I hate to be the guy saying you need to do more work, as I honestly understand that your guys' workload is MASSIVE right now. It's something I've been telling people behind the scenes for over a year, that these types of things require massive amounts of work, and that you guys are a small team, so the speed and load you guys can handle isn't Microsoft or Apple or Google in size. But, I do feel the need to stress something.
The banner links.
I'm not saying you need to do this right away, but I do need to stress that eventually you need to bring in a spiritual successor of sorts to the Support button, one that only appears when they have a link that would appear in the banner to bring you to another site to support them. The reason I'm saying this, is because you NEED to have something that you guys have stressed many times before, and that's a nice, consistent user experience.
Now how does this and the banner play a role together? Let me explain with a little bit of history.
Many years ago, the Android operating system had a navigation button called the "Menu" button, which served the exact purpose you would first imagine, open the menu for the screen you were on in the app you were currently using. The issue with this button, is that it was not contextual, meaning that it did not change or inform the user if pressing the button would do anything or not. So if a user pressed the menu button, yet nothing happened, they had no way of knowing if their phone was messing up or being slow, if the app was messing up, or if their simply was no menu for the screen they were on. The user was left completely in the dark, and it was a very frustrating experience. Eventually, this issue was solved by them removing the menu navigation button entirely, and put it onto the app developers to implement a menu button for when one was needed, which made the entire user experience better, as the users now had context as to whether or not the screen they were on had a menu.
So how does this relate to the banner links and a spiritual successor to the support button? Well, it's that same frustrating user experience of not knowing what the issue of no feedback is. With banner links, when you click on them and nothing happens, you will have no idea if there is simply no link, or if the site did not load correctly, if their computer is lagging, or maybe the page simply had not loaded fully. This will lead to an extremely unpleasant experience, especially to users like me who commonly have to deal with an unstable internet connection, which can render parts of tapastic unusable due to certain elements failing to load. The best way to resolve this issue, would be to have a button that only appeared if they had a link to an external site, similar to how the support button only appears on comics that you can actually support. This would give context to the readers, and allow them to KNOW that they can do something, instead of simply wondering if they can or not.
And lastly, like I said at the top, this does not have to be implemented right away, it is just something I feel you need to think about, as it is a pitfall that I do not feel you want yourself stuck in.
Thanks for reading! Can't wait to see what you guys bring in! And hope what I've said can help you in at least a small way~
