UPDATE:
Comics Kingdom has explained the change.
There’s a crisis of toxicity online. The social platforms meant to bring us together are pushing us apart. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Websites often have a love-hate relationship with their comment sections: on the one hand, they’re a sign of reader loyalty, a great way to engage with communities, and receive direct feedback, but they can also devolve into toxic cesspools if left unmoderated driving everyone away.
So, today we’re excited to announce that Comics Kingdom is moving its commenting platform to OpenWeb…
The notice also explains that “In migrating to our new commenting platform, we could not retain a few things, most notably pre-existing comment history and user profiles.”
Read the message for more information and how to create accounts.
Original November 22 post:
It seems Comics Kingdom has dropped Disqus as their community platform
and signed with OpenWeb for their engagement and commenting needs.
In the process all comment history before midday today has disappeared.
The comments at today’s The Phantom seem to have the
calmest and clearest explanations for those of us who have
difficulty with technology more recent than the 19th Century.
To be honest, I wonder why they feel the need to have a comment section at all.
Engagement, Brent. It’s not only how you know someone is out there, but it’s how you build engagement, which is key to business success in the online world.
Their entire comment section appears to be devoted to deprecating their product, though. I don’t know how that helps engagement with the vast majority of their audience who don’t comment. I’d think their page metrics give them a better view of how well various strips are doing.
Hey Brett, that’s like asking why does Daily Cartoonist feel the need to have comments. Or do you just dislike relatively harmless jokes in the comments?
Oddly (perhaps, given that this is CK, “incompetently” would be more accurate), they’ve taken away the comments button when strips are viewed on one’s Favorites page. I guess they’re not interested in engaging paid customers.
Every day on On the Fastrack, my main character Dethany posts a short comment on that day’s strip.
They did well. For too long the comments section was just a spam section. No one commented on the strips or stories.
The problem with this new comment section is that the newspaper sites that carry the comics and use Disqus you can’t comment on them anymore. If you want to comment you have to go to Comics Kingdom’s site and they only allow so many free views a month.
How is changing one comments section for another that basically does the same thing supposed to make the comments less toxic?
And they have a comments section because it keeps people coming back. You click on it 5 times a day instead of once because somebody “liked” you or answered you.
Liam, it’s eight cents a day to support the site, and the cartoonists.
I let my Comics Kingdom subscription lapse because they consistently do an inexplicably bad job with the tech side of things. But I re-upped four days ago. They still haven’t verified my debit card.
I solved the ‘toxicity’ problem by never reading the comments. I don’t care what others think, nor do I want ‘community’ with anyone else, senkuveddymuch. That’s pretty lame, IMHO.
I read (and make) comments here, Claytoonz and Raging Pencils. I already spend way too much time online, without going thru puerile comments to find a nugget (if that much) of additional humor or insight.
Comics Kingdom has gone downhill since they redesigned the website (when they turned everything purple) a few years ago. One change I disliked most was the removal of original publication dates of vintage comics. Those dates helped place the strips in a historical context, especially useful when seeing some of the racist tropes in WWII era comics.
I don’t often comment on CK (for design and layout, and ease of commenting, I prefer GoComics). I usually read my CK favorites from my email, and let it go at that. But today there was one that I wanted to comment on. I signed in to the CK site, went to my favorites and discovered that the comments button was gone. After reading the posts and comments here (thanks, everyone), I went back to CK. I had to click on Comics, find the comic I wanted, then sign in to the comments. My email address and password came up in the log-in process, and then the system informed me that my email is not registered. Seriously??
I signed up with CK again last year, after letting my membership lapse for a while. They usually do okay with emailing my comics (though recently there was a glitch with that, and it took them a few days to resolve). They have got to get their tech house in order.