You have to assess the funding situation between the two companies and what business models they're operating under. I just don't really see any similarities between IB and Tapastic. It just doesn't really make sense to assume that we're going to be shutting down - there are a ton of other webcomic platforms that have been around for longer and are still operating. I think from a high level perspective you can sort of compare the two platforms but if you look at the intricacies of where the two sites diverged you'll be able to sort of see that we don't have much in common outside of some of the content.

It's just one of those things where it's not really polite to point out what IB did wrong or where the hiccups occurred - what measures Tapastic has taken and how we've grown that separates the two. I guess we can dive into these discussions more in the next livestream - possibly even inviting some of the IB members to chat about it.

She was referring to how it impacts the reading experience.

I would say that's a pretty harsh critique - we emphasized on how we are trying to create an elegant solution to a complex problem. The things we are trying to do with the platform and how we are trying to accommodate creators with a variety of different storytelling forms is bigger than just implementing one thing - it's a systematic problem that has to considered from multiple points of view.

Trust me when I say that if we could have solved the problem by now, that we would have.

We are not really concerned with adviews - I think more websites should try and de-emphasize ads because they're predominantly useless.

I guess taking a step back and painting in broader strokes, it's a lot easier to convince one person to give you a dollar to support your comic then it is to get roughly thousands of viewers to earn that dollar in adrevenue. Plus when was the last time you found an advertisement to actually be super useful?

This is my personal opinion and isn't part of Tapastic's overarching plan, but I see a future where webcomics can be a major form of entertainment that people have grown accustomed to digesting habitually. Instead of running ads on the app, I think more synergistic forms of ad placement can be made like... product placement in comics. It's a strategy that we see in TV, and it should be just as easy to replicate in comics.

To put it bluntly, it was confusing. You had to click on the chapter on the side nav-bar in order to access a drop down menu which then took you to individual pages. For starters, it's not intuitive to make that initial action of clicking on a chapter to access the drop down - especially because this is not a uniform action across the site. Other forms of content which aren't structured in that way won't produce the same effect when clicking on the episodes in the nav-bar, more often when clicking on an episode on the nav-bar, you'd be taken to the episode.

We have to delineate between desired reader behavior and expected product behavior. How will the readers want to use the site and should the site accommodate to that. I think the solution Nox.Fox created is great - it's something we have mocked up as well but in the end it serves the purpose of the creator more so than the reader and doesn't accomplish 100% of the task.

Sorry about the long winded responses - if any of it doesn't make sense please free to let me know! Also thanks for tuning in. There are a few things that we can't really talk about publicly, and in the future I'll be sure to just be blunt about "I can't comment on that" - I hope that's all right.

Yeah, if you want to know more about specific things then you should definitely fill out more questions in the form.

Case and point on how awesome comments are, my latest page post has spurred a pun war between @mrazrielblack, Jacen, and myself that'll go down in history as the acorniest pun war ever. (pun face)
I'd never want to do anything to delete that, and currently there's no way that I could merge this page into an existing episode without deleting this bit of gold. Until a better option is available I going to have to keep posting individual pages because I find these comments on individual pages, likes, shares, and even views to be more encouraging as an artist than not having them on each page. @noxfox's suggestion to creating a visual directory for chapters and episodes may be a good method to help keep episodes separate while also grouping the episodes together as chapters. They don't necessary need to be drop down menus, but merely a way to label and group episodes together. The current method of grouping pages into episodes isn't ideal for me.

Also, getting Tapastic's name more out there, through advertising or perhaps inquiring reviews from bloggers, may help boost Tapastic's reputation on sites like Reddit, and a few others, where Tapastic links are considered spamming. There are a lot of comic/webcomic readers on these sites, and for anyone to just brush off Tapastic links as spam isn't good for anyone. That hurts all of us. Ads are still beneficial, and people still click on them especially if they are effectively designed well, and the site is going to be in a constant state of evolution. Getting better and better, so waiting till the site is at a place of perfection before advertising might not be the best course of action either. I think Tapastic is awesome, and I'd like more people to know that and respect it as a comic platform site over Comicfury, Smackjeeves, and the other more blah comic sites.

