I just don't understand Drunk Duck

[Gibson]

I wrack my brain and I rant about it with people I know, who rant back in agreement, that I just don't understand the problem at Drunk Duck, nor do I understand why so many people still put up with it. I hosted there for a while a couple years ago, and I've been giving it another shot in the past few months, but my patience is gone.

Drunk Duck seems to have an army of people running it and an actual company with actual money backing it up, complete with an alleged tech department. So why does it seem like they can't more than a few months without a major, site-wide glitch that screws people up for weeks? Why is it ALWAYS populated with bugs that no one seems willing or able to fix? Why is it so user-unfriendly that people who code for a living can't figure it out? Why are site features that haven't worked in years just given up on? Why do you have to download a completely different program (that also doesn't work) to get your full stats (or as full as DD will grant you, which isn't very full)? And how can any of the people who run it say with a straight face that they think it's the best free comic site? The BEST condition I've seen the site in could only be described as "buggy as hell".

The site itself is ugly and confusing, you can only customize so much, and every page has an ad burned across the top that you can't remove under any circumstance (even if you delete your entire code, the ad is still there). It feels like my comic is there for no other reason than to make money for Platinum Studios, but they can't be bothered to make the site any better than they absolutely have to do. It feels like the people who oversee the site don't really care that the site is buggy as shit and nothing ever really works the way it should...they seem like nice people, but the level of apology when things go massively wrong comes off as a shrug and "Oops, that's the way it goes, we're still awesome, stop complaining."

I don't know what ComicGenesis is like, I don't know what Gaia or whatever it's called is like, I know a little about other free hosts but I've never heard anything to make me think their functionality is as weak as Drunk Duck's. What really makes the contrast shine, though, is Smack Jeeves. Smack Jeeves has its problems, but it's customizable as hell, the main-site design is attractive, the personal options are varied and easy to use, the actual day-to-day management and accessibility of the comics themselves is fairly intuitive or at least easy to figure out, technical problems get taken care of quickly and definitively, and you can just plain old do more. A recent Smack Jeeves server move took a whole three days to have all the bugs worked out and get things back to normal...the recent Drunk Duck server move took several weeks and more than one try just to move, and they're still trying to work out the kinks from it.

These things alone are enough to make Drunk Duck look like a schoolyard full of shaven raccoons, but what's really astonishing is that it's all run by ONE GUY. One guy does all of this. His name is Dan and I don't think he's old enough to drink. He has other people who help run the forum and a number of users have helped create a wider array of default templates, but the site itself is overseen and operated by him. It's not perfect, but it's one young man doing the job that a team and a parent company can't do at Drunk Duck. So, this leads me to the question...what is wrong with the people who run Drunk Duck?

I know there are other Drunk Duckers here, and I don't want it to seem like I'm bashing on the users there. In fact, that's the one thing DD has over the other sites...the community kicks ass. That's the thing that shocks me most, that there are so many interesting, talented people tolerating the bedlam. I tried, I gave it another chance and it lost me a second time because it just can't get it's crap together, and for the life of me I can't figure out why.

[ran]

I don't understand it, either. When I first discovered webcomics and decided that I was making my own, back in highschool, I started out on DD, right before Smack Jeeves was brought into existence. I tried to figure it out for weeks, and right when I was getting the hang of it, it died. For half a year. I was forced to move elsewhere, and by this point in time, Smack Jeeves was a shining beacon among other hosts (don't ask me about my comic genesis experience).

I made a cursory attempt at making a mirror to a now defunct project a couple years later, but by that time, Platinum had already taken over and I quickly abandoned the idea--customization, if you could call it that, was horribly difficult and super-ugly, and it just didn't seem worth the effort.

No, the thing that baffles me the most is this:

Yeah, I understand liking the community, but there's no excuse for putting up with such a poor quality service. It is entirely possible to be a part of the community--post of the forums, interact with people, so on, and host your site elsewhere. Put the link in your profile, the banner in your signature. But host elsewhere. Why does no one realize this?

As far as I can tell, Platinum cares about money. They don't care that their service is crappy, they don't care that they're buggy, and if they actually do care, they don't care enough to actually fix it.

[Dr. BlkKnight]

Drunk Duck's downhill run started when the creator left. Once that happened, the site went downhill and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The admins are as powerless as the other users in terms of what goes on with the site. It's like Platinum is the boss that keeps dangling the hope of change when change is never going to come.

[amanda]

The Duck's community is phenomenal - I was super involved for a long time.  But the problems lately have been so out of hand and kind of ridiculous that I can't deal with it anymore. =/

[Knara]

Drunk Duck, Comicsgensis/Keenspace, and Webcomics Nation all seem to have the same sorts of problems, and I don't know why.

