"Happy birthday, ComicFury", 7th Jul 2010, 11:11 PM #1
What the hell Kyo, how could you forget about the birthday? Does all this mean NOTHING to you? This really is just a sick enterprise to fuel your various addictions monetarily. They told me, but I wouldn't believe it. I just wouldn't believe it. "Not Kyo, No! He's a good man. He only has like 3 - 4 addictions and I bet he uses the donation money for NONE of them! Yeah!" Man, I sure am a sucker for falling for that. Screw you sellout, I'm leaving. Thanks for nothing, you asshats.
In unrelated news, it was ComicFury's second birthday two days ago. And I totally didn't forget. I have good reasons for posting this thread two days late, right after posting another one, and I will explain them to you:
uhm
Anyways, let's look at what we've achieved:
Total Users: 3855
Total Webcomics: 2980
Total Non-empty Webcomics: 2055
Total Comics: 43655
Total Threads: 2869
Total Posts: 46741
Total Comments: 54590
Total Approved Comments: 54512
Naturally, ComicFury 2100 came out recently, the successor to ComicFury 2000, which was the successor to ComicFury 1, and now we have ComicFury 7 coming. Exciting! The site has never been this user friendly, this fancy, this not crappy looking. Unfortunately, we got less and less green over time. Suck on that, enviroment. Yeah, that's right, I have a grey-blue layout now. No, I don't care about blue light pollution. It stays this way and there is nothing you can do about it.
So let us look at the ComicFury history, as told by a source you cannot and should not trust under any circumstances: Me. Yes, Kyo. I am totally unbiased about this.
Exactly two years ago, I made the first ever post on the forums, declaring the site to be open while admitting that I am one day late, while actually being two days late. No one ever replied. Well, over a year later some asshat (Word of the day: Asshat) posted in it, but that hardly counts.
Then, some other asshat made post number 2. This is where things went downhill. Users started using the forums. Sorta. Not really. They were pretty empty. Having experience, I knew making a lot of forums would just make them look even emptier, so I made exactly five forums: "News & Announcements", "Problems, critique and suggestions", "Shameless Advertisement", "Critique" and "General Discussion". Shortly after, I was asked to make a forum for Introductions, which I did since everyone was posting theirs in GD (breaking the General Discussion rules as early as two years ago, before they even existed for another 16 months or so).
The 8th thread ever was Jeffrey talking about adding a new layout. Which? Rainbow tables. The shittiest layout we have. We thought it was pretty awesome at the time (then it was table based, before I had him rework it), which made us have two layouts, both extremely simplistic and extremely crappy. This would stay that way for a looong time, but we've come a long way since then.
Eventually, I added the mediterranean avenue, a name which I still do not know how to spell. People who are non-american may not realize this, but this is the cheapest street in Monopoly. I was disappointed to find that they were different in different english speaking countries, so I just picked the american one. Trivia: The german name is "Badstraße". This was of course the spam forum, designed to filter the crappy posts. It contains almost 2 times as many threads and posts as any other forum (with the exception of Shameless Advertisement). That should speak for your post quality everyone. Nice job. At the time, you had the ability to move threads. Now we don't. Why? Beats me. Maybe in CF7.
Anyways, we didn't have a lot of comics back then and your updates would stay on the front page as long as 3 days. The site's activity kept growing and I can honestly not say at which point it stopped being so inactive. Honestly, I still don't fully understand that we get more than 1 person signing up every 2 days (we get, I'd say about 8 a day on average), nice job everyone. ComicFury's gone viral, I guess. While still being kind of non-conformist and the underdog. Woo.
The code for ComicFury 1 was pretty crappy, it had no template system whatsoever and partly was as old as 4 years, at the time. So that's code from when I was 13. 13! I was a pretty shitty coder back then (and still am, arguably), but this came to bite me in the ass. I've always been pretty involved with webapp security, and there have been exploits found in ComicFury, but always by me while looking for them (with the exception of one, where I asked people to look for exploits). Now, I'm not claiming this is because there are none (it's because nobody cares enough to try finding vulnerabilities in webcomic hosting sites), but I know that a lot of the other comic hosts, if not all, aren't particularly safe. Yes, I've looked. Yes, I found stuff. This was a few years ago, to be fair. But it was a large reason of why I made ComicFury. Most hosts were unresponsive with patching their vulnerabilities, or only patched ones that were easy to patch. Not gonna name any names, but I wanted to feel safe with my webcomics.
