“What’s this,” some future reader of past strips might ask, “This strip resulted in only 5 comments that seem to have nothing to do with that strip? What’s going on here?”
What’s going on, is that this day, Monday, October 3, 2016, is the day that GoComics began to suck.
Ever since 2008, when people began to post here, the Dick Tracy Comments section had been a fun place. One could post images (the Pig On Wheels was an early fan favorite), videos, external links to other sites. We could write posts of any length, which was wonderful in going over the strip’s rich 80+ year history. The site hadn’t changed much in the past 8 years, but we didn’t care. This was such a great place to hang out. It inspired us to be creative. Some people even did poetry. I myself loved to post 2 regular features, a Death List of every character who died since Mike Curtis took over as writer in 2011, and a list of every DT story available on GC.
But GC had ambitions to make the site look more appealing to smallscreen users. This somehow also resulted in revoking privileges we had enjoyed to this point. On this day, with no prior warning, GC struck. No more images, videos, or links allowed. All past examples were also removed. Spacing no longer worked the way it used to (which is why so many past poems and long comments look so badly scrunched up). Worst of all, GC imposed a 500 character limit, reducing comments to next to nothing. This day’s comments at the time were very different from what it looks like now. Lots of shock, anger, and unhappiness, that you’ll see more of in the next few days. Eventually, GC relented on the character limit, expanding it to 2000 characters, but preemptively ruling out expanding it further on the grounds that anything more “would be very, very disruptive on the smallscreen.” The new limit still ruined my Death List and badly curbed my story list.
“What’s this,” some future reader of past strips might ask, “This strip resulted in only 5 comments that seem to have nothing to do with that strip? What’s going on here?”
What’s going on, is that this day, Monday, October 3, 2016, is the day that GoComics began to suck.
Ever since 2008, when people began to post here, the Dick Tracy Comments section had been a fun place. One could post images (the Pig On Wheels was an early fan favorite), videos, external links to other sites. We could write posts of any length, which was wonderful in going over the strip’s rich 80+ year history. The site hadn’t changed much in the past 8 years, but we didn’t care. This was such a great place to hang out. It inspired us to be creative. Some people even did poetry. I myself loved to post 2 regular features, a Death List of every character who died since Mike Curtis took over as writer in 2011, and a list of every DT story available on GC.
But GC had ambitions to make the site look more appealing to smallscreen users. This somehow also resulted in revoking privileges we had enjoyed to this point. On this day, with no prior warning, GC struck. No more images, videos, or links allowed. All past examples were also removed. Spacing no longer worked the way it used to (which is why so many past poems and long comments look so badly scrunched up). Worst of all, GC imposed a 500 character limit, reducing comments to next to nothing. This day’s comments at the time were very different from what it looks like now. Lots of shock, anger, and unhappiness, that you’ll see more of in the next few days. Eventually, GC relented on the character limit, expanding it to 2000 characters, but preemptively ruling out expanding it further on the grounds that anything more “would be very, very disruptive on the smallscreen.” The new limit still ruined my Death List and badly curbed my story list.
TBC cuz GC’s character limit STILL SUCKS!!!!