Ok, so the TWC that is up is essentially in an alpha stage, its partially converted to our new format, with multiple things waiting to be done.

New voting procedure.  As several thousand who have already voted with the new system know, we have a new means to vote.  You essentially choose a vote button based on the image.  Some of our international users couldn't identify the American comic characters (and some of the Americans too!), so I added the names of the characters to the image.  Which then opens up the next step, why use existing commercial comic characters? 

What I'd like to do is request from the community replacements for the vote image.

I'd like it to be in 100x100 jpg format, send me the name of the character, and the URL to your webomic.  I will try and rotate out 20-30 different ones at a time.  It will essentially look like

Image

3 form buttons

then it will say "This character, Willow, is from Earthsong", and the name of the comic will be a link that will open in a new window, and will show up both before and after the person votes.  If anyone would like to participate, please e-mail me at rmathis@-nospam-h2ohq.com  (minus the -nospam-) with the image, name, and link that you would like to use.

 

More Info forthcoming, but going in for a wisdom tooth extraction in an hour so kind of rushing before I'm out for the count for the rest of the day. :(

 

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

The only problem I see is that wide vote incentive images are no longer centered.

-Joe

I think the image is centered, the text isn't as it centers to the original width rather than the new width larger incentives try to expand it to.  I kind of thought that was always a problema ctually, at any rate, I"ll try switching some things to percentages, and maybe it will auto-grow appropriately.

 

Thanks Joe!

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

I might've failed to notice off-centered vote incentives in the past... I can't say for sure. I'll assume you're right.

A note on the new vote method

While I like the idea of using the character selection option to further the awareness of comics on the list, I think you may get better results by tricking any auto votes another way.

You could make one correct vote button that simply says, "vote" and two incorrect vote buttons that are the same color as the site background. Someone viewing the site will see only one button, and will press it. However, an auto-vote bot (or whatever you’d call it) would still see three buttons (since the color of the button doesn't matter to it) and will be just as confused as with your current system. The only difference is that the user will have no idea this security procedure is even going on, since the dummy vote buttons are "invisible." Just an idea.

-Joe

I think this is a good idea. If you use characters from the webcomic community, you end up running the risk of someone not knowing which button to press because they don't read that comic. For instance, I could have three different Godzilla characters. But someone who has never seen a Godzilla movie in his life won't know Godzilla from Grizzly Adams. I like noneedforbushido's idea.

That's true, Shin-Goji. I think I could point out Godzilla, but I would be lost otherwise. Even though I read your strip, I'm lost when it comes to distinguishing between multiple kaiju (or versions there of.)

Of course, if you still want to encourage awareness of webcomics on the vote page, you can randomly pick a banner from the TWC list to place on that page. It would have no relevance to the action of voting, but it would provide some exposure for lesser-known comics outside of the top 10.

-Joe

regarding bot programs and the color of buttons.  I actually thought I was pretty clever Joe and a couple days ago I moved the real vote button down and put an invisible button where the old button was and setup a trigger to monitor the TCP packets of anything that clicked on the invisible button.  I caught one very meager cheating program that would regularly click there, but not the one I was trying to prove was cheating to the tune of 1 every couple minutes. 

I was pretty confused, so I moved a gray button down at the bottom of the page like the old vote button and I switched the old vote button to an image button with a blue background (people may have noticed it Friday/Saturday).  Suddenly my cheattracker went wild!  Votes started pouring into my cheat tracker for 1 comic (I think most of us know or suspected the comic had false votes last week but I won't name them because I'm not sure they were responsible or an overzealous fan).  After 24 hours of monitoring, they had received several hundred attempted votes via the cheattrapper button, 2 other comics had received roughly 20-30, and many other comics had had 1-5.  This was sufficient proof to me that the program uses color to identify where it was clicking.

 I am hoping that the name of the characters being included on the image will be enough for everyone to easily vote, this will be the most outward change, I am also going to build a page where people can look at a couple other measures I track for sites for each webcomic (not all), and I'll be building additional behind the scene security that shouldn't affect the vote process much (if any).

(Oh and welcome back Shin-goji!  Congrats for your birthday last month and for being #1 on Buzz last month!)

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

Wow, they actually avoided your dummy button? I guess I underestimated their abilities.

I agree that it shouldn't be difficult to determine the character (since the names will be printed on the image.) My main concern is that if feels like an extra step (even if it, technically speaking, isn't) and some people may be put off by that.

What if the vote button (and fake button) were placed on a background color that changed i.e. the "correct color" wasn't always the same. A cheating program would first have to identify the background color and then decide which button was not that color. Then again, maybe I'm still unaware of just how far some people will go for votes.

If you had 2 almost identical buttons, one saying "vote" the other saying "don't vote" that randomly switched sides, do you believe a auto vote program would distinguish between the two? I imagine this would work best if the buttons were actually images.

(and welcome back as well Shin-goji, even though I will have to work extra hard to get higher on the list now :p )
-Joe

I personally think having webcomic characters on the voting gateway is an interesting idea. And a unique way to generate a little extra cross exposure.  It shouldn't be hard at all with the names actually on the images.  I don't think it'll drive away many, if any fans.  If the fans want to vote, they'll go out of their way to vote.  Just look at how many votes Megatokyo still gets, and they don't even have a vote button on their site.  Not that it's actually going out of the way, still the same amount of clicks, they just actually have to pay attention for a couple seconds.

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-- Stan

Will someone be able to use the fact that the character's name is printed in text (so and so is from sucha and such) to automatically locate the correct button? At this point I think ANYTHING is possible.

-Joe

Actually they can.  They could look for certain collections of pixels, convert it to text, then look through the html code to match it up with the text of the buttons.  To make that even more difficult I could create custom image buttons for each avatar, but at this point I'll refrain, if just for my own santity. ;) 

 

We have 6 people who have submitted (Joe sent 5 himself), I chose one of Joe's and added the other 5, I might add more as we get more but currently I only want to allow one per comic.  I'm pretty happy with the response, I'd think by the end of the week I should have a good 20-30 submitted, which creates a good number of combinations for hackers to have to deal with, which I'll be removing and shuffling around the images quite a bit so they'll have to continually update their software if they even bother.

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

Should it still say "famous cartoon character" on the vote page? :p

-Joe

Thanks Joe for keeping us on our toes over here at TWC, wording changed. :P

 

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

Actually its a lot easier than that. Below the buttons it says something like "Milny Boldoffin is a character from the comic, Planescape Survival Guide." All I would need to do as a cheating script writer would be to find the button that corresponded with the first part of that (Milny Boldoffin) and do an HTTP POST request to the server to simulate that button being pressed. Well, that and the hidden ASP viewstate element. Trivial. Unless you get rid of that line on the choice page you've done effectively nothing.

Thats true, I'll probably just change it to "This character was from the comic, blah"

Thanks Mrnonchalant!

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes