Tapastic Update: Comic Categorization

[brianorlando]

Hello Tapastinauts!

Notice anything different on Tapastic today? We just released a major update that will get the community more involved in the comic discovery experience. Going forward, every time you read, subscribe, like, comment, and share a comic, you will help creators get their comics discovered more than ever before with the newly updated categories on the homepage and browse page.

Why the change? We now have 7,000+ comic series on Tapastic. That’s a lot of comics! With so many new series being added every day, we needed a new way to surface our content.

Categorization Updates

We created 5 new sections to effectively categorize comics on Tapastic, all of which you can sort by genre on the browse page.

Popular

This section will surface comic series with the most engagement in the past 24 hours. That means series with the most new subscribers, likes, comments, and especially shares will be showcased.

Trending

Trending will show comics that experience the largest positive changes in subscribers, likes, comments, shares, and views. All series have chance to be Trending, even brand new ones as long as readers are consistently engaged. This section will update frequently throughout the day since series engagement is constantly changing.

Fresh

Whenever a comic series is updated, it will appear in the Fresh section. This is to help newly updated series get discovered on a regularly basis. Please note that a series will not repeatedly appear at the top of the Fresh section if lots of episodes are added at once. This is to ensure that all creators who update their comics get a chance to be discovered.

Tapastic Picks

Tapastic Picks will consist of hand picked content by the staff. This will update regularly as the staff finds awesome new comics that make best use of Tapastic.

All

The All section is what the old browse page used to be. You'll still be able to sort series by subscribers, likes, comments, date created, and name.

We also added a new Premium and Discover More section on the homepage. Check it out!

Please note that our team will be constantly optimizing this new system over time. There’s still much room for improvement, but we believe this is a step in the right direction for the community. We’re extremely excited to see what comics you will help us surface. So don’t forget to subscribe to series you love and like, comment and share episodes you enjoy. Your actions decide which creators get discovered on Tapastic and beyond.

Thanks for being such an incredible community. We have lot's more exciting news to announce in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! As always, please let us know your thoughts below. Happy discovering!

[brianorlando]

[ck_tapastic]

This is an awesome update!

[Agentzap]

eh? where are those?

[UzukiCheverie]

Nice! I was a little iffy with it at first, but reading the thread here made me feel a bit more confident with it :3 I might get lost with it ever now and then just because it does seem to be a WHOLE new layout, but it seems to be alright so far.

I like this improvement +1 here but I wish they included the chatroom were the creators can share their thumbnails every 5 minutes, so there would be no more fake people trying to be friendly just to get subscribers.

eh? where are those?

..... Yeah I have no idea what you're talking about either :I

[ratique]

I really like this categorization. My only complaint:

Why is this not on the front page? It looks way more interesting and I would love it as landing page. I realize that it is easily accessible by just clicking one button, but we all know how lazy we become when browsing the internet.

And what about people who get to this site for the first time? Would they be more impressed if they would see the categories on the first page instead of the second?

Aside from that I am really happy. At least on first glance it looks like it is going to be easier to find new comics now. Thank you Tapastic team!

[NagashiKhan]

Out of curiosity, how long will fresh series' be posted? I don't know what the rate of updates per minute is, but that seems like either a really good gambit, or nothing to put your dollar on, unless you're feeling lucky. If the number of updates is overwhelming, doesn't it become like Deviantart? I can't stand Deviant art, it's pretty much random.

But hey, that's just one feature. For the most part this update sounds pretty legit. =3

[MylCreates]

Same I was like ... oh great... how are people with few yet very engaging fans going to make it to the first page (because they could though comments), but the descriptions did make sense, however, does that mean it's now clumping "likes, comments, etc" all into one section?

Because now I'm just seeing the effect where "popular comics" and "trending comics" are ALMOST EXACTLY the same. Because, duh, popular comics most likely have the most subscribers, thus most likes which I'm guessing would straddle any number of comments smaller comics could amass like they used to.

I'm so sorry if I'm sounding picky , I'm just still skeptical of the new format and I wish the option of picking most "comments" "likes" "subscribers" etc was still an option. Atleast with the old popular comics format I actually saw diversity in the comics depending on their category and I did actually catch, not so prominent comics featured within those sections. Now I'm seeing the same comics in both categories.

I do like the option of "Fresh" though. It wasn't as obvious in the previous update. That's a +.

But I no longer see categories, does this mean Tapastic's no longer doing themed categories for say holidays or special events?

[AnnaLandin]

This looks like a really good update! However, I agree with @ratique in that the "Fresh" category would do better to appear on the front page - that gives lesser known/less popular comics more exposure, which is great for everyone.

I know the category is only a click away as it is, but with all those other categories grabbing attention on the front page, people are less likely to make that one click to find it.