Sometimes I sacrificed functionality in order not to open up potential vulnerabilities. Maybe a wasted effort, as no one would ever have tried to exploit them, but it's not something I intended to risk.
Time passed on, and I made a new version of ComicFury: 2k. This one took really long to make. Not only did I add a template and language system, allowing for different site layouts and languages (which so far I haven't made use of), I also completely recoded all files (this was needed anyways), getting rid of bad code and adding functionality, as well as making editing stuff more flexible. It took forever to make. Long breaks inbetween the making because it was so enormous. Weeks spent basically just coding and sleeping. Then other weeks spent watching shows, one episode after another while coding (I do this quite often when coding large projects, it's the only thing that will make me keep coding, but it also makes me take 5 hours for stuff that I could have written in half an hour.) I'm not kidding here. while writing CF2k1 for example, I spent a week watching every single episode of my name is earl, one after another, constantly coding at an extremely slow rate. This gives you the ability to code for another week or so without going insane, but after you're done with that it will feel like the life has been sucked out of your body, not feeling like doing anything for a day or two. It's hard to describe unless you experience it. Honestly, I wish I was kidding with any of this but I'm dead serious.
Anyways, ComicFury 2k was eventually released. A bit rushed I might add, the design was a bit of an afterthought and I was rather dissatisfied with it, but I didn't want to keep people waiting any longer. This also meant some things were unfinished, like deleting webcomics or moderating the forums (moving threads in particular, or opening them again). I released it as soon as the site could reasonably be used. We are still seeing the effects of that. I tried making a template engine that parsed templates into PHP before I started doing 2k, but I ran into a bunch of problems so I used a rather half-assed engine that was far from powerful. It couldn't do conditionals, so you had to use separate templates for that. This affected the site in many ways, most prominently perhaps that everything ended up rather static unless absolutely needed otherwise. This was patched in CF2k1, which was basically just an upgrade to the template engine I tried to create when I started with 2k. It's powerful and beautiful, and I really love the work I've done with it. Coding for ComicFury was now easier than ever. The site looked nice, worked nice and was nice. And that is now.
To another great year, guys.
In unrelated news, it was ComicFury's second birthday two days ago. And I totally didn't forget. I have good reasons for posting this thread two days late, right after posting another one, and I will explain them to you:
uhm
Anyways, let's look at what we've achieved:
Total Users: 3855
Total Webcomics: 2980
Total Non-empty Webcomics: 2055
Total Comics: 43655
Total Threads: 2869
Total Posts: 46741
Total Comments: 54590
Total Approved Comments: 54512
Naturally, ComicFury 2100 came out recently, the successor to ComicFury 2000, which was the successor to ComicFury 1, and now we have ComicFury 7 coming. Exciting! The site has never been this user friendly, this fancy, this not crappy looking. Unfortunately, we got less and less green over time. Suck on that, enviroment. Yeah, that's right, I have a grey-blue layout now. No, I don't care about blue light pollution. It stays this way and there is nothing you can do about it.
So let us look at the ComicFury history, as told by a source you cannot and should not trust under any circumstances: Me. Yes, Kyo. I am totally unbiased about this.
Exactly two years ago, I made the first ever post on the forums, declaring the site to be open while admitting that I am one day late, while actually being two days late. No one ever replied. Well, over a year later some asshat (Word of the day: Asshat) posted in it, but that hardly counts.
Then, some other asshat made post number 2. This is where things went downhill. Users started using the forums. Sorta. Not really. They were pretty empty. Having experience, I knew making a lot of forums would just make them look even emptier, so I made exactly five forums: "News & Announcements", "Problems, critique and suggestions", "Shameless Advertisement", "Critique" and "General Discussion". Shortly after, I was asked to make a forum for Introductions, which I did since everyone was posting theirs in GD (breaking the General Discussion rules as early as two years ago, before they even existed for another 16 months or so).
