Introduction Thread - Welcome to the New and Old

[JSConner800]

Hey everybody. I don't have an elaborate introduction like Ferret0007, so I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. My name is J.S. Conner, and I'm the writer for a small group of artists called the Black Hole Collective. Our sci-fi webcomic, Steel Salvation (following the story of Dy-Gar, a small but vicious homicidal robot stranded on his dead homeworld) has been approved, and our graphic designer is in the process of working up a site (along with a banner and a sexier forum avatar). I've already poked around the forums a little bit, and I look forward to poking around some more and getting to know you all better.

[spoonyliger]

Hey everybody. I don't have an elaborate introduction like Ferret0007, so I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. My name is J.S. Conner, and I'm the writer for a small group of artists called the Black Hole Collective. Our sci-fi webcomic, Steel Salvation (following the story of Dy-Gar, a small but vicious homicidal robot stranded on his dead homeworld) has been approved, and our graphic designer is in the process of working up a site (along with a banner and a sexier forum avatar). I've already poked around the forums a little bit, and I look forward to poking around some more and getting to know you all better.

Wow... I am disappoint. Your introduction was trash compared to Ferret0007's. Shame on you. Shame!

Other than that, welcome to CG! I hope you find the forums to be very engaging and entertaining, even if somewhat slow at times.

Is Steel Salvation going to be hosted on CG?

[JSConner800]

Is Steel Salvation going to be hosted on CG?

Is there any alternative? We've actually already paid for a domain name and hosting with wordpress, and we've had a site there for a couple of months, but we weren't getting any traffic, so we thought it would be a good idea to move to a webcomic community. I looked into it and it seemed like the only way to become part of Comic Genesis was to have them host the site, but I could have very easily overlooked something. I tried to make a topic about it in the help forum, but that was my very first post, and I don't think it got through the mods.

[spoonyliger]

Is Steel Salvation going to be hosted on CG?

Is there any alternative? We've actually already paid for a domain name and hosting with wordpress, and we've had a site there for a couple of months, but we weren't getting any traffic, so we thought it would be a good idea to move to a webcomic community. I looked into it and it seemed like the only way to become part of Comic Genesis was to have them host the site, but I could have very easily overlooked something. I tried to make a topic about it in the help forum, but that was my very first post, and I don't think it got through the mods.

Well, I'm happy to hear you chose CG as your host.

Hm, I think you can still post on the forums even without a comic. For example, this account I'm using now isn't connected to my comic. Derek Dragomir is. But I don't like that username anymore, so I made spoonyliger.

Do first posts have to be approved by Mods, anyone? If they do it might be a while before a Mod comes and approves it.

You said you paid for a domain name. Are you planning on linking it to your CG site? You might have a problem with that. See, I bought a domain for my comic too a few days ago. This was before I was told by a Mod that CG domain parking was unavailable. I don't know when they might bring it back. Apparently though, you can still link your CG site to your domain through your domain's website. This is something that I still have to look into.

Out of curiosity, where did you guys get your domain from? Mine is from Dynadot.

[Cobalt]

Hello. My name is Chris Sutor. I've been drawing comics and cartoons on and off since the mid-80s. I also survived two and a half years at the Joe Kubert school, and spent another seven attempting to erase the experience from my memory with mixed results.

I grabbed a comicgenesis account, because several people who had comics here told me that I should. So I did.

My comic "Evil Twin" has been live for several weeks, and hopefully will be around for several more.

[spoonyliger]

Err... replace Admins with Mods on my last post.

[JSConner800]

You said you paid for a domain name. Are you planning on linking it to your CG site? You might have a problem with that. See, I bought a domain for my comic too a few days ago. This was before I was told by a Mod that CG domain parking was unavailable. I don't know when they might bring it back. Apparently though, you can still link your CG site to your domain through your domain's website. This is something that I still have to look into.

Out of curiosity, where did you guys get your domain from? Mine is from Dynadot.

It seemed like the first 3 or 4 posts I made had to be approved by the mods. All of my thread replies were approved in minutes, but no luck with the thread I created. It's no big deal, we've decided to make a CG site even if we could use our old one. A clean slate will do both us and our comic some good. It would be nice to hang onto our domain name, though. We got ours from GoDaddy. I actually took a look at your thread on domain parking while we were researching CG, and I told our web guy to check it out with the domain provider. He said we have to do something on the Comic Genesis end, but we don't know what yet. I haven't found any options for it, but if I figure it out, I'll be sure to let you know.

[McDuffies]

Only your first post should be approved. However if you make several posts before that handsome admin gets to it, they'll all be waiting on the queue. If any post is lost for whatever reason, my apologies, we try not to have that happen but there's a bad spam situation here and all.

Hello. My name is Chris Sutor. I've been drawing comics and cartoons on and off since the mid-80s. I also survived two and a half years at the Joe Kubert school, and spent another seven attempting to erase the experience from my memory with mixed results.

Why was it that bad?

[LibertyCabbage]

Mine is from Dynadot.

From the dynadot.com forums:

1. Log into your Dynadot account.
2. Click on the "Domains" link in the main menu.
3. Select the domains you wish to forward by clicking on the checkbox next to the domain name.
4. Click on the "Set Name Servers" button.
5. Click on the "Forwarding" tab.
6. Enter the URL of the web page you wish your domain to forward to, and then click on the "Forward Domain" button to save your changes.