These are just my humble 2 cents thoughts on the matter.

Yeah, I agree - when I post comics here, I find it a bit of an inconvenience actually having to cut out, make and save a 300x300 picture for each comic. (Or I could just make one icon for all the comics, but that doesn't tell much about the actual comic strip itself) Maybe making one directly on this site, from the uploaded comic image, could be an idea?

I agree that the mock-up was an idea that needs to be refined a little. However it brings up a concern I had when I first joined Tapastic. I really wished that there would have been a page or series of page (or even a comic) to take me by the hand and show me all the features of the site. Not just about publishing series but also about using the site as a reader.
I can't tell how long it took me to figure out that it's possible to edit/delete comments, and I figured how to skip lines because I already had knowledge about this trick from previous web experiences ...that younger users may not have. I've never really much used the Search feature either, but access pages of certain series or friends (sometimes didn't find them).
A thing I love about the forums is how there are those messages that display to help you compose your first posts, or to ease expression in general. It's fantastic and super user-friendly. It would be really neat I think if there was something a little like this to teach users how to use the site. There's no shame in doing this and it doesn't mean that the UI is bad. It's like driving a car: when you know how to drive it, it's super functional, but you have to learn how to drive first.
Nowadays a lot of sites do this: facebook with all its updates, Disqus, and pretty much all Google services. I think tutoring is a good choice however simple or complex the feature is =)

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiif there was a way to MERGE pages (like layers in PS) with comments et all I'd be all for it!

@keii4ii, you are very insightful, as always. I agree with a lot of what you have to say, ESPECIALLY the whole part about making a new icon in PS to upload onto Tapastic! I hate that! And I, like you, also use the same thumbnail over and over for each page in a chapter. It's nice to have the option to use a different one for each page (it was helpful for my Advent Calendar special), but when it comes to my main comic, I'd rather just have no icon at all.

I was pretty bummed out when I first started on Tapastic about the whole episode/chapter thing. I've gotten over it for the time being, but it would be nice to be able to have everything grouped as a chapter and update to the chapter, rather than posting individual pages. When I first uploaded Vatican Assassins on here, I had a lot of old archives, so I bulk uploaded each chapter as one episode, but I feel the comic suffered for it, and though I have a lot of content, I have a pretty low number of views. There must be some sort of compromise that the staff can come up with that will allow for chapters.

I don't know if Tapastic users have anything to fear. It seems that the community is pretty strong and the platform has gotten very popular as an alternative to owning a site and as a mirror site. I know a lot of comics that use Tapastic as a mirror. As a web developer, I'm a little biased and think that it's always better to have your own domain, but as a free comic publishing platform nothing beats the ease of use and clean look that Tapastic provides.

The only problem is that those thumbnails don't tell me, the reader anything about why I should read the next or previous episodes. The side-bar collapses when you press 'F' and these mode of viewing becomes sort of an eyesore when all the thumbnails are the same. These are all smaller components that lend itself to a bigger overall aesthetically pleasing experience of reading through a series.

It just tends to be one of those things that the staff enjoys because it feels like the creators are taking their craft more seriously or sometimes a creator will do something to the episode thumbnails that really catches our eye - and we're all about celebrating those moments.

And if you couldn't tell from the stream, it's sort of an inside or running joke at the office. shrug

We are building a cropping tool for episode thumbnails that will function like the episode cropping tool for sharing. Coming soon.

That's exciting! I'm very sure it will boost up the experience for all users OuO
As a side-note I find it funny how you view comments^^ I wish I could say they're forever in my heart, but I have a terrible memory so it's very hard for me to be sure of who said what. Sometimes I go back to my episodes and end up reading old comments I had forgotten about, and it's really cheering and fueling.

I must admit I usually don't look much at the next thumbnail, or at least not in way to be "teased" because I don't want spoilers^^ But I totally agree on the eyesore part. I tend to find it very annoying when the same image is repeated all over the place. When making my thumbnails I always try to go for the part of the picture that I prefer, unless it's too spoilerish (well, there's one or two spoilerish ones because I just liked those parts too much).
It does sound like you guys are having a lot of fun and that's seriously cool! Can't wait to see that tool! OuO