The 8th thread ever was Jeffrey talking about adding a new layout. Which? Rainbow tables. The shittiest layout we have. We thought it was pretty awesome at the time (then it was table based, before I had him rework it), which made us have two layouts, both extremely simplistic and extremely crappy. This would stay that way for a looong time, but we've come a long way since then.
Eventually, I added the mediterranean avenue, a name which I still do not know how to spell. People who are non-american may not realize this, but this is the cheapest street in Monopoly. I was disappointed to find that they were different in different english speaking countries, so I just picked the american one. Trivia: The german name is "Badstraße". This was of course the spam forum, designed to filter the crappy posts. It contains almost 2 times as many threads and posts as any other forum (with the exception of Shameless Advertisement). That should speak for your post quality everyone. Nice job. At the time, you had the ability to move threads. Now we don't. Why? Beats me. Maybe in CF7.
Anyways, we didn't have a lot of comics back then and your updates would stay on the front page as long as 3 days. The site's activity kept growing and I can honestly not say at which point it stopped being so inactive. Honestly, I still don't fully understand that we get more than 1 person signing up every 2 days (we get, I'd say about 8 a day on average), nice job everyone. ComicFury's gone viral, I guess. While still being kind of non-conformist and the underdog. Woo.
The code for ComicFury 1 was pretty crappy, it had no template system whatsoever and partly was as old as 4 years, at the time. So that's code from when I was 13. 13! I was a pretty shitty coder back then (and still am, arguably), but this came to bite me in the ass. I've always been pretty involved with webapp security, and there have been exploits found in ComicFury, but always by me while looking for them (with the exception of one, where I asked people to look for exploits). Now, I'm not claiming this is because there are none (it's because nobody cares enough to try finding vulnerabilities in webcomic hosting sites), but I know that a lot of the other comic hosts, if not all, aren't particularly safe. Yes, I've looked. Yes, I found stuff. This was a few years ago, to be fair. But it was a large reason of why I made ComicFury. Most hosts were unresponsive with patching their vulnerabilities, or only patched ones that were easy to patch. Not gonna name any names, but I wanted to feel safe with my webcomics.
Sometimes I sacrificed functionality in order not to open up potential vulnerabilities. Maybe a wasted effort, as no one would ever have tried to exploit them, but it's not something I intended to risk.
Time passed on, and I made a new version of ComicFury: 2k. This one took really long to make. Not only did I add a template and language system, allowing for different site layouts and languages (which so far I haven't made use of), I also completely recoded all files (this was needed anyways), getting rid of bad code and adding functionality, as well as making editing stuff more flexible. It took forever to make. Long breaks inbetween the making because it was so enormous. Weeks spent basically just coding and sleeping. Then other weeks spent watching shows, one episode after another while coding (I do this quite often when coding large projects, it's the only thing that will make me keep coding, but it also makes me take 5 hours for stuff that I could have written in half an hour.) I'm not kidding here. while writing CF2k1 for example, I spent a week watching every single episode of my name is earl, one after another, constantly coding at an extremely slow rate. This gives you the ability to code for another week or so without going insane, but after you're done with that it will feel like the life has been sucked out of your body, not feeling like doing anything for a day or two. It's hard to describe unless you experience it. Honestly, I wish I was kidding with any of this but I'm dead serious.
Anyways, ComicFury 2k was eventually released. A bit rushed I might add, the design was a bit of an afterthought and I was rather dissatisfied with it, but I didn't want to keep people waiting any longer. This also meant some things were unfinished, like deleting webcomics or moderating the forums (moving threads in particular, or opening them again). I released it as soon as the site could reasonably be used. We are still seeing the effects of that. I tried making a template engine that parsed templates into PHP before I started doing 2k, but I ran into a bunch of problems so I used a rather half-assed engine that was far from powerful. It couldn't do conditionals, so you had to use separate templates for that. This affected the site in many ways, most prominently perhaps that everything ended up rather static unless absolutely needed otherwise. This was patched in CF2k1, which was basically just an upgrade to the template engine I tried to create when I started with 2k. It's powerful and beautiful, and I really love the work I've done with it. Coding for ComicFury was now easier than ever. The site looked nice, worked nice and was nice. And that is now.
To another great year, guys.
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