Oh no! Not the collections! OnO
I loved the collections too.
I found a lot of great comics through the new and noteworthy as well as the collections.
I'd like to see this too, please. OuO
What I'd like to see is a feature to search comics by tags and the ability to sort by subscribers/date added/last update and whatnot :<
I have to quote this cuz yeah, I super agree ><
It is amazing how I am now noticing there were a lot of things I didn't know about the website, and things I wouldn't know if someone hadn't mentioned it, like the new "comics" and "fresh" section o-o
New there is a "categories" too, that's cool. But I wish "fresh" would be "easier" to find? o-õ The main page is looking a bit repetitive...
You know what I find interesting? How we scramble at ways to reach viewers on a site pandered towards reaching viewers with our comics. How did it come to this? I'm thankful for the platform, but there is still so much to be desired. Related suggestions? Genre searches? Why not broaden and reduce the number of tiers?
I'm sure the staff understands the desire to be seen, but how can they find so much trouble with giving artists a voice on a platform like this? I find it so strange that it's so difficult to find a viewership that we are literally picking apart the design of the site in terms of good comics going unnoticed. Is it really the lack of good web design? Or is it the lack of adventurous readers? I feel like we shouldn't have to sweat blood trying to get people to read our comic on a webcomic website. Isn't it the least bit strange to you? Maybe I'm just babbling nonsense
We played around with that idea but ultimately it felt like we were punishing creators. Right now the algorithms are still collecting data and we're still making tweaks to it. We can only improve it by collecting more data, so eventually we'll be seeing a lot less overlap.
Haha, we wanted to change up the wording just because the old system was set up in a way where if you created a series and uploaded an episode that didn't get any traction in the beginning, then we couldn't feature you (based on how the system was set up). But say that the series gets a lot more traction on episode 2 or 3 that they might have uploaded a few months later - we wanted to be able to still feature them. With the old system we couldn't and again that sort of felt like we were punishing the creators.
Yeah, that's understandable - this is both v1 of the new homepage and the new algorithm. We'll be tweaking everything to improve how it functions. All feedback is welcome!
Hm, that's not true at all. We've been very transparent with how the front page works, I've written a couple posts about how the old "New and Noteworthy" system functioned (i.e. new content with good engagement numbers which was an amalgamation of views, likes, subscribers, comments and shares). The only part of the site that really had any editorial control was the spotlight section at the very top.
There's a time decay that will reset the board periodically throughout the day.
Working on that right now - you should expect to see one in your inbox later this evening! edit: tomorrow. Sorry for the delay!
We folded it into the trending algorithm (you will not believe how many times I've misspelled this word today) - so expect to see yourself there again 
edit: thanks for the all responses! i'll be back soon to respond to some more questions and concerns. remember that today is the first day of the algorithm and it hasn't really collected enough data yet. i'll be shooting out an email soon, trying really hard to get everyone back on the mailing list. looking forward to seeing your responses!
The biggest problem I have is that a lot of series that have not updated in months are still occupying top positions. Why? Because that is what the readers see first. When new readers see the top ten that have always been there or have the most subscribers, they very often subscribe to them. Even if those series may never make another episode again, the way that the site is laid out keeps the popular popular because they are still listed as popular, thus getting them more popular.
There are a few series that I say deserve those spots, the biggest example being Gamercat, even HJ story, because they still update content regularly. That makes a lot of sense. What does't make sense is to keep series that have not updated in the longest time at the top of the lists. Automatically it removes spots for potential series to rotate in and keep the popular, popular. This may be getting fixed already, but for the time I've been here, the creators listed at the top when you click on "creators" are the same and have been the same, and probably will stay the same unless something is done about it.
I get an email notification after two weeks of neglecting a series wondering what's up. Shouldn't the many series that have been gone much longer than that, say a month or two, be automatically marked as "Complete"? That way, their series is out of the way for others to take its place, and if a creator wants to continue it, they would have to un-mark it or create a new series from scratch. That, in my opinion is much more fair to newer or older series that are still being updated.
We're constantly tweaking and updating the Trending section based on the feedback. Purpose of that section is to show which comics are fast-rising and up-and-coming.
We also hope the newly introduced "Fresh" tab gives more exposure to freshly published comics.
Hey everyone,
Please check out the updates here:
Hopefully this will answer additional questions. Thanks!
It makes sense that if the categories are "Popular" and "Trending" a lot of comics will appear in both. People will come into the site seeing the "Popular" comics and clicking those, which in turn will turn them into "Trending" comics. Of course, if you have a lot of subscribers and you update you could move your comic into the trending by people coming in to see new pages, which could also put it into "popular".
There will be a lot of cross over.
I understand why! Doesn't mean I like it. The purpose of those sections is to highlight popular comics that you might not have checked out before, and overlaps defeat that purpose.
Sound like the team sees this and are on top of it working to make the two categories different.
@brianorlando made a comment on it in the other forum topic:
Except the "fresh" tab is still heavily hided, i can understand you guys don't wanting the majority of comics making ugly your frontpage, you put the popular ones there, and when you click "comics" surprise! popular is the no. 1 tab again, (thats really redundant, and design wise, it's guiding new readers to the popular sections only) then you find fresh in the third row of tabs, so that's like 2 pages of lurking level of hiding.
don't get me wrong, i'm a graphic designer and i know a lot about merchandising, i understand 100% the reasons behind this, what i don't like it's the whole "we're with the little guys!" speech. it really comes as a little hypocritic.
If i had to make a wild guess, i think Tapastic would benefit more of a few comics with lots of backers and money incoming, than a great quantity of comic creator with the samenumber of readers, like a piramid scheme, but that's just me doing the X-files Mulder theory, i may be wrong.I speak for the actions i see.
No more collections? I loved those! T^T
I don' really like the new front page. It all seems like the same comics over and over again. You guys need to come up with ways of OTHER comics to get noticed. Other wise why should a comic even USE this site?
However, I could argue that if a creator worked really hard to get to that spot, haven't they sort of earned it? It'd be one thing if those series remained on top and DIDN'T get any traction, but they do, which shows that the series still has a lot of intrinsic value. Just something to consider.
We are filtering inactive series for the Trending section because we feel that it's more related to series that are in the moment. So something like that makes a lot of sense to us.
I've covered this topic in the other thread: here3
We are already working on changing the algorithms to introduce more diversity in both sections, but you'll have to remember that both of those sections are entirely community driven, there's no editorial curation. So it's not really us coming up with ways for other comics to get noticed, it's really up to the creator - you get what you put in.