[taihendechu]

I like the layout of the front page... but I think it's not the best solution.
As @MylCreates already mentioned: The chances that in the popular and trending section are the exactly same series, is pretty high. I'm personally not a fan of that... I think it suggests that we don't have enough different good series to fill the places. I have absolutely no idea about programming but wouldn't it be possible to write a little code that automatically avoids duplicates on the front page?

Aside of that I like the new algorithm!

I really understand @ratique's point. I was a little confused at first as I wasn't able to find the "Fresh" section. Personally I would really like to see this on the front page! It's a great way to discover new series!

Another thing about the front page.. and I would really like to hear other people's opinion about that: Imo The best solution for the big banner, was the one one year ago. Three series featured at the same time (the images was changing). The banner pictures are always gorgeous, it gave the page such a dynamic WOOSH. Now I find it a bit static... especially because when a new series gets featured.. I check it out. Depending on the content I subscribe.. or I don't... and for the next 5 days I'm just looking at a pretty picture. When I got featured I noticed a huge boom at the beginning... and a little less every following day (still a lot, but slowly falling). That might have been just my impression though! However... If you'd put it down in numbers featuring more artists at the same time (maybe again with the moving header WOOSH) would help more people in less time... I guess... ?

[shade277]

Hope it will work =)

And I truly hope - it will be as fair to small projects as to big ones!

[Iron]

The banner pictures are always gorgeous, it gave the page such a dynamic WOOSH. Now I find it a bit static

Agree 100%

Also, I vote for the 'fresh' to go to the frontpage. The way I see it now is that staff is worried that 'low quality' comics will make a negative impression of the site if they are displayed on the front yard. But since we have here so many comics here, the list would be dynamically changing, and it would give a chance to many creators to draw a bit of attention. And we have to remember that people (includingmesadlyforthemostoftime)are generally lazy creatures, so if they have a choice of finding a comic by 'search +scroll + click +search +several clicks' or 'scroll + click' they choose the later option...

[Foxjorch]

Woh, this is great

[shinepaw]

I totally agree, I'd love to see some changes to the top banner! It's just boring to see the same series featured for a week. I'd say let it be either 3 series featured for a week with the old carousel type header, or change it daily or every other day!

[panos]

I'm pretty sure it will help new comics, nice job!

[Mane]

The"fresh" section is a great idea and I think it will help artists get more exposure!

[brianorlando]

The chances that in the popular and trending section are the exactly same series, is pretty high. I'm personally not a fan of that... I think it suggests that we don't have enough different good series to fill the places. I have absolutely no idea about programming but wouldn't it be possible to write a little code that automatically avoids duplicates on the front page?

We totally agree. We are working on an improvement for this right now. Thanks for the feedback!

[Drawnicula]

It's better than it was before, but there are still some things which I would like to see (hope you don't mind):

• banner changes (3-5 comics per week are promoted instead of 1)
• popular and trendy shouldn't feature the same comics, because if I don't sub a a "popular" comic I certainly won't sub the same "trendy" comic and other series won't get the exposure.
  Also, it looks like Tapastic has only a few comics to visitors, because "why would the same stuff be featured twice if there were enough comics?"
• the collections are gone and most of my favourite comics were part of collections (manga madness).
  Many creators were glad to be featured in a collection and it was a nice way to find good comics from a particular genre without having to search.
  I already suggested something similar in feedback:
  *Just like the collections, there could be a weekly/monthly theme which is shown on the front page. For an example: Supernatural, The brave, thought-provoking, silly, Zombies - anything goes!
  Themes show a small selection of comics which are picked by Tapastic's staff and belong to that theme.*
• please let "fresh" on the front page. "Fresh" doesn't only show bad comics, it shows many many good works which otherwise go unnoticed.

[brianorlando]

Out of curiosity, how long will fresh series' be posted?

This all depends on how many creators update per day. Fresh displays 150 unique series episode upload results. Once a series is updated today, it will move up to the top of the Fresh list and push previously updated series down 1 space. Keep in mind, uploading more than one episode back to back won't bring a series to the top of the list repeatedly. So technically a series that uploaded today still should be in the Fresh section for more than half the day (depending on the amount of episode uploads we have per day). Hope this sheds some light. Thanks for the feedback!

[brianorlando]

Why is this not on the front page? It looks way more interesting and I would love it as landing page. I realize that it is easily accessible by just clicking one button, but we all know how lazy we become when browsing the internet.

And what about people who get to this site for the first time? Would they be more impressed if they would see the categories on the first page instead of the second?

Thanks for the feedback!

Right now, the homepage is intended to display the top content across all genres and categories on Tapastic. To address the issue of genre discovery, we added clickable genre tags to the thumbnails to allow readers to jump into the corresponding genres on the browse page. We're hoping that readers will make use of these tags to jump into desired genres. With that being said, we're constantly iterating to see what works best.