I was with WCN (after Keenspace, after being on the Cologuys beta servers lonnggggg ago) before finally doing it all myself, and WCN had promised updates, new exciting things to happen when they merged with that other site (can't be arsed to look it up now), and bugs that had been lingering for months/years with no resolution. 

I think its the same issue as with many conventions out there: fans frequently make very poor businesspeople.  Take a look at the whargarbl over AX, or, more recently an more small-scale, check out the Anime Wasabi Denver forums and see how the Convention staff treats criticism coming form attendees. 

It all gets wrapped up into a ball of "inefficient business operation" and results in poor service.

Then again, most people in general make very poor businesspeople.

[JR]

I can't stand DD because of all the reasons that Gibson mentioned above, and I've never met anyone who was actually able to log onto Comics Genesis.  Smackjeeves was the first host that I discovered when I got into the whole web-comic thing, and I've been pretty happy with them.  Dan is the man over there, and he seems to have his stuff together.  I will happily continue to post my comics there until things change otherwise.

What other web-comic hosting sites are there out there?  I haven't bothered to check, but is there one out there besides SJ that anyone can recommend?

[Miluette]

DD and SJ have always been nothing more than mirrors for me, as I much MUCH prefer free hosting on personal servers. Of course my first 3 hosts kind of flopped/flaked out themselves, but my current host is the awesomest of awesomes. But back on topic: Drunkduck would leave me with the greatest of distastes were it not for its community. It's strangely nice over there, even in the serious discussions forum. A diverse and opinionated group. I stand in awe of that.

But DD's website is awful, and I hate awful websites. I only recently figured out how to manage its template specifics with some manner of success (that's a link to my more mature comic's mirror, y'won't see anything terrible -- just that I managed to replicate LF's most recent CSS layout on DD -- EDIT: and sometimes DD does this weird thing where there's a huge space below  the entire page, whee :B), but it's just impossible to debug things if you mess something up, and support is at the whims of (a very helpful set of) your peers, and not at all official.

I gained a new respect for SJ when I realized it was all run by one person, and also when it made MASSIVE improvements recently. SJ is really, really nice now. I'd recommend it to people. I honestly wish DD would improve like SJ did, but I've given up on it, much like I've given up on OnlineComics. :B

[Knara]

But DD's website is awful, and I hate awful websites. I only recently figured out how to manage its template specifics with some manner of success (that's a link to my more mature comic's mirror, y'won't see anything terrible -- just that I managed to replicate LF's most recent CSS layout on DD -- EDIT: and sometimes DD does this weird thing where there's a huge space below  the entire page, whee :B), but it's just impossible to debug things if you mess something up, and support is at the whims of (a very helpful set of) your peers, and not at all official.

Is what made me finally get off of KS/GS, and WCN.  Their default templates were ridiculously ugly, and modifying the layout into something that even resembled a pleasant format was a huge pain in the ass.  I never understood why, the aforementioned ColoGuys system (the system that I assume still runs Megatokyo) was really awesome and easy to use.

Finally broke down and re-learned enough CSS to stylize one of the default layouts from ComicPress, and even that is tons better than the template system on the previous systems I was on.

[Gibson]

Drunk Duck is now falling apart at the seams. Not only can you not post new images, which seems kind of important for a comic host, but you can't create new comics, which also seems important, and you can't edit your layout code or it deletes it. This has been going on for weeks.

On top of this, it turns out they're opening a Drunk Duck STORE. Can I get a WTF? A store?? They already make ad cash on a site that doesn't work, now they've got the audacity to try and squeeze more money out of it's members? Anyone want to lay odds on how functional the store's going to be? My bet is that the part of it that takes your credit card info will work just fine.

[Travis Surber]

When I started I was on ComicGenesis but couldn't get it to work.Then I went to SmackJeeves and DrunkDuck at the same time.I got more hits on DD so I stayed with them for about 6 months forgetting about SJ.I put up with the bugs and the craziness because I knew nothing about setting up a site and my readers knew the DD address.Finally I left after they lost one of my strips 3 times in one day.I went to ComicFury it's smaller and newer(2yo i think) until a friend helped me use ComicPress to put together my own site.I lost a chunk of readers moving twice in a month but I'm much happier.(and the readers are slowly trickling back.)

[mishi]

Drunkduck is a POS. ( 　ﾟ,_ゝﾟ)ﾊﾞｶｼﾞｬﾈｰﾉ Not even Platinum cares about it, and well the so called "admins" have no real control. Take it from a web designer, the whole thing was coded by a 3 year old. After the image server was broken for about a year, and everyone good left, that was my cue to leave. If you value your comic, you will only use DD as mirror. One day, the site will just stop working and well, no one will care about it enough to fix it. The only reason I go there is to help people disguise the god awful ugliness of DD's design.

[Gibson]

Drunk Duck is so messed I can't even bother to use it as a mirror. Not worth the headache.