The avoid posting page states:

Avoid posting these things.

• ...
• Excessive webcomic rips (more than 5 or more consecutive webcomic pages)
• ...

But what counts as a "webcomic" is never specified.

The obvious definition is "any comic published on the Web." But that's a huge chunk (most?) of our pools, so that doesn't seem reasonable.

I guess the spirit of the rule is to disallow the mirroring of long-running webcomics like SMBC. But then, what counts as long-running? How many posts is too many? And what happens when people start uploading it here, and then the threshold is reached later?

All this leads to the question of why we have the rule in the first place. Whatever counts as a webcomic, whatever the rule is meant to exclude, why do we want to exclude that?

Imagine this: every hour within 10 minutes, 20 pages of a comic is attempted to be uploaded. It gets approved when it does, and the next chance it gets 20 more pages come out. It gets approved, rinse and repeat ad infinitum until the entire comic is on the site, or it stops getting approved.

As a person who uses 99 posts per page, 3 columns of 33, a comic mass uploaded at any opportunity and uploaded fast enough would be 20 posts of something I do not want to see. I'd have to skip them each time they occur, and this is ignoring approval times now. Again, imagine this occurring until one of the two criteria are met, and you'll have a stale, arguably irrelevant to site (regardless of imagery, this is supposed to be an art archive and not a comic host site), and repeating irritant. Now, remove me from the equation, it can be anyone now.

So, to shorthand: it is annoying and, IMO, it goes against the site's concept of just being an art archive (when comics are uploaded in bulk). I can also imagine things like being argued as fan-advertising (literal, a fan "advertising" it by various methods), etc. 'cause I have to cut things short.

I've asked before and was replied with something along the lines of "comics with few panels per page like VGcatz".

The stuff I've uploaded all got approved.

We don't want to divert ad revenue from the creators. So use that as a basis on determining what counts as a webcomic.

Periodically updated comic hosted on its own site, with banner ads? Yep, that's a webcomic.

Genjar said:
We don't want to divert ad revenue from the creators. So use that as a basis on determining what counts as a webcomic.

Periodically updated comic hosted on its own site, with banner ads? Yep, that's a webcomic.

So then what about the comics that are like one image a week or two weeks. Are those going to stop?

Htess said:
So then what about the comics that are like one image a week or two weeks. Are those going to stop?

If they have their own domain which is the only place they post their comic, then yes.

Of course as this rule is mostly in place to not steal artists web traffic, if artist has given permission to post the pages or are uploading pages themselves, they will get accepted.

Mario69 said:
If they have their own domain which is the only place they post their comic, then yes.

Of course as this rule is mostly in place to not steal artists web traffic, if artist has given permission to post the pages or are uploading pages themselves, they will get accepted.

Few OK. Thank you.

Genjar said:
We don't want to divert ad revenue from the creators. So use that as a basis on determining what counts as a webcomic.

Periodically updated comic hosted on its own site, with banner ads? Yep, that's a webcomic.

Mario69 said:
If they have their own domain which is the only place they post their comic, then yes.

Of course as this rule is mostly in place to not steal artists web traffic, if artist has given permission to post the pages or are uploading pages themselves, they will get accepted.

Rules should say what they mean. If the intent is to avoid "stealing" traffic with e621 uploads of images that would otherwise only be accessible through the artist's own ad-supported site, then that's what should be against the rules. Not "webcomics," which is incorrect, or at least confusing.

Maxpizzle said:
Rules should say what they mean. If the intent is to avoid "stealing" traffic with e621 uploads of images that would otherwise only be accessible through the artist's own ad-supported site, then that's what should be against the rules. Not "webcomics," which is incorrect, or at least confusing.

The rules say what they mean, but we're not going to write the intent for every single rule into the document because we actually don't want to turn that list into a 17 pages long essay.