Shortpacked! by David Willis
Toys are serious business.
Convention appearances:
Calgary Expo Calgary, AB: April 26-28
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Multiplex
Sorcery 101
Templar, AZ
The Transformers Wiki
Hail to the Slash
80 page GIANT
Axe Cop
The Book of Biff
Butt-Taco
Comics Curmudgeon
College Roomies from Hell!!!
Diesel Sweeties
Dinosaur Comics
Dr. McNinja
Dresden Codak
Fans!
Fleen
Gastrophobia
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Goats
Hark, a vagrant
Hijinks Ensue
Intrepid Girlbot
Legend of Bill
Medium Large
Not Invented Here
Octopus Pie
Overcompensating
Penny Arcade
PhDcomics
Power Nap
Questionable Content
Real Life
Rob and Elliot
Bad Machinery
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
So Far Apart
Something Positive
Two Lumps
Wapsi Square
Wonderella
Wondermark
Frumph.NET
Sorcery 101
Templar, AZ
The Transformers Wiki
Hail to the Slash
80 page GIANT
Axe Cop
The Book of Biff
Butt-Taco
Comics Curmudgeon
College Roomies from Hell!!!
Diesel Sweeties
Dinosaur Comics
Dr. McNinja
Dresden Codak
Fans!
Fleen
Gastrophobia
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Goats
Hark, a vagrant
Hijinks Ensue
Intrepid Girlbot
Legend of Bill
Medium Large
Not Invented Here
Octopus Pie
Overcompensating
Penny Arcade
PhDcomics
Power Nap
Questionable Content
Real Life
Rob and Elliot
Bad Machinery
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
So Far Apart
Something Positive
Two Lumps
Wapsi Square
Wonderella
Wondermark
Frumph.NET
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©2005-2013 David Willis | Powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑
NACHITOS!!!
Did not notice that. Maybe because I train myself to ignore ads.
LOL! the exclamation coupled with a avatar pic of 2 people restraining AMber as she seems to be shouting.
stole that off of a banner ad on QC’s page.
Sad thing is, I never see what Ethan’s talking about. Unless it’s all that stuff at the front of the store, by the register’s.
Even worse, a friend of mine’s resigning from his job at a Wal-Mart because, and I’m not kidding this is what he said, he was doing his job and nobody else was around to help him and he got in trouble for it.
Srsly.
The Walmart here is just a metaphor, dude.
Yeah, it’s the idea that a Wal-Mart where you can’t find the actual products would be a very bad Wal-Mart, and a wiki farm where you can’t find the actual content is a very bad wiki farm.
That would be the Bellefontaine Ohio store. I’ve never seen so many empty shelves, on such a regular basis.
No, that would be the best Wal-Mart, because then you would be forced to walk down the block to the nearest dollar store and get the exact same made-in-China crap about 50% cheaper. Or cross the street to get similar-but-higher-quality crap for about the same price from Target, which isn’t staffed entirely by partially mummified oldsters and vacant-eyed hobos.
Also, Garth Brooks has voluntarily quarantined himself at Wal-Mart (I’m guessing for the good of all Humanity), so that’s another reason to shop elsewhere.
Dollar stores don’t usually carry PCC five-packs.
Went riiiiight over my head then, sorry.
The short of it is, Wikia (which is a wiki farm for lots of small wikis and a few big ones) changed their default skin to a new one, forced it on all the wikis, disabled the old default skin, and lots of people hate the new skin because it’s full of ads (even more than the last one was) and it’s crap. It also hides all meaningful functionality with the excuse that it would only confuse new users.
Metaphor? I hardly know her!
I never met a phor I didn’t like.
Yanno what, I realized this as I was reading it now, and then I read my comment and went, what the hell are you going on about?
I don’t know, I must’ve been really tired when I wrote that. X.x I’m gonna go back in time again and smack myself…
Truth.
Also, hey, Nachitos!
I KNOW RIGHT!
Walky avatar + noticing Nachitos = Yes.
Doesn’t look like O’Ryan’s been aging well…
Who’s O’Ryan? Isn’t that supposed to be Jimmy Wales?
Jimmy Wales is Wikipedia, not Wikia.
Jimmy Wales is still a Wikia board member and founder.
There appears to be a Bart O’Ryan ad under the Nachitos one.
I think this strip works a lot better with the penultimate panelbeing the last one, with the current last one cut altogether.
But that might just be me.
I gotta agree, the last panel is pretty redundant.
Myspace is the 6th most visited site in the world, ahead of wikipedia and youtube.
so…yeah
Misses the point. It’s not MySpace that companies should be chasing right now, it’s Facebook. MySpace is kind of the also-ran now.
