Now we got features!Man, there's so many new features to list:
- New site design! It's only a tweak of the old one, but we think it looks much better.
- Loads of updates to the user panel, it's now a nice place to hang out instead of a dingy corner of the site.
- Private listings. Don't want to bare your reader count to the entire internet? You can change your comic to private and it wont display anywhere on the site except your user panel.
- Comic places. We'll talk more about these later. Now you can distinguish readers from your RSS feed, main site and mirrors of your comic on other websites.
- Age Ratings. Keep them kids safe, change your comic's rating through your "Edit Comic" page.
- Conversion rates. How good is your comic at turning guests into readers? Now you'll know!
- Your reader history now spans 6 months, in a monthly graph. Much more useful.
- Adding a new comic to Comic Rank is now instant in most cases. Awesome.
What the update means to you:
For most it is business as usual, however, for those of you who are using their ComicRank button to track the same webcomic across multiple sites listen up! You need to generate new Comic Rank codes ASAP, failure to do so will get your comic automatically suspended. To do this, edit your comic, add in the URLs that you use and then generate new button codes for each of your sites. Each site now has a different button code so make sure you put the right one on the right site.
The same goes for people who have the code in their RSS feeds. But you don't have to add any URLs in, just select RSS from the dropdown when generating your new button.
5 comments:
Hey, one thing that would be pretty nice is if the /in link were to redirect to a page which also showed the comic that brought the reader into the site, so people can actually find where they are in the rankings, rather than just categorically forwarding everyone to the front page. I appreciate you wanting people to see the top-ranked stuff but I'd like people to be able to see my actual stats easily, when I'm nowhere close to the first page.
Also it looks like the individual comic detail page no longer shows the individual rank, which is unfortunate. It would also be nice if there were a graph charting the position in the ranking system, although that would probably be a lot more difficult to generate, as well as a lot more depressing.
Linking the /in links to the comic's info page was my first plan, but people can be touchy about showing their statistics off so I've turned that off for now. There will likely be an option for where to direct the /in links soon.
As weird as it sounds we're doing our best to move away from ranking. While our system gives you the most popular comics instead of the ones with the most time to make vote incentives it still only serves to make the popular more popular.
"Marvin's top pick" is our first step at shaking things up. As we progress we're hoping to create more advanced leaderboards. By expanding trends that we see in comics slowly gaining popularity we can somewhat detect quality of the comic using just the stats. Giving us an automated list of "deserving" comics.
What you've achieved with comicrank is amazing.
We've been trying to develop means of figuring the evolution of our readership with homemade tools piped to google analytics. (trying to build metrics to measure "real readers", "usefull visits" and such) And your progression graphs seem absolutely accurate. As a matter of fact, I consult them more often than mine now :)
Cheers, and thanks for all your work.
I notice you already have an option for people who want their stats to be private; the 'shy' option. I too think it would be cool if the website link went to where your comic was in the ranking.
Mind you I think your idea of making ranking less important is good too, as you say the popular comics don't really need help being more popular - they're there already!
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