We got ours from GoDaddy.

From godaddy.com's support page:

1. Log in to your Account Manager.
2. Click Web Hosting.
3. Next to the hosting account you want to use, click Launch.
4. From the Settings menu, select URL Redirects.
5. Click the New Redirect button. The New Redirect window displays.
6. Enter the domain from your account you want to redirect. If you want to redirect all of the domains in your hosting account, check the All domains on this account. Otherwise, enter the directories containing the sites you want to redirect in the Path field.
7. Select whether or not you want all instances of your site with or without .www to be redirected. When you're finished, click Next. The To window displays.
8. Select if the destination site is http or https and enter the domain name you want to redirect to, as well as the path, if applicable. If the path box is left blank, it will redirect to the root of the domain you entered. Click Next. The Type window appears.
9. Select which kind of redirect you want to use.
10. Select your content redirect option. This option decides the behavior of your Site Redirect when a visitor goes to a content path of your domain name, such as http://coolexample.com/path.

I'll post this in the Help Desk thread as well in case anyone else has domain issues in the future.

As for the CG side, a domain mask is nice but it isn't entirely necessary. With one, people who go to (e.g.) http://www.mooncrestcomic.com will see http://www.mooncrestcomic.com as the URL the browser displays. Without one, people who go to http://www.mooncrestcomic.com will see http://mooncrest.comicgenesis.com as the URL instead.

[JSConner800]

Only your first post should be approved. However if you make several posts before that handsome admin gets to it, they'll all be waiting on the queue. If any post is lost for whatever reason, my apologies, we try not to have that happen but there's a bad spam situation here and all.

No worries! Honestly, I'm impressed everything runs as smoothly as it does, considering how hard it is to fight spam these days. I tried to join the 910CMX forums over half a year ago to ask some questions, and I still haven't heard back from them.

And thanks for the info, LC. That's exactly what we needed. I'll forward that along to our web guy right now. Sorry for steering the welcome thread into a help forum topic, but that should clear it all up, so we can get back on track.

[McDuffies]

Remember, kids, when you see someone involved with spreading spam in any manner, kill them.

[Cobalt]

Why was it that bad?

Yes, it really was. The place was worse than simply a waste of time and money, and most of what I learned there later had to be forcibly unlearned, as it was either uselessly outdated, or simply wrong.

[McDuffies]

Heh. For instance?

[LibertyCabbage]

And thanks for the info, LC. That's exactly what we needed. I'll forward that along to our web guy right now. Sorry for steering the welcome thread into a help forum topic, but that should clear it all up, so we can get back on track.

It's fine; I'm always up for helping people out with their technical problems. And if you run into any problems while setting up your site, just post it in the Help Desk forum and I'm sure myself or someone else will try to help you out with it.

[Cobalt]

Heh. For instance?

Let's see... one teacher gave a class which was basically "how to be a racist." The gist was that by using racial stereotypes, you could save a lot of time and effort on characterization. Draw your black guys with big lips and radios, Draw your chinamen with squinty eyes and buck teeth. That was his idea of a labor-saving device.

We had an animation teacher who skipped over the whole "how animations works" and "how you animate a drawing" aspects of animation. Pegboards, animation paper, pencils. None of that was part of the class, despite the fact were were required to buy all that crap at the start of the year. I learned exactly one thing in that class, and that was the phrase "rostrum camera."

I had a caricature teacher who flunked me on several projects for drawing celebrities he didn't like. He was also the teacher whose idea of critiquing the finished assignments was to verbally abuse each student in turn. That his name was also a slang term for a certain aspect of the male anatomy didn't help endear him to anyone in the class.

As for the building itself, it was just this side of being condemned. We actually had a week off once, because part of the roof collapsed, and as it was spring, the place was filing up with rainwater.

The only teacher I got any useful knowledge from was Mike Chen, and that was mostly because he was xeroxing pages out of How To Draw The Marvel Way and giving them to us in class. That and "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Work." Good stuff, but not exactly worth what they were charging us.

I could go on like this for weeks...

[spoonyliger]

That is quite the story there Cobalt. I wonder if there are more like you. You should band together and do something about it.

[dolphinwing]

I'd love to hear more about the apparently shitty program they have going. I always heard that school was the best except that the buildings are gross. I was trying to research if anyone had a similar story and all I got was people arguing over it's lack of accreditation and an article about a prof they hired who had stolen his whole portfolio..

[Cobalt]

a prof they hired who had stolen his whole portfolio..

Please tell me his name wasn't Dominic.

[Cobalt]

That is quite the story there Cobalt. I wonder if there are more like you. You should band together and do something about it.

I do my small part, by warning people away from the Kubert School whenever the chance arises. Yes, it's not accredited, yes the place is a dump. There were a couple of good teachers - Mike Chen, John Troy, Tex Blaisdell - they were good guys and I wouldn't say a word against them. But the rest of the teaching staff, while they may have been good artists, were somewhat unskilled at teaching and seemed incapable of passing their knowledge on.

And what knowledge we were getting, was almost instantly outdated as well. They didn't factor computers into the equation at all. Computer fonts, layouts in illustrator, computer color. We got none of that. We got the horse-and-buggy stuff - all done by hand at great expense the old fashioned way. And while it's probably nice to have some fundamentals, they should have been a platform to build on, not the sum total.

[LibertyCabbage]

Kubert School

Wow, that's one horror story, alright.