I dunno, they seemed to do an overhaul on redesigning the site, it’s possible they’ll go for a comeback…
But they’re also putting in a thing to let myspace users merge with their facebook accounts, kind of admitting defeat
But it’s not the empty void that everybody portrays it as. If you want to mock an abyss of a social network, why not Xanga or Friendster?
Cause for the joke to work, it has to be a place that was popular recently enough for people to actually remember it.
Because nobody’s heard of either of those.
I think that’s part of the point, that Wikia’s adopting the wrong business model, or at least an obsolete one that people don’t like.
Well yeah. That’s what I was trying to convey to the dude.
As a (former) admin of a Wikia Wiki, this made me laugh and cry at the same time. Nice work.
(Actually I still am the admin. I just stopped caring)
Former Wikia wiki admins unite! Booyah!
“Wikia wiki admin”…. as opposed to, like, a Wikia BBS admin?
It’s a branding/trademark thing. For example, you are not playing with a “Transformer,” you are playing with a “Transformers brand converting toy.” You are not playing with “Legos,” you are playing with “Lego brand construction bricks.”
It prevents trademarks from getting diluted like xerox and kleenex.
I played with a transformer, once. It was a 1:3. Then someone turned on the circuit….
I left the transformer alone after that.
‘Scuse me while go I find an ATM machine in the Sahara desert.
Just remember your PIN number. Otherwise you’ll be wasting your time using an ATM machine.
I can’t think of anymore things that people do that with.
It’s like in Philly, where the ATM’s used to be called Money Access Centers before Star took over the MAC network. You will still hear people in the Philly area call an ATM a “MAC machine” (pronounced “Mack”).
I’ll help you out, but there’s football on tv! I don’t know whether to watch the WAC Conference or the MAC Conference.
Here in England I’ve never heard them called anything other than “cash point” or “cash machine”.
So you can buy a ticket for the MLB baseball game?
Or maybe something with an LCD display or LED lights. Or maybe an NES system. Or tickets to the E3 Expo.
I don’t know why they weren’t called AT machines and PI numbers. Then you could also refer to the See Eye Agency and the Federal Be Eye.
I blame the Anus Agency for this three letter obsession.
Because an AT machine is a military vehicle used by the Empire.
It’s not like Palpatine’s going to complain about it, what with being fictional and all.
Hear hear!
I am an ex-Wikian and I approve of this message.
Former sysop of a Wikia wiki, and I also approve of this message.
I used to love the MS Paint Adventures wiki, but now that it’s a huge pain in the ass trying to navigate the site, I tend to meander around TV Tropes instead.
I used to meander around TV Tropes, then I ended up selling my soul to it.
Deal With The Devil
Well played.
I’m with Ragnal. This one went completely over my head. Whatever the ill being mined for humor, I’ve never experienced it.
Must be my robust HOSTS file that prevents ads from appearing on my screen that saves me.
The basic gist: Wikia is a service that allows people to set up MediaWiki systems without requiring things like their own hosting, in return for automatically-inserted adverts in pages for people who were not logged in (I’m not sure if they’ve removed this now, and all users get it, but it wouldn’t surprise me). Wikia used to be fairly flexible about the restrictions it placed on wikis, so people were able to lay out and skin their wikis to fit their requirements. This year, however, Wikia has imposed a number of restrictive changes on wikis – in particular it has forced all wikis to use a “Wikia” skin, which includes a navigation bar to other Wikia wikis, fixed width layout, numerous content changes opposed by users, and considerably more advertising space.
They have. Now logged in users – even admins – get a face full of ads regardless.
[/has NoScript]
I also notice that Joe Rosenthal is hiring.
(The strip’s punchline felt off, though. Anticlimactic.)
That’s absolutely brilliant. Can’t stand the new Wikia layout.
At least it’s better than the old way, where the ads had a tendency to cover up the actual content you came there to see.
Even then it still sometimes happens.
PROTIP: when you authenticate with Wikia, you can go to the “preferences” link next to your name at the top, scroll down to “Site Layouts” and choose “Monobook” to ditch that awful style they’ve been pushing on people.
World of Warcraft wiki jumped ship off of wikia, which has got to hurt because that wiki had truckloads of traffic. The default style scragged most of the templates we were using, and the “helpful” navigation blocks that were added doubles-up on the navigation blocks we already had.
The wiki for /v/’s Recommended Games has also been clobbered because the advertising has squeezed out screenshots, and the helpful layout we had on the front page is scrambled in the new default style. The wiki’s purpose — to help newbies — is out the window. It doesn’t pull enough traffic to afford jumping to it’s own hosting, like WoWwiki did.
I think my favorite part is the “Have a related image? UPLOAD IT!” section on some of the frontpages I’ve seen. Because, yeah, what a wiki really wants is random people just dumping what scrambled JPGs they have on their hard drive, irrespective of what images articles require.
It’s walmart, so who cares?
*sigh* Once again, the wal-mart is a [i]metaphor[/i].
There are few popular old websites that remained in their purist forms. Eventually, greed or “progress” or just plain old success starts tainting things. How many free sites have added commercials or fees over the years. Remember how many free web hosting sites there were all over the place years ago?
I don’t begrudge people profits. Things cost money, after all. It just seems short-sighted to nip off what you’re charging for to begin with, like a snake eating itself.
But the ouroboros represents eternal existence!
See, this is why Wikia as a corporation is moronic.
Fun fact: I work for the Bulbagarden networks (a group of Pokemon sites), which hosts the Bulbapedia wiki. A while back, the shitty Pokemon Wikia wiki stole a whole bunch of content from us, and then ignored us when we asked them to kindly stop stealing our content. They (I should say they as I was not employed at the time; ‘they’ meaning Bulbagarden) contacted the Wikia higher-ups about it. Nothing happened for a long time, and although the content was eventually taken down, it took way too long for that to happen.
Later, our forum servers were under pretty big stress due to the Gold and Silver remakes being released, and there were a bunch of crashes. The forums were given some new servers to balance out the traffic, but Wikia then reared its ugly head. It had the gall to offer and BUY the hosting rights to the Bulbapedia site, offering Archaic (the owner of Bulbagarden)…. STOCK OPTIONS. And ADVERTISING REVENUES. And this was AFTER Archaic had formed NIWA, a group of independent Nintendo wikis designed especially to COUNTER Wikia.
So yeah. Wikia sucks. Burn them.
Ha!
(Bulbapedia is awesome btw.)
Man, he got offered WIKIA stock options? Wow, that’s like putting money in BetaMax!
This was the full letter to Archaic:
“Hi Liam,
I was recently told about the problems you’d had in March with the
increased traffic. If there is any offer you would like Wikia to make
to be able to host the Bulbagarden website, please let me know. I hope
we can restart a discussion on what would be an appropriate level of
compensation for you, in either cash, stock, or revenue sharing.
Angela”
His response was as follows:
“Angela,
I wasn’t going to reply to this initially, but I figure it’s best that I do, if only to save myself the trouble of having to read these kinds of emails from you again in the future.
Quite honestly Angela, I’m flabbergasted that you would email me with anything like this. I’ve felt for a long time that your organisation represented one of the greatest threats to online fan communities, and this email just confirms in my mind everything that I’ve thought and said regarding Wikia and how little you actually care for the online fan communities that you attempt to absorb.
For starters, if you had cared to actually look into our situation, you would’ve noted that despite the sustained increased traffic following the English language release of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver versions (which I note has brought us into the top 2000 websites in the US, with traffic still increasing), Bulbagarden and Bulbapedia’s recently upgraded and expanded cluster of 5 servers are currently quite stable and self-supporting. There is no technical or financial reason for us to even think of considering your offer.
However, this isn’t what makes your email as astounding as it is. For the record, since both you and your subordinates clearly have not done your research whatsoever, let me point out to you that I am the founder of the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance (NIWA), an association of fan wikis including Bulbapedia that was specifically set up to provide support to other independent wikis in the greater Nintendo fandom, and to provide a bulwark against the continued encroachment into it of groups such as Wikia. You will find a link to our Manifesto at the bottom of this paragraph. With the very fact that you sent this email to me clearly demonstrating some of the points we raised there with regards to your management style and lack of interest in the fandoms themselves, I imagine you’ll be hearing and seeing a lot more of NIWA over the coming months and years.
http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=98.0
I would say more, but now that you’re here in Australia, I’ll restrain myself so that I don’t accidentally fall foul of our slander and libel laws. Suffice it to say that, if it hasn’t already sunk in Angela, our answer to your offer is, has been, and always will be, a firm no. There is no possible circumstance under which I or my team would ever consider having Bulbapedia “hosted” by Wikia. Our attitude towards your offer has not changed, and will never. The same goes for our wiki partners in the Encyclopaediae Pokémonis and NIWA networks.
Yours sincerely,
Liam Pomfret
a.k.a. Archaic, Webmaster of Bulbagarden/Bulbapedia; Founder of the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance”
Yeah, my boss is rad.
