal use, and to be honest -- if you can't view local pages, you can't tell if it's really there. Because of this, he added that it should only be used for private use into the README file. However, I am taking the issue up again as I have seen several places that do not follow the guidelines for private use.

That's what pisses me off. It's not like I'm asking for money. I'm just asking for people, if they want to see the strip, to visit the site. I'm battling lazy people.

This would be more helpful if it wasn't just me fighting the fight. Would anyone else be interested in showing your disdain for DailyStrips theives? I mean, the more people involved, the better chances we'd have with protecting all of our works.

I'm very interested in helping, but I can't think of any constructive way for me to do so apart from complaining about it. As far as I know, Elf Only Inn isn't widespread enough to get hit by the comic grabbers, so any complaints from me wouldn't carry as much weight. What can we do?

Maybe an exchange of ideas of what can be done would be a good place to start. Also, making the users aware of the problems of bandwidth theft (many don't know about it)... maybe a site that teaches users about how it hurts online comic artists. Maybe a little logo button that people can put on their sites saying "Please don't copy me" and a link to such a site.

Myself, I mailed a letter to sourceforge, asking them to review the script to see if it is covered in their Terms of Service.

I think a page like that would be a good idea, a little banner or graphic linking to it would be unobtrusive enough on a page not to irritate readers who don't know about this or give them ideas.

Someone's got to go to your page first before they decide to grab your comic, hopefully they would be clued in on that first visit to the idea that they SHOULDN'T grab these without getting all defensive about their actions.

UPDATE

I had some success with chopping up the graphic into two or three pieces. This seemed to help a little bit, but there are still pages hotlinking the graphic despite this change (e.g. http://www.tempestnetworks.net/comics.html ). I don't know how much of a priority it is to keenspace wranglers, but some sort of protection against bandwidth theft would be nice. This could save keenspace a lot of money, I am not sure why they don't do it.

In the meantime, i will be continuing to try to protect my comics from automatically appearing on other people's sites any words of encouragement appreciated.

Another innovation, wow I'm impressed at the time and effort you're putting into this. It does mean manual updating which probably many people (even the ones who frequently see their comics on these 'daily comics' pages) will be too lazy to do anything about it.

In my case, I really won't have the option to hack up my comic into bits with the navigation system I'm using. Then again, I don't know if they will be able to detect which comic is the most recent, in the system I'll be using (drop down image selector)? Or if they will even try?

I do think the vertical cuts in your comic have the most annoying effect for the daily comics people; there will end up being text balloons sawed through middle... But this means a very strange loading process for the loyal readers who do still visit your website to read the comic and have a slow connection.

So that's what severed comics lately were all about.

Say, long ago before I even new webcomics existed, I downloaded this little program called "Comic reader". When I recall, it was actually doing the same thing: letting us pick up our favourits from list and then creating html page with daily portions of them. But if I remember well, most of comics on the list were syndicated comics, taken from sites like ucomics.com. The only independent I remember was CRFH!!!
Anyway, that's how I started reading CRFH!!! and later all the other online comics. I never used that program again bercause 1. i couldn't use the last page without the rest of archives 2. i completely forgot about it and 3. i found it better experience to visit the site on it's own.

Now that was just a story. I'm not implying that this kind of programs is a good marketing weapon, cause I don't believe majority of people who use it act the same way as I did. It's just that it never occured to me before that it makes damage...

What a abomination! I do believe a a banner and link to a page describing such threat would be a great thing. Something like a logo. Like a "Don't be a thief" logo. Something or other. I also wonder why Keenspace isn't doing a thing for us! They haven't been doing much for us in months and I worry. Give us dedicated Keeners hope!

i'd like to help somehow, is there somewhere we con e-mail of post complainst. being that my site isbn't up yet, what i have to say might not carry much weight, but at least it will give tham an idea of how manny people are unhappy with them.
~K

JJcareksims wrote:What a abomination! I do believe a a banner and link to a page describing such threat would be a great thing. Something like a logo. Like a "Don't be a thief" logo. Something or other. I also wonder why Keenspace isn't doing a thing for us! They haven't been doing much for us in months and I worry. Give us dedicated Keeners hope!

Calling them thieves right away won't make anyone of them listen to us, on contrary. Maybe we should first explain why we don't wont them to do that. That way we may even get a few of them to listen. A short tutorial on bookmarks (however short) or on making a simple html page with links on comics could go with that.