Site comments, RSS updates and other site news

Here are a few updates on what’s going on with the site:

  1. As of yesterday it’s no longer possible to post comments on the site.
    In the past year I’ve noticed a dramatic decrease in the number of submitted comments, even though the number of visitors to the site increased significantly. Most of you seem to prefer discussing the comics on Facebook, GPlus, Twitter, Reddit and the likes, and that’s totally cool.
    On the other side of the equation, the number of spam comments on the site soared. Installing popular anti-spam plug-ins decreased their numbers slightly, but the numbers were still overwhelming – on an average week I moderated about two to five authentic comments, and close to a thousand(!) spam comments.
    Taking both sides of the equation into account, I decided to disable comments on the site. I know this may be frustrating to some of you, but I hope it’s for the best, as the time saved on moderating comments will be dedicated to producing more comics.
    Note that even though you can’t see your previous comments, they’re still here. If the day comes when I decide to restore comments to the site, your old comments would be restored as well.
    If you want to contact me personally, you can still do it here, or just Tweet / FB mesasge / GPlus message me.
  2. Social media updates: More than 4700 of you follow our comics on Facebook, more than 1400 on Twitter, and almost 200 on GPlus. Several hundreds of you are subscribed via e-mail, and roughly 1500 of you via RSS. Just wanted to say thank you all for your support!
  3. Speaking of RSS, a few months ago Google announced it’s closing Google Reader. Reader will not be available as of July 1st 2013. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s strongly recommended that you switch to a new reader (and best do it before July 1st, since some RSS readers allow you to import your Google Reader feeds). There are many such services – personally I’ve chosen Feedly, but Netvibes and Newsblur are also good alternatives. (EDIT: Following this post I got a mail suggesting I add RSSOwl [ http://www.rssowl.org/ ] and Tiny Tiny RSS [ http://tt-rss.org/ ] to the list. Thanks, Vedran!)
  4. Last layout change for today – the blog section no longer appears in the homepage. If you want to see all blog posts, click on “Blog” in the upper menu. Viewing comics is still as same as before.

If you have any suggestion or questions regarding the latest changes, feel free to contact me.

Yours, Idan

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