Yeah, I got offered quite a few different things by Angela. That latest one which was c/ped above wasn’t the first time she’d made an offer for us.
I have to say though, NIWA (http://www.niwanetwork.org/) has done pretty well for itself thanks to Wikia’s actions here. We started off with only Bulbapedia, Zelda Wiki and Super Mario Wiki at the start of this year, and we’ve since picked up something like 6 or 7 wikis from them, helping them to transition into independents. We seem to have inspired a few others to start up similar groups as well, with Square Enix, Capcom and Sega wiki alliances currently forming.
This is what the “billboards” look like on RuneScape wiki:
Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2.
I watched tfwiki depart Wikia two years ago and I’ve been thinking about you guys a lot these days.
◄mendel►
The amount of irony and stupid presented compels me to say something… but I’m having trouble getting past the stupid.
What fraction of the Runescape wiki page is advertising for Runescape’s competition? 33%? 45%? This is like a Toyota dealership covering all their windows with posters for Ford Motors, that’s the only metaphor that can penetrate my stunned.
Screenshot #2 made me facepalm IRL.
Both of the shots made me trollface. :]
Adblock. That is all. Except, of course, for sites that *deserve* the support. But then that’s what the whitelist is for.
jimfromtx:
+50 Intelligence!
Can the site owner actually tell if an individual is viewing their site with an active adblock program? If so, I feel bad for visiting sites like this with mine enabled (although if they can’t, my actually viewing the ads has little impact on their advertising revenues…)
The adblock programs that shun ads by not loading them (AdBlockPlus, NoScript) can be detected, but they also protect you from pop-ups, pop-unders and trojan attempts.
The adblock programs that load the ads but hide them (Google Chrome, some Greasemonkey scripts) cannot be detected… unless the advert is part of a captcha. This latter method has a dickish level over 9000. The only legit use I’ve seen for something like that was to verify votes at Top100 Webcomics sites.
Ah…ok. I normally run AdBlock Plus and NoScript constantly. Too many friends getting viruses and the like (not to mention audio ads…who the fuck thought those were a good idea?)
Well. I’m not ditiching NoScript, but I suppose I will start using the AdBlock whitelist then.
I wish there was a way to just chuck a few cents at a website whenever you feel like it. I know theres schemes and various attempts but none seem to take any grip, and we are forever stuck with Paypal which isn’t worth a transaction under 50cents or whatever.
If there was a one-button method to donate a cent at the top of this site, wouldn’t almost all of us click it occasionally?
The unhappy “block or not” with adverts and the ethics just gets a pain for those wanting to support stuff easily, quickly and without fuss.
flattr seems to be making in headway in the direction of “chuck a few cents that way”, I see more and more sites that support it. It sidesteps microtransactions by bundling payments.
I seriously worry someday advertisers (possibly a new generation thereof) will realize nobody looks at ads, and all entertainment media will collapse.
Naw, people do look at ads. If Coca-Cola stopped advertising tomorrow, they’d eventually start tanking in sales, especially with Pepsi ads continuing. Repetition is remembering that you exist. Hell, half the things I wanted when I was a kid were things I saw on television. Advertising works because people are impressionable.
Now, people don’t CLICK on ads, at least not terribly often, but that’s not how ads work best. They work at mindshare. When you see an ad for a Big Mac, you don’t run out and buy one immediately. It’s most important that you merely remember that Big Macs exist rather than there be a 1:1 ratio of ad to purchasing a product.
I’m not sure that logic works beyond a certain threshold though.
We all know Big Mac’s exist, Coca Cola etc. I think, beyond a point, (when you have already had the product a few times), I’m not sure more advertising or less will effect you much.
I know I wont buy Pepsi because I find I don’t like the taste. I dont think a difference in advertising quantity would effect that, and not for people going from Pepsi to Coke either.
Its just guesswork really, but I think there would be studies on this somewhere. And perhaps not just food. (seeing as watching food like bugers can make us hungry, and so can talking about them. Hmmm…I feel like a burger now)
There are studies, and David’s right. Trust me, I actually teach this stuff at a university for a living.
I got your Grimstone right here: http://www.grimstone.net
I’ve been using that name for 10 years.
GOD LOOK AT ETHAN IN THAT FUCKING GRIMSTONE PANEL.
FUCKING HELL.
THAT OTHER ASSHOLE SHOULD BE EDITED OUT AND THAT PANEL SHOULD BE TURNED INTO A T-SHIRT.
Complete and sheer brilliance.
Oh, and I like that rendition of Jimmy Wales XD