February 1st, 2019
The timing is trickier -- it's always tempting to want to be able to jump right back in and I have a habit of giving myself less time than I really.... should.... and it's hard to say how long a break should be when there's not something specific I'm trying to do over the break (aka, a break for doing work, aka, not actually a break). So let's check back in a year! I'll also check back in around August and let you guys know where things stand -- if I'm planning to Actually Start Updates in January or if anything has changed or what's goin' on there. So, in August I'll let y'all know if anything new is going on, but January of 2020 is when I'll do an official check-in/update on the comic's schedule.
If you just wanna see my art or hang out with me in the meantime, you can! I'm on tumblr as long as it sticks around, twitter, and now pillowfort, I'm around a bunch on the RW Discord, and my patreon now has two tiers -- first tier gets you Sketchbook updates where I just show off a bunch of sketches I've made that haven't been shared publicly anywhere, and the second tier gets you regular patron livestreams (we're currently doing about 3-4 short streams a month) where we vote on what I should draw and then I draw it. I'll still be around making art!! I just gotta step outside this story for a bit and stretch my brain before I can jump back in. :>
(Thank you all so much for all your kind messages and how incredibly supportive you've all been when it's hard to articulate why I need to stop for a bit. ;u; You guys really are the best, and a huge blessing always. Lord willing, hope to see you all again before too long! :D
---
!!!OH ALSO! I'm supposed to be at ECCC this year!! so if you're planning to go and you wanna pick up some books or say hi, I'll have some space at Kel McDonald's table??? I'LL HAVE MORE INFO VERY SOON twitter is probably the best place for updates!! Okay now I'm ending this post for reals)
SO FUN FACT: they're often not even trying to get you to click on their links! In fact, most of the comments are contentless "wow I love your post how informative" type filler, rather than ads for any particular product.
Instead, their goal is to manipulate search engine algorithms. If you're a shady site with shady links then Google (and presumably the others as well) has ways of identifying "okay, this site is probably not to be trusted" and it won't rank them highly in search results. But if search engine algorithms have identified a site as untrustworthy, and then see a bunch of trustworthy sites linking to it, they figure, oh! That must have been a mistake, it must be legit. And the spam site gets treated as more trustworthy than it should by search engines.
Spammers who comment just want to get their link on my page, because I'm a legitimate content creator, so having my page appear to link to their page (even if it's just the place where their name links back to their website) makes them look more legit -- surely a legitimate content creator wouldn't be linking to spam, so those websites must be okay!! This is also the reason you occasionally get "likes" from iffy accounts on tumblr -- it leaves a "so-and-so liked this" link on your legitimate blog, making their blog look more legit.
Every time someone figures out how to circumvent the spam filter I get a whole slew of nonsense comments for a few months until they realise they're not getting through again -- in the past usually it's been on a less recent page, because they don't want to be noticed, they want their link to slip in without anyone seeing it and possibly deleting it, so it's just me quietly in the background deleting 40 attempted comments every day on some random page of chapter 3 for a while. xD
posted at 3:41pm on March 24th, 2019
Comment by Salaru
Do these ad link spammers even realise that they're just making people hate what they're trying to advertise without consent, meaning people will purposefully avoid them out of spite?
posted at 6:17pm on March 21